Plastic Crates for Urban Utility Cycling
Grace Newhaven
My wife and I are "seven
day" cyclists . We are lucky enough to work in
the CBD of
We commute to work every
day, rain or shine, and have done for about eight years.
We also have our famous
Central Market, an old style "covered market" provided by the
municipality, within a quick walk, where fresh food is both cheaper and more
various than anywhere else.
So I often have quite a
weight of food to carry home several days a week. For a long time, I relied on
my standard panniers; but these are at their best only when they're on the
bike, off the bike they're unstable and difficult to carry, especially with a
heavy weight, and they're not much use with bottles. So ,
I'd also use a small cardboard carton that would last a few trips (only) before
carrying a load of paper to the front gate for recycling. Still not ideal : lugging this around the market was still clumsy, and
the box looked shabby after a while.
What I really wanted was
something fixed to my bike that would be tamper proof, reasonably
weather proof, with a good capacity...
A couple of years ago now,
I chanced upon a small ( 230 x 200 mm = 9 x 8 inch)
cube plastic crate in a hardware store - only $2.00. & the same colour as
my bike! I'd seen larger ones sometimes on other bikes around town, but they
seemed too big, didn't fit under the seat etc, so they didn't sit on the rack
securely. Or they would interfere with step over etc.
But this little one was a
perfect fit, with a total capacity of 10.58 L (about, say a six-pack and a half,
or a cauliflower ), and the possibility to have tall items (say, a celery) poke
out the top , or a bag of apples will sit nicely on top. It also matches the
bike's colour perfectly .
I bolted it onto the carrier
with four 25 MM bolts - no drilling or altering the carrier, of course ! The whole thing is very steady compared to the same
weight in panniers, and so much easier & quicker to load. As well, I could
keep my dynamo rear light right where it was mounted on the carrier rack, but
better protected.
Interestingly, while commercial
carriers like this seem to insist on having a hinged lid to keep out rain, I've
found in practice that the lack of a lid is not important - a little
rain never hurt a vegetable or a beer bottle, after all. In fact, many items
can ride as overflow (eg bags of onions or apples)
and with no lid I can use the increased width and rigidity of the crate itself
to attach even larger objects that would not fit on the original
carrier.
Later , I was to add the smaller , matching crate
to the front carrier, as you will see in the picture below. That too has a
surprisingly useful capacity.
I have to add in fairness that I
still need a pannier on occasion, and the bike has a home made one screwed onto
the carrier semi-permanently. This might be less than satisfactory for a bike
that spends its parking time in the weather, which mine does not.
Well, all this was quite an
advance on a cardboard box ! But more was to come …
A few weeks later, rummaging around in
bargain section of the city's BBS [Big Bike Shop] I noticed a very large
reflector of a type I'd never seen before ( 100 x 420 mm = 4 x 16 inch), a
rectangle of bright yellow & red "arrow heads", with "See
Me" written in the middle, a bit like this : <<<<
SEE ME >>>>> …..As it was marked down from $15.00 to
$5.00, I just had to buy it - I love collecting bits of bike history!
It turned out to be a very
old (1986) product from a small factory somewhere on the Australian East Coast.
The design was intended to fit under the saddle, on old style saddle clamp
nuts, then extend on 100 mm / 4 inch "arms"
backwards over the rear wheel, where it would vibrate/wobble when the bike was
in motion. It's made of a flexible plastic, so it's capable of taking a fall.
Not much use for a bike with anything on the rear carrier of course, and quite
useless these days with modern, keyed saddle clamps. Great idea, but not very
practical as it stands; and zero on the "street cred"
scale...
However, it suited me
perfectly. With a little drilling, I managed to fit this giant vibrating
reflector to the box (which was weird enough to start with!).
I was so pleased with the whole
set up, I went back for more, and managed to get the
last one in the BBS (smirks from the macho staff!) for my wife. She believes in
"blink " lights - which I do not - but has always had a problem
finding a secure mount for the blink light which isn't obscured by a rear load
- the mounts seem to be designed for & best on seat posts for luggage free MTBers. The best solution so far has been just below the
top of the rack on one of the stays of her
Well, the crate has fixed that -
it's a good flat surface to bolt on a reflector bracket which seems (I only did
it yesterday!) to hold the blink light protected in the centre of the box quite
well. So she's got blink light + dynamo rear + <<<<
SEE ME >>>>> reflector + heaps of luggage capacity. The
bikes also appear wider, so cars will give us a little more room, we
hope.
If necessary, the crate
de-mounts in a couple of minutes, and the bike's back
to "normal" for touring etc.
The whole set up looks integrated
too, despite its disparate sources - even a factory fit would be hard put to
improve on this, if I do say so myself!
Purely as an intuition, we seem
to get a little less honking on our joint commute to the CBD, with our two
bobbing reflectors waving away at the traffic! I wonder if it's a case of, as
they say in
Now, as to the patent........
Some other "hard" pannier
sites :
The "Flinger" trunk
Oyster Bucket panniers http://www.olywa.net/leveen/cobbworks.html