I’m not sure whether it’s ironic or just funny, but I bought a bike rack for the car and brought it home on the ute.
Finally, I think we’re there
With much excitement I tore open the package that arrived for me today and found it contained some lovely yellow and black panniers. They’re now attached firmly to the ute and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s commute to try them out, admittedly really lightly loaded.
Here’s the story.
Regulars will know that I have been looking for some panniers that would fit behind the legs of the childseat when it’s mounted on the deck of the ute. The big orange bag is useable, but the leg obscures the flap to such an extent that you can’t really open it. The simple option, I thought, was to buy some ordinary sized panniers and stick them on. Unfortunately the tubes on the back of the ute are about 20mm, and pretty much all panniers top hooks I could find would only stretch up to 16mm.
Much searching and trying and muttering later I stumbled across these, crosso big dry panniers. They are made by a polish company who make a range of decent looking panniers for pretty reasonable prices. The beauty of it is that they’ve got metal hooks which are infinitely more bendable than plastic ones.
I checked all the measurements and the top hooks on the big dry bags looked like they’d fit in between the cut outs on the ute deck, and the bags themselves would fit in the space behind the seat when it was attached.
I contacted crosso to see about getting some sent to the UK, but before they could answer I found these panniers on cyclesense. They looked suspiciously like the crosso ones, but branded as extrawheel. Extrawheel make some cool trailers and these bags were made to attach to them, extrawheel have now decided to go with standard ortliebs so these bad boys are end of line, pretty much.
I spoke to Dave at cyclesense and he was great, he measured the hooks for me and explained that the bags were crosso ones but rebranded. I put and order in late on Monday night and the bags arrived today, Wednesday. Great service from cyclesense, and they even sent me some Yorkshire tea in the jiffy bag. Thanks guys.
Here they are,
As you can see, they’re a really simple design. Roll top cordura dry bag with some metal hooks on the back. It’s not fancy but they look like they’ll do the job.
A bit of hook bending and they slotted onto the ute with minimal fuss. I might think about heli-taping the frame a little bit to avoid scratching, but apart from that, I think, we’re good to go.
Here are some more piccies, of varying quality, to show how it all fits together.
You can see that they fit nicely behind the yepp maxi with full access to the bag and no restriction on the amount I can get into them.
Here’s a top down view to show how the hooks fit perfectly into the cutouts.
And finally a view of the bags when the seat’s not in place. This is probably how I’ll use it on my commute. I can have one bag with my locks, spare tubes, tyre levers etc, and the other with my lunch, book, water bottle etc.
My commute on Fridays is a bit different, I play football after work, so I can load up the one bag with all my footy kit and leave that on the bike, while taking in the other contains my sarnies etc. no need to drag my kit around the office for a change. check out the flexibility!
I’ll report back once I’ve used then in anger, and also when I’ve played with getting the side by side down one side of the ute and the big orange bag on the other.
Nearly there…
After much research, some jiggery pokery, the occasional bad word and some really bored looks from my wife I think I may have found the answer to the panniers problem.
The short version is that it’s really hard to find panniers with hooks big enough to fit the 20mm tubes on the back of a ute. I’ve hunted high and low, and suffered the withering looks from bike shop staff who say ‘no, no, these will fit… …oh hang on, those tubes are really big, these aren’t going to fit’. In many ways it’s been like my other bugbear, trying to find shoes that fit my size thirteen feet.
‘would you like to try the 12s sir?’
‘No, I chuffing wouldn’t because they’re the wrong size!’
Sorry, I digress, the shoe thing annoys me. Anyway, I think I’ve found some panniers which will fit the bill, they’re possibly a touch bigger than I ideally wanted, but they’re bright yellow, so my missus is happy that I’ll be even more visible, not that you should miss a massive hairy man on a seven foot bike.
Once I get the bags I’ll post in more detail, hopefully they’ll be here by the end of the week.
In the mean time, here’s a picture of my trip to church on Sunday. I’ve not played bass in ages, but our regular bassist has selfishly got pregnant so I said I’d stand in to give her a week off. I love bungees, I mean come on, where would we be without bungees? For extra vertical support I wrapped the shoulder straps of the case around the child seat mounting rack.
Here comes the sun
Some weirdly variable weather combined with colds has confined us to the car lately, which has been a shame, but the last two days have produced sunshine and occasional showers so me and the boy have been out and about. My lady wife has been at work this week and our childminder on holiday, so it’s been fun and frolics with daddy daycare.
I discovered a natty way to attach the smallest buggy to the ute and thus a trip to town was a less daunting affair, I could transfer the boy from bike to buggy and not run the gauntlet of him ‘investigating’ everything we encountered in town.
It worked well and the buggy stayed firmly in place. I’m going to tap up my plumber heating engineer mate and ask him for some pipe insulation to protect the ute’s paintwork for future trips. It’s my intention to expose the boy to as much music as possible, so we bought Ghostpoet’s album, a best of Dr John and a hip-hop compilation. Wicked skills!
After the trip to town we headed to the park to play on the swings and see the rabbits, on arrival we bumped into a friend from church and her little boy, who ogled the ute. As I parked up I got into conversation with a chap who was taken by it too. We had a good long talk about the pros and cons of cargo biking and he dragged his wife over to repeat the pros. A lot of the things he was struggling with with a standard child seat setup were the same concerns I had, the child being too close for rucksack wearing, lack of load carrying, etc. Hopefully a convert in the making.
Strangely the boy wanted to stay on the slide and not get back on the bike, a couple of breadsticks sorted that out! he’s making a weird face because he’s copying the clicking noise that my phone makes when it takes a picture, he does it every time, so all our photos of him looks bit mental.
