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I’ve been disenchanted with our old generic bike trailer’s hitch. It’s a clamp-style hitch that’s a total PITA to get tight. I was ogling used Burley trailers when I started wondering whether I could hack my own Burley-style hitch onto my old generic trailer.
The way the trailer hitched onto a bike always bugged me. The clamp tends to slip if you don’t really crank on it. I actually wear gloves when turning the crank handle, just to get it on there so it doesn’t move. It moved once on me while I was riding and one of the clamps slid into my disc brake. The brake cut through the rubber, and into the aluminum of the clamp. Ouch. I’ve kinda been done with that clamp since then.
The other day I was browsing Craigslist and ogling some Burley trailers. Nice trailers. As I stared at them, I thought the trailer body tubing looked familiar. So I started digging around the web, looking for how Burley hitches work. What I learned led me to this little bike trailer hack.
Rather than spending a couple hundred bucks on another used trailer, I spent $20 on a couple of parts and hacked a new hitch for the trailer (okay, in truth I spent $60 because my bike has breezer-style dropouts and I needed some special doo-dad to accommodate ‘em.
Anyway, instead of pictures, this time I made a little video that shows the hitch bits and, I think, adequately demonstrates my dorkiness. Enjoy. (runtime: 3:49)
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Filed Under: modification
4 comments for this entry ↓
1 Kelt // Apr 18, 2008 at 5:41 am
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been looking for ways to improve our hitches. I need to make a system that will work for both center mounting at the back of an Xtracycle and in the normal fashion at the rear hub. I’ll let you know if it can be done.
2 Matt // Apr 19, 2008 at 8:12 am
Care to list all the parts you bought, the cost, and where you got’em?
3 Bren // Apr 19, 2008 at 10:00 am
Sure.
All the parts came from Bike Trailer Shop. All the parts are Burley replacement parts.
I got one “Flex Connector for Round Tongue” ($4.99), one “Standard Hitch (Quick Release) for Burley Trailers” ($15.99) and one “Quick Release-Alternative Hitch for Burley Trailers” ($39.99)
4 Car Hitch for Bike | BikeHacks // May 12, 2008 at 3:49 am
[...] the RSS feed. You can also subscribe to BikeHacks by email. Thanks for visiting!Brendon wrote about modifying a bike hitch a little while ago, and I recently stumbled upon this bike that incorporates a standard hitch used [...]
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