Bike curious

[j4]

I 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!

Comments

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

I know that Rachel loves her put-the-kid-in-front bike, and Charles seems perfectly happy in it - I expect she'll be along in a minute to extoll its virtues!

not very helpful, sorry

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Someone quite often parks one of those outside the SBS. I always think that it looks awesome!

[jinty]

The Electric Bike shop on Magdalen St has previously offered to send stuff along from its Cambridge shop if one wanted a trial of stuff they don't have in stock normally, and they do stock cargo bikes, so I'm sure that getting parts for it will not be massively difficult. Good luck!

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

I would be very very concerned about lack of neck and back support; she's very young for all the jouncing about and absolutely too young for a back of the bike seat. A 3 point system may no longer be street legal for such a small baby and I would check around widely as to whether just-sitting-up is sufficiently strong for a bike seat. She needs a helmet: do they make them that small? presumably it has a raincover?

Bring a tack hammer and tap all the welds and joints. Look for signs of bending and dodgy repair. Check the wheels and axles as you would for any bike. It looks bloody heavy, as well - but you are very strong!

[htfb.livejournal.com]

New, that's for sale (at, eg, kidstraffic.nl) for 779 euros. Linking to a bakfiets.nl model at 1800 is a bit disingenuous.

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.

[rmc28]

Some useful recent discussion here if you didn't see it: http://plan-survive.livejournal.com/305601.html

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

I'm about to acquire (as in, it's on order and should be here this week), this trike (http://bakfiets.nl/eng/modellen/cargotrike/small/).
The Ebay trike is not the same as this one, so my test-riding experiences and knowledge may not be relevant.

I test rode the 8 speed version extensively, and found that 7 gears was enough for me. I don't think 3 gears would have been, even in Cambridge.

There are options to either fit fixings for a car seat (Maxi-Cosi) or a baby seat that fixes to the floor of the box for a Bakfiets. That may not apply, and in any case, whether you can get either the fittings or someone to fix them in Oxford is another matter.

The handling on a Bakfiets takes a little getting used to, but is fine after half an hour or so. I would be less certain about another trike, especially if you're not used to riding a trike. I tried one like this (http://www.kangaroobike.com/pages/features.php) and it wasn't much better than an ordinary trike for handling, which means you should expect to overturn it a lot when you first start riding.

[shermarama]

Would a trailer be an option? Over here there are specific kinderkars and you do see a fair number of them, though not as many as bakfietseses (plural, whatever.) I've also seen a kinderkar being used separately as a pram, which depending on where you're going could be useful. Then again there's the whole safety problem with trailers in the UK because cars don't expect bikes to have them. But I can't say, having seen lots of people stomping on the pedals to lumber up to speed on a bakfiets, that I've ever thought they looked worth all the work to me.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I have a flyer for the Cambridge Dutch bike people which Rachel's came from, and she can probably tell you more about them than me, but I would totally be up for any mad plan that involves cycling a bakfiets across the country.