Load Carrying on the Watsonia

 

Load carrying from wood, timber, 3d printed parts.

Minq recumbent chair

Crate can be removed without tools

With Cushion in place

Next to conventional basket

Milk crate as chair. (Sitting on the cushion, you can't see much of it)

Minq recumbent in Bicycle mode

Milk crates with cushions at Alphington market.

Single speed milk crate bike (not colour coordination!) at Piedemontes, in

the nearby suburb of North Fitzroy.

(A 21st century bike basket)

After my last post about this bike, I did little bits of work on it, changing the tyres, and removing the load carrying and chain guarding contraptions. The plastic chain guard was pretty brittle and deciduous anyway, and fell apart with even the slightest touch. For a while, that's the way it stayed, but I was slowly gathering ideas for putting load carrying back on it. 

A visit to a local farmer's market inspired me - here were milk crates being used as chairs as I had seen before and even written about in my book. And me and lots of other people have used milk crates as load carrying. How about a built-in chair on a bicycle? Turns out this has been done before on the 20 year old and short lived Minq recumbent. I managed to find an article about it in Velovision 23 from 2006.

I was thinking of a complicated timber-based seat cushion but something quite simple worked instead, I just cut down the foam inside a cushion I had spare to make it fit in the milk crate. The night before I did most of the work on the load carrying I fossicked for suitable timber and a bracket in the shed, and was able to find them. Overall I'm very pleased with the result. The cushion should benefit the load carrying, keeping it suspended and less prone to damage, and could also carry some pets - maybe a willing cat or a smallish dog. 

I've put in a pic of a standard bike basket next to the removable-without-tools and and customisable and doesn't rust and is-also-a-chair milk crate.