The weather was gorgeous today, bright and fresh, so we headed out again, back to the park and then onto to an LBS for reserve inner tubes. A couple of conversations with people about the longtail, including a great chat with a guy who had built his own long John type bike and was looking to electrify it while staying sweet with vehicle duty people.
The LBS guys couldn’t have been more helpful and sorted me out with some 29er tubes to fit the weird conti tyres on the ute. We also tried out some panniers to see if they’d fit, but it’s not looking promising.
We also saw a guy on a Christiana trike, and said hello but he didn’t seem to want to stop for a chinwag. Maybe we’ll see him again one day.
Nice to know that there are few cargo bikers in the area, maybe a bit of exposure will bring more people into the fold.
Oh, he’s awake, better get back to being a dad.
Winds of change
Let’s get this straight right from the offset, I’m a cyclist, I really don’t like headwinds. End of.
Today’s been good so far, it’s another daddy daycare day, so the boy and I got on the bike and headed to the park to play on the slide and look at the ‘babbits’. All was well on the way, it was five miles or so of pleasant riding, albeit with that sneaking feeling that you get that the return journey won’t be so much fun. We met up with big bear and his boy and much fun was had by all.
My boy got to the point where he’d had enough and he made it clear it was time to get back on the bike. ‘daddy, bike. Bike, bike, daddy’.
We saddled up and hit the road, straight away we were hit by the headwind. It’s no fun when you’re over six foot, and on an upright bike, and have a child on the back, and a bag the size of a sail. Teeth gritted and head down, we battled through. The boy, of course, noticed no difference with my mighty frame shielding him from the worst.
As we pulled onto the drive, he started shouting ‘more bike daddy’, but there was no way I was going out again before a sit down and a cup of coffee. We’re now in the merciful calm of the front room, watching pingu and eating breadsticks. Not a bad morning all told!
No photo update of today because the sun was (unusually) shining and I couldn’t see the screen of my phone. Here’s an arty on from the other day of the longtail in a different park. As you can see, it wasn’t very busy.
Baby boy don’t like big bags
First of all, thanks to my cargo bike brethren who are taking time to read and comment. It’s great to know that there are people out there doing the same sort of things that I am.
By way of update, my little boy is still loving riding the ute, so much so that the other day we pulled into the drive and he did his usual shout of ‘more bike’, but this time he burst into tears when I tried to get him out of his seat. What could I do? What sort of parent would deny his son a bit more bike riding? So out we went again.
I’m struggling with a problem though. The bags. When I’ve got the yepp maxi attached, the leg portions stop the big orange bags from opening properly. Ok, it’s possible to squeeze things in but it’s not easy. Ideally I’d like to be able to take the boy’s change bag and provisions for the day, but at the moment that’s a bit of a squash and a squeeze (old man, won’t you help me please?).
I’ve got the frame for the seat mounted into the middle holes on the deck (and made some others as well) so there’d be plenty of room behind the leg bits for a smaller bag on each side. The small orange ute bags would be an option, but I’m loathe to pay 75euro each for them!
Looking at standard pannier bags, the hooks are nowhere near big enough. The ute has a ~20mm farm out back, and the bags I’ve seen will only fit up to 16mm. I guess it’s possible to bend the hooks but I’d ideally like a solution that isn’t cobbled together.
I’m also wondering if a set of Xtracycle freeloaders would a) fit the ute and b) fit the bill?
Any thoughts on solutions? I’m happy to road test and review things if someone’s got a natty product they’d be willing to send me.
More. Good. Like it.
Having spent some time working out the best way to attach the child seat to the Ute, I’ve finally got it sorted and used the existing deck mounting points for the front screws and drilled a couple of holes for the rear screws.
And a top down view
I’m about as sure as I can be that that’s going nowhere in a hurry!
Now that the rack is in place the boy and I decided to take spin down a converted railway line via the supermarket.
Pretty much All the way he was chatting away and shouting ‘good’ and ‘like it’ amongst other things. Whenever we stopped, he’d say
‘more’, so I’m fairly sure he liked it.
I’m not convinced about the interaction between the leg bits of the seat and the Ute bags though. At the moment I’ve wedged the seat over the top, which works but dramatically reduces their usefulness. I’ve had a look for some normal sized panniers to use in conjunction with the seat, but can’t find any that will fit the 20mm top rails of the rack.
Any ideas people?
Boyzilla vs bikezilla
The day has finally come. I took a trip to really useful bikes with a good mate of mine who also looks after his boy on a Monday.
It was snowing and flipping freezing but we had great fun talking to Rob about all things cargo bike. My mate, big bear, has probably fallen in love with a bakfiets and I bought a yepp maxi for the Ute. Rob was really knowledgeable and helpful, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a trip to his shop.
Here’s the boy, moments before his first longtail ride. It’s a rubbish picture but the light was fading fast.
I was unsure how he’d get on with it, but as we got back from a little spun round the block he said, “more bike, more bike, more bike” so we went off for a few minutes more.
He loved it, which is a relief seeing as transporting him was one of the main reasons for getting the Ute!
Cajon vs. Cargobike
kona ute and cajon
It was with a bit too much excitement that I strapped the cajon onto the Ute. This was one of the primary reasons to get a longtail; so I could get to church to play and not have to use the car. OK I could walk, but I can save quite a bit of time this way and when I’ve got to be there early to set up and practice I like to have all the time I can.
It was dead easy in the end, a couple of bungees and she was solid as a rock.
A festive longtail use
It was the christingle service at church on Sunday. How does one transport a christingle on a longtail? Not like this, it fell off by the time I got home.
Never mind, I didn’t know what to do with it anyway. Anyone got any ideas for uses for a christingle?
