Thread: Planning a bike trailer

Thanks. The mesh is 50x50x3. The middle bike will be going on backwards (I mentioned this earlier) as I want to keep it off the draw bar as it is a handy place to strap on marquees or eskys and you can't really do that if there is a bike in the way. With my current trailer we mount a bike backwards and have never had a issue.

No pictures at the moment but I have the axle, hubs and springs painted and mounted. The bearings have been cleaned and re-packed. Also the hitch, safety chains and tie down points are on as well. Not much more to go now.

Originally Posted by Legion

What a good idea! I'm going to steal that, will come in very handy.

just be careful and check that the mesh sheet is square first , quite often they are not

well done on the trailer it looks great

Thanks. And the first thing I done was to make sure the mesh was square

Well the trailer is now registerd! I pulled it out and loaded my bike to see how it fits. I'll get some better photos soon and with more bikes on it.

Finally went out riding yesterday with some mates so we were able to load 3 bikes onto the trailer and they all fit with heaps of room to spare. The trailer is heaps better to tow compared to my box trailer.

That 3rd shot is the first one to show how far back the axle ended up. No wonder it tows so well!
Looks the goods!

1/2 inch per foot works a treat on a 8 foot tray for bikes. I must say thanks for the help and input from members on here that went into this trailer.

Well we're heading away for easter and I got asked if I could take a extra bike, so that makes 4 in total. The 4th bike is only a 150 so I figured I could come up with something. I didn't want to put the 150 across the draw bar as I feel that would be too much weight up front(plus thats where the marquee is going). So what I did was strengthen the draw bar a bit by adding some 30x30x2 angle to the under side of the draw bar(the trailer seems to be a bit front heavy with the bikes on so it was for my own peace of mind), I done a 1 inch weld about every foot on both sides. Don't have any photos of that but I'm happy how it turned out. Then I made a rack to go on the back to hold the 150. Since the trailer is 2400mm long it just fits behind the bikes. It's held on with 6 bolts and I can still load and unload bikes with the rack in place, the bike on the right has to be leaned over a fair bit while passing the tie down but it can be done. When I have all 4 bikes loaded up I'll take a couple of photos

Once everything is loaded up, I'd be unhitching the towball (with the jockey wheel down) and checking what kind of weight (or lift) you're actually getting there, as that's probably the critical issue.

With just the 150 on there it still has a little bit of weight on the tow ball(maybe only 2 or 3kg). Adding the 3 bikes and other things up front will add a lot of weight to the tow ball so I'm not worried about it being 'unbalanced'.

Well I took the trailer to our Easter camping trip. Had 3 full sized bikes, a 150cc CRF across the back, a big marquee across the front with a carton of beer and a jerry can packed in the front of the trailer(the back of the ute was full so a carton and a jerry had to go in the trailer). I done a 700km round trip and the trailer towed great(about 90 minutes on a dirt road as well), could hardly tell it was there. Only drama I had was a blow out on the trailer about a hour from home on the return trip. It was raining and I found out the spare I had for the trailer wouldn't quite fit, LOOOOONG story but to sum it up the PCD of the hubs are 114.3mm (ford stud pattern) the spare(as I found out) is a 112mm PCD...... When I 'test' fitted the wheel I didn't put the nuts on, I just assumed that since the wheel 'fitted' the hub it was the right stud pattern, I'm not making that mistake again. I ended up having to leave the wife, dog and trailer on the side of the road as I went to get the blown tyre replaced. But we made it back and I took a couple pictures of the trailer loaded up and thought I'd share them. Oh and also to RustyArc, there is plenty of load on the tow ball(bout 60kg) when the trailer is loaded like it is in the pictures
P4030081.jpgP4030083.jpgP4030082.jpgP4030080.jpgP4030079.jpg