Hi. My third sidecar winter comes, third year without ending "bike season" 🙂 I need some change, unusual rig.
Reason:
I live in some strange place, where:
-everybody has his own inner gate, that can be of any width
-there is common fence with three 4m wide gates and two 120cm wide ones
-wider (car/sidecar enabling) gates are opened every tuesday 2-6pm march-september, and closed november-march
-120cm gates are opened all-time, enabling for pedestrians, hand-driven cars and solo bikes to enter inner terrain
-my own gate is placed 500m from common gate
-there is no tapwater october-march, I must carry a water from "outer world"
I'm fed up with constant attaching and detaching a sidecar when I want to leave home and return. Also leaving a rig in parkplace near main gate and carrying few parts of cargo between my home and main gate is frustrating. And it makes me to solve "wolf-goat-cabbage" problem every time I have a luggage bigger than I can carry in my hands.
Unpackung, detaching a sidecar, passing a gate solo, carrying a sidecar and luggage, reattaching and repacking takes about 15 minutes in summer up to 40 minutes in winter, even with my fast-detachable sidecar. And my backbone is very important also 🙂
I could make some partial solutions, but they are danger or stupid or .. partial 🙂 :
-leave a sidecar on parkplace, mont