Produce Cart at Findlay Market

Shorty gets upgraded

My main pedicab has been seeing lots of action and improvements lately.

New tires - 3 Primo 20 x 2.1"

New seat - Serfas gel suspension seat

New lights - 2 Serfas USLR-R USB taillights

- 1 Serfas USL-5 Raider USB Headlight

New sound system - Gigaware portable docking station

New water bottle - BPA free, with Cycle Path Logo

New bell - identical to the previous one that lost its guts.

New light bar - one with red & white alternating

New brake pads - front & rear

New inner tubes - front & outrigger

Also added:

A wheelset from a girls Huffy coaster bike that was already painted white

Coroplast fin covering the outrigger wheel for safety and advertising space

Speedometer for tracking mileage, which ranges from 7-16 miles per night

Canvas wrap over pipe insulation on backrest for a more finished look

A makeshift turn signaling device set up under the driver seat using a taillight that illuminates bottom to top in 3 stages and can be rotated to make the series of lights point either left or right

Other maintenance:

Re-painted the third wheel in white

Greased bottom bracket

Greased hubs on the newly added Huffy wheels

Produce Cart Completed

The produce cart has been finished and delivered to Cincy. Here are some photos courtesy of Adam Birkan, who made the trip with me to document the occasion.

More photos at Adam Birkan's photo blog

The Sidearm

This new project is a sidecar with a different sort of auxiliary input. It has a hand-crank on the side! Thus the name, Sidearm.

Painting the Permaganic Produce Cart

With a warmer than usual winter, I was able to get primer on this thing outside in my front yard.

But temperatures dropped and it didn't look like I would be able to finish painting before the spring, UNTIL...

I leased a part of the storage facility belonging to the Friends of Animals Thrift Store at 21 Kern street. The Produce Cart travelled across town on the 5' Bikes At Work trailer, along with fans, an 8' ladder, a lamp, a tarp, plastic sheeting, and painting supplies.

I strung that puppy up and put on my respirator and sprayed like crazy for a week.

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There was just enough room underneath for me to roll myself out from under the deadly paint mist, Indiana Jones style!

Then I brought some parts on the trailer and put it together. Yayy!

And I hear it'll be 60 degrees tomorrow.

The Permaganic Produce Cart

Here is my first bike to be done by commission. It was requested by a friend who works at Permaganic, an organic garden in Cincinnati. Their garden is located about a mile from the market they sell at, so they've been wanting a way to move their goods to market without a car. They gave me dimensions for how much storage they needed, which will be enclosed in an insulated compartment. We brainstormed some design ideas together, and I persuaded them to go with the sidecar platform as opposed to the delta trike design they had drafted by the MoBo bike co-op. One advantage of this layout is that the overall size is much shorter, but the other great benefit is that the driver can sell the produce from the same seat by turning it 90 degrees to the right.

Here are my designs from the drawing board:

You can see that this is more than just an ordinary bike with a sidecar added. Due to the size of the cooler that's needed, it necessitated an extra-long bicycle to fit alongside. So my first phase of the project was to build a longtail bike.

Then I went on to build the box frame out of recycled bike tubing, which has used up at least 8 different bike frames so far. Once I had the big rectangular box together, it was attached to the longtail and set up for some test rides.

The Bumblebee Bike

Here's my newest sidecar project that's coming together. This one is a 20" kids bike with a double bench seat welded permanently to the side. My biggest obstacle so far in creating sidecars is that they have a tendency to ruin wheelsets, usually when handling loads on uneven surfaces. Ordinary 26" wheels are not meant to handle side-loads, and I found myself replacing them often on the Widecar. Even the 24" wheels on the Decidecar and Arthur's sidecar were being warped periodically. Therefore, I decided to make a model with 20" rims all around, like the Filipino sidecars. Such wheels are almost as readily available, and much better at holding their shape.

Since the donor bike began its life as a little tyke's rig, it had a smaller size bottom bracket and short cranks on it. My first step in making it a suitable workhorse was to do some BB surgery and replace it with a standard-size crank housing. Using the original rear wheel and sprocket with a MTB crankset gave it an appreciably low gear ratio, with longer cranks plus a smaller chainring. It will only have one speed so I wanted to be sure it was set up with lots of torque for hauling and hill-climbing.

I also had to remove the original seat, which was so rusted in place I was afraid that I would never get it out. With persistence,  a little grinder action and a lot of WD-40 I was eventually able to extract the bugger and put an extra-long seatpost in its place.

Once the bike was ready I began chopping bike frames for steel tubing. I think I ended up using at least four donor bikes for this. I discovered that certain bike frames have tube diameters that allow the seat tube to be sleeved into the top tube, which then can be sleeved into the down tube at the other end, resulting in a tube about 4' long that is straight, rigid, and easily welded together. Not all my donor bikes had that fortuitous combination of tube diameters, so I had to practice doing butt welds, which are harder to make straight without a jig.

With the sleeved tri-tube I established the overall width, going from just above the back wheel of the bike to a similar point above the outrigger wheel. My goal was to create a bench seat that could easily seat two, because that seemed to be the configuration most desired by passengers. From my experience pedi-cabbing, it is most likely that fares will involve two passengers, if not three. Most of my other sidecars (except for the Widecar) were designed for one passenger, with a little extra room in case another had to be squeezed on. On some the second passenger seat is present, but more as an afterthought than a deliberate aspect of the design. This would usually mean it would take some convincing to assure potential passengers that there was indeed room on board for two people, even three if they were desperate. But this is not the best way to lure in potential fares. I needed to make it patently obvious that the craft I'm piloting will fit two people no problem, and a third without stretching the imagination too much. The Widecar fits this ideal on the surface, but falls short because it is not sturdy enough to properly handle the three-passenger load that it seems large enough to carry.

Consequently, this machine ended up being wider than it is long in overall dimension, which is why I'm calling it "Shorty". As a result, it is very stable. It is virtually impossible to lift the back wheel when cornering hard to the left. It is still possible to lift the outrigger wheel turning right when unloaded, so leaning right to make hard turns is a must. Once loaded, however, this vehicle is very forgiving and can be wheeled any which way without needing special care to keep the wheels down.

Here's the completed frame entering the painting stage:

Here's the completed bike after paint and accessories