With warming weather and increased time at home, it seemed like a good time to return to my admittedly neglected bike trailer project.
When last I addressed this project - apparently a year(!) ago now - I’d cleaned the canvas shell off of the frame and had started debating about how to build a cargo floor for the trailer.
At the time I mused that the simplest thing would be to use a thin sheet of plywood - and it would - but in my head I was also wondering about perhaps sheet metal - aluminum or galvanized steel might be options - or even some type of plastic. In the abundant amount of time between finishing that stage and now, someone posted a video about using palettes for this purpose. While I lost track of the video itself, the idea resurfaced in my head as I approached this - I didn’t have plywood or any of the other materials I’d been considering, and I did not relish a trip to the big box home improvement store in the era of social distancing. But I did have palettes.
Granted, they were on my burn pile - living in a rural area means lots of trees. Living in a wind farm means lots of wind-fallen tree deteritus, so we usually gather enough for a bonfire every year or so. In the winter I’d decided to dispatch with the palettes as a part of that process - I had kept them in case I had a use for them, but I hadn’t found one, and I wanted the space they occupied for other things. But now?
Fortunately they were still in decent shape, so I brought them in to the garage and started to disassemble them. As is true every time I start a project in the garage, I had company...
As is also true every time I do a project, I think about putting on gloves too late...
Unfortunately, nothing about the knowing what you want to, or of having a plan, gives you the callouses of a carpenter. Those have to be earned.
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I broke down about four palettes and, since they had been out in the weather, I laid them out on garage floor in the sun in order to dry them out.
After several hours in the sun I stacked them up and put them away until my next chance to work on it a few days later.
Once I had a chance to get to them again I broke out the orbital sander and sanded down enough of the boards to cover the base. I wanted to smooth them down - palette boards are pretty rough when raw - and clean them up. Once that was down I laid them out across a couple of reclaimed 1x4’s along the frame to start to get an starting idea of what everything would look like.
And as I laid it out, Rosie signaled her approval of my approach:
With all of the material on the trailer I did a very unscientific evaluation of the weight of it all (I picked it up). Even though there are several pieces of wood it doesn’t appear to be unduly heavy, which was a concern. And I like the way it looks like it will come together.
So now I am weighing a couple of additional components. I’d like to be able to use it as a push cart - because it was originally a combination kid trailer and jogging stroller it can be set up with a front wheel - and I will need to have some sort of side rails. I’m debating whether to use the original aluminum frame assembly, which has a handle for pushing and to which I could attach side rails, or to build something bespoke for that purpose.
The former choice - the aluminum frame - would be quicker and easier. The benefit to the latter approach is that I could cantilever off the back of the trailer a bit to make it longer. I don’t know that I need it to be longer - my current cargo needs are modest, involving mostly trips to the grocery store and similar sorts of outings - but I might want that option in the future.
My plan is to move forward fairly quickly one way or the other. Of course, that was my plan a year ago. Construction time competes with riding time, after all, which is always my challenge.