LIGHTWEIGHT PEDESTRIAN TRAILER
I'd
been thinking about the idea of making a light pedestrian trailer for doing
small events in town centres. It needed to be something which would fold
to fit into a small hatchback car, and I already had a pair of cheap BMX
type wheels left over from a scrap bike broken up for the chainwheels.
One day, a table frame made of suitably light square tubing held together
by plastic joints turned up in a skip in my road and I was off. Although
the tubing was ideal, the lengths were not spot on and I had to do some
butt joins to get the shape I wanted. Most of
the bits for the rest of the frame were made from folding pushchair tube.
Folding
pushchairs often appear in rubbish and they're a really useful source
of all sorts of round and square tube and flat
struts. All you have to do is drill out a few rivets and dispose of the
plastic bits; the wheels aren't a lot of use as they're small and often
worn out.
A couple of bits of round pushchair tube went across
the frame as supports for the base board, and
some smaller tube with a bore of 10mm was fixed
inside one of them to hold stub axles for the wheels. The stub
axles were made out of a 10mm rod from a wide computer printer.
The bicycle wheels originally had 8mm spindles but the
plastic bearings were worn out (probably the reason the bike had been scrapped).
Normally when using bicycle wheels for a trailer you have to build outriggers
to support both ends of the wheel spindles. I figured if I could get away
with drilling the bearings out to 10mm, the larger axles would be strong
enough not to need an outrigger, and the trailer was already quite wide
due to aiming for the maximum size that would fit into a Ford Ka load space.
In fact, by an amazing bit of luck, we later found it just fitted through
the door of the lifts in Debenhams multi storey car park in Swindon with
about 1cm of clearance!
I drilled the bearings out
in steps, starting with 8.5mm, then 9, 9.5 and then 10. The wheels turned
without wobbles, and standing on the trailer frame didn't bend the axles,
so I decided the idea might work. I don't know how the bearings will wear,
but the trailer's only got to go from the nearest car park into a pedestrian
area, and both wheels and bearings should be easy to replace.
The sharp corners were sliced
off as I didn't fancy them sticking into my ankles, and 8mm nuts were welded
inside the front corners to mount shortened
legs cut from a scrapped table.
The base of a removable handle was made out of
a bit of square tube; a convenient piece of round tube with a bend in the
middle was welded to it and a socket with a fixed nut put on the frame
for a mounting pin. The socket doesn't look all that heavy duty, but I
wanted the whole thing to pack as flat as possible.
Having got the assembly to work OK as a trailer,
it occurred to me that if I welded some more leg mounts into the back corners
as well, and made a set of longer legs, it could
double as a small table at the destination.