Problem: No car, 1 MTB, 16 days of trials shows in Sydney for the Sydney Family show and an awesome trials riding area 6km away at the coast. What to do?
Answer: Easy. Build a carry rack out of an $8 length of flat bar steel, mount a Yakima Blockhead to it and voila! You have yourself a way to tow the no-seat, single speed, no-good-for-long-distance trials bike to a great training area!
Thanks to the help of my talented, fix-anything friend, Cam, and especially to Pushys for the Yakima Blockhead, we were able to build this pretty nifty bike trailer idea. Obviously, the Yakima Blockhead was originally designed to be mounted to a truck/ute bed as a mounting option and is popularly used for that purpose. In this situation though, we had a slightly different purpose but it still worked a treat. To be honest, it actually worked a lot better than I expected because we only had one night to quickly get it made. I have a carbon frame so we weren’t keen on drilling anything to it. I just have the trailer frame bolted to the drink bottle cage and there’s an entire rubber buffer between the steel and the carbon.
The 9mm throw skewer is built very robust and locks the bike in perfectly. Once everything’s hooked up, the bike trailer tows the trials bike really well with the trial bike's rear wheel tracking the MTB’s wheel. The only thing to be mindful of is that you need to take corners the same as if you were towing a trailer in a car – take the corner gradually, and nice and wide. If you ride in a really tight circle the trials rear wheel tracks inside, but riding in a circle isn’t a usual occurrence when cycling so that’s no big deal. Yakima also have a Locking Blockhead for added bike security. I’m really happy with the Yakima Blockhead’s design and I'm happy to recommend it to anyone looking at purchasing it for their ute tray, boat, trailer or custom design.
The 9mm throw skewer is built very robust and locks the bike in perfectly. Once everything’s hooked up, the bike trailer tows the trials bike really well with the trial bike's rear wheel tracking the MTB’s wheel. The only thing to be mindful of is that you need to take corners the same as if you were towing a trailer in a car – take the corner gradually, and nice and wide. If you ride in a really tight circle the trials rear wheel tracks inside, but riding in a circle isn’t a usual occurrence when cycling so that’s no big deal. Yakima also have a Locking Blockhead for added bike security. I’m really happy with the Yakima Blockhead’s design and I'm happy to recommend it to anyone looking at purchasing it for their ute tray, boat, trailer or custom design.By Janine Jungfels - Pushys sponsored athlete.