Bike curious
Sep. 19th, 2011 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4I will do a proper update soon, honest (& might even get round to reading other people's journals & commenting on them!) but right now I have a question which is a bit more time-critical and I'd be really grateful for answers from people who know about bikes...
So, now that Imogen is nearly 6 months old (!) it will hopefully not be too long before I can put her in some kind of bike seat & actually start cycling regularly again, hurrah hurrah. A colleague has offered me a standard sit-up-on-the-back child bike seat for free (so I will probably say yes to that anyway) but I still feel that what I'd really like is a Bakfiets-style cargo bike. The problem is that a) they are frightfully expensive, and b) nowhere in Oxford stocks them, so all the bike shops I've talked to have basically said "you don't want to buy one of those" & have instead tried to try to talk me into buying a bike seat that will fit on my normal bike (ie the sort of seat they actually sell).
HOWEVER, a cycling-mad colleague sent me a link to this cargo bike on eBay, in Oxford, for what looks like a very reasonable price (compared to the new cargo bikes I have seen online), and I am tempted. I am going to go and have a look at it tomorrow (Tuesday) and what I really want to know is: what should I be looking for to determine whether it's actually a sensible thing to buy? The description mentions "patches of rust on the frame" (they look quite trivial from the photos) -- what's the best way to check if these are a serious problem, & what work would need to be done to fix them or stop them deteriorating any further? (NB I'm not really concerned about cosmetic stuff, I just need to be able to reassure myself that it's safe.) Is it likely to be a problem getting parts for it if it's an odd make of bike?
To be honest the key question may turn out to be "is the bike actually short enough for a tiny person like me to ride it?", but I can figure that out when I see it.
Any other advice re babies-on-bikes is also welcome (unless it's "argh don't do it", but I know you're all more sensible than that. :-) Thank you in advance, kind people!
So, now that Imogen is nearly 6 months old (!) it will hopefully not be too long before I can put her in some kind of bike seat & actually start cycling regularly again, hurrah hurrah. A colleague has offered me a standard sit-up-on-the-back child bike seat for free (so I will probably say yes to that anyway) but I still feel that what I'd really like is a Bakfiets-style cargo bike. The problem is that a) they are frightfully expensive, and b) nowhere in Oxford stocks them, so all the bike shops I've talked to have basically said "you don't want to buy one of those" & have instead tried to try to talk me into buying a bike seat that will fit on my normal bike (ie the sort of seat they actually sell).
HOWEVER, a cycling-mad colleague sent me a link to this cargo bike on eBay, in Oxford, for what looks like a very reasonable price (compared to the new cargo bikes I have seen online), and I am tempted. I am going to go and have a look at it tomorrow (Tuesday) and what I really want to know is: what should I be looking for to determine whether it's actually a sensible thing to buy? The description mentions "patches of rust on the frame" (they look quite trivial from the photos) -- what's the best way to check if these are a serious problem, & what work would need to be done to fix them or stop them deteriorating any further? (NB I'm not really concerned about cosmetic stuff, I just need to be able to reassure myself that it's safe.) Is it likely to be a problem getting parts for it if it's an odd make of bike?
To be honest the key question may turn out to be "is the bike actually short enough for a tiny person like me to ride it?", but I can figure that out when I see it.
Any other advice re babies-on-bikes is also welcome (unless it's "argh don't do it", but I know you're all more sensible than that. :-) Thank you in advance, kind people!
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-19 09:16 pm (UTC)As far as I can tell this is the same as the Halford's model that comes last in the test at http://www.babboe.nl/bakfiets/pers/test-kassa. There's what may be more of the same review at http://www.dekinderfietsspecialist.nl/bakfiets/boxbike.htm
The suggestion that the handling is pretty rubbish might strongly limit what you could do with the machine.
It looks as though the front of the bike is garden-furniture-quality, d-i-y-able equipment, and the back is generic cycling parts. You certainly wouldn't have difficulty replacing bits: the front tyres might be a nonstandard size but even so the bike shops can order them in without trouble.
The parts I'd be most concerned about are the brakes. I can see what looks like a rim-brake on the rear wheel but can't make out what's on the front. If they are flimsy pressed metal brake arms I'd be pretty unhappy, given the weight of the loaded bike. The rear brake is more important for this geometry than for a regular bicycle. For an ordinary BSO, replacing or upgrading parts is a bit like throwing good money after bad, but of course this is a machine for a specific job. So maybe you could upgrade the brakes if necessary. If the wheels are steel (shiny and prone to rust-spots), rather than aluminium, and if the brakes are shoes on the rim rather than hub brakes, I'd be very unhappy indeed---braking against steel loses all traction in the wet.
For rust, I'd be most concerned to look at the tube along the bottom from the pivot behind the box to the bottom-bracket where the pedal-cranks attach. That's close to the road so exposed to spray, and a critical single point of failure. Anything else breaking would be safety-tolerable. It ought to be fairly obvious whether the tube is actually producing flaking rust or whether it's just marked where the paint has got chipped.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 10:48 am (UTC)How expensive/difficult is it likely to be to upgrade brakes?
And I have heard 'Bicycle Shaped Object' before but didn't pick up the acronym so thanks for explaining. :-) To be honest I suspect a Serious Cyclist would tell me that my bike (http://www.bikes2udirect.com/B0889.html) is only a BSO, but it's served me well for nearly a decade now!
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 01:52 pm (UTC)Here's a translation of the previous page: http://www.bakfiets-en-meer.nl/2008/10/26/workcycles-and-bakfietsnl-win-in-kassa-bakfiets-comparison-test/
Upgrading all the brakes is most likely to be 30 quid for parts, and a job you can do yourself without exhausting your vocabulary of swearwords; or might be an engineering impossibility, depending on what is actually stopping the wheels now. My guess is that those are modern hub-brakes on the front wheel and that you wouldn't need to do anything anyway.
I've seen bakfietsen around Oxford though the only people I know who use one for their 4-year-old are in Cambridge. Even here in London there are some trailerbikes about, in these recessionary days.
(I like owning a tandem but it cost a lot to get from ebay condition back to rideability, and it gets much less use than I expected. Nonstandard bikes tend to do one thing well but take up a lot of space when they're not doing it. So, for myself, I'd be going for a baby seat now and a detachable trailer later.)