Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Cycling with baby

Children can use designated seats for bicycles from when they're around one year old. (Or nine months, in Wacky Holland.) This means I can't go cycling with Frog until next spring. (Winter will get in the way.)

But there has to be a way around this. This very responsible-seeming gentleman has a convincing solution: Child seats for cars can be fastened in the box of a cargo bike. He does not recommend fastening them on the racks of normal bicycles.

I am one of maybe five people in this town with a front-loading cargo trike. So I almost owe it to the world to make good use of it.

I had some adaptors (below) which are meant to fasten the child's car seat to a stroller. (Stroller, check. Car, well, no. But car-less peope still nead the car seat, just in case.)

I built a frame inside the trike's box for stability. This also creates compartments which might be nice when carrying gear. One reason I want this to work is so we can all go to the beach, and the stroller, besides being slower than a bicycle, has almost no cargo capacity.

Bus? Sure, we can use the bus. But where's the challenge in that.

The seat now snaps nicely into the brackets. I want to fasten things properly before I actually go anywhere with this set-up.

This might not look too convincing, but the seat gets tightly wedged within the box, in addition to being clamped into the brackets.

I have just discovered that there is actually a gadget on the market designed specifically for fastening children's car seats to the box of a cargo bike. (It can also be used on a rack, for the more thrill-seeking parent.) I notice this thing provides some suspension, and this has led me to reconsider my design.

We'll see.

4 comments:

coastkid said...

Once again some great designing there!

Northmark said...

Thanks! Am spending all my waking hours trying to think of some kind of suspension. Knowing me, it will probably involve some discarded inner tubes.

Anonymous said...

Tough to get the balance right on that between having some spring and bouncing the Small One out of the box when you hit a pothole.

I did wonder about some kind of leaf spring affair with plastic sections, but personally I'd keep it simple: the baby seat provides cushioning and you get used to taking it slowly on bumpy bits.

Anonymous said...

BTW Thanks for the link. I missed it before...