Looks good Kelly, but I hate towing trailers, they’re a pain in the arse to park, store, reverse, drive in traffic etc etc. i have a bike trailer (stored at Spotty’s place) and the little truck has a towbar, but I’d much rather haul bikes and parts in the truck, hence my desire to build my own bike loader, that I can use on my own without any other assistance, as in most cases I’ll be loading/unloading on my own. I live in a house in the ‘burbs, so with 6 cars and 26 bikes, space is at a premium and a trailer that will be only occasionally used takes up the space of a car or small truck that will be used regularly, if not daily.
I looked at all of the Youtube videos of both the store bought and home built loaders, and have to say that the store bought loaders are all stupidly overpriced, all seem to be around $3-4K with maybe $500 worth of materials, and either poorly designed, or ridiculously over-engineered.
One of the loaders relies heavily on the operator pulling/inserting special pins at least 13 times during the process of loading or unloading which is just dumb, and the simplest solution appears to be a 4 wheeled trolley that the bike’s front wheel is locked into, being pulled up a couple of rails via an electric winch, while the rear wheel rolls up a standard ramp, so that’s what I’m going to build.
I’ll jump in muh truck at lunchtime and go pick up the steel. I just got a call from the bike towing company to tell me that their truck is on the way to collect my poor injured BMW, and the guy told me that, looking at the description that I put on the claim, the bike will most likely be written off. Oh well, so be it…….
