Dreaming of cargo bikes…
When I was a kid I went with my family to Zimbabwe a few times to visit relatives. One of the things that I remember from these trips were the basic cargo bikes. They used a smaller front wheel so that they could fit a huge basket.
I often integrate the bus into my bike trips so most cargo bikes or XtraCycle conversions wouldn’t work for me. While thinking about this I remembered those African cargo bikes and thought it would be cool to make one.
Here is what I came up with:
The rear wheel is 559mm, but the front wheel is only 406mm. The rest of the geometry is fairly typical touring bike geometry, except for much lower trail (to work well with big loads up front). It should be possible to fit a huge basket or flat rack on top of that front wheel. It shouldn’t be a big deal to carry a few grocery bags or a large box up front. The wheelbase is about the same as a normal bike, so it would work with normal bus mounted racks. Some folks will find the use of drop bars on a cargo bike to be weird, but I find flat bars to be weird. Flat bars would offer a little more cargo space, but I think that the bars are high enough off of the front wheel to prevent this from being a big problem.
I made this in BikeCADand the .bcad file is here.
Now I just near to learn to braze or weld…