This is awesome advice, thank you! I bought a rear rack and some cable housing (I’m worried the rear derailer cable will scrape on the rack mountings). I’m going to start with the rear rack and panniers.
My front fork is some kind of chunky mountain bike built-in-shocks thing and I’m not sure there’s a way to mount a front rack to it, but I’ll try to figure something out once the rear one is set up. Failing that, I’ll look for one of those handlebar baskets.
I figure I’ll start small, see if this is useful, and add capacity as I go.
This is great info, thanks for taking the time to write it out! I didn’t even notice the front rack at first, does the handlebar basket just latch on to the rack? I think this (minus the trailer for now) makes a lot of sense for me
The bike has rear mounting points but the type of bike racks that seem to be designed to use them claim lower weight limits. There are others that wrap around the seat post and rear fork.
That’s good to know! My SO’s bike has a basket, and I was surprised at how much of a difference it made. I found myself using her bike more than mine last year. For stuff like hauling groceries, would it be better to use saddlebags over the rear rack?
That definitely adds a lot of length to the back! I think I see these on the bike path sometimes but didn’t realize its an add-on rather than a custom-built bike. I’d been thinking when my SO and I have kids in a few years, we’d get one of those cargo bikes with the big wheelbarrow bucket on the front, where kids or probably another adult or groceries can ride. But I’ve never ridden either version - do the ones with the cargo in the front handle worse? Are there other tradeoffs?
I like his electric bike conversion. I’m brand new to anything more than the most absolute basic bicycle maintenance (this bike’s rear derailer was held together with zip ties at one point), so I hadn’t waded in to electric bike options and tradeoffs yet. I’ve heard they’re a huge game changer and an improvement on cars in the kind of built-up areas where I live. I’d figured I’ll set this one up for some cargo capacity, then sort of feel out what I want once I’ve been using it a bit.
This would lend itself to stencils pretty well though (one color, no islands), especially with a touch of spray adhesive on the back. I’ve done the symbol from one of the more common solarpunk flags, and getting the blank spot inside the gear positioned would be a little finicky if doing graffiti.
You’d want to bridge the corners there, to make it all one piece, if you wanted to be able to put it up quickly. I was just painting a laptop so I had plenty of time to fuss with it.
Movim is awesome! PoVoq put a bunch of work into getting it set up and linked with Lemmy so if you have an account here, you can just start using the microblogging platform too! I use WordPress for my art and writing and Movim for my making-and-fixing-type projects, and I mostly prefer Movim - the interface is nice, it’s free, doesn’t spatter everything I write with gross ads, and it’s not corporate. I’d very much recommend it.
Thanks! I pulled it from one of the more popular solarpunk flags. Out of all the ones I’ve seen, many of which feature the sun-and-gear motif in some configuration, it’s my favorite symbol for the movement; It’s very simple and visually clear, and easy to render with one color.
In the northeast there used to be a fair bit, but I think a lot has been torn up in the process of making bike paths. A lot of the small towns I grew up in still have intact tracks running between their centers, I’d love if these pods made an appearance, if only to show folks that trains can be useful to them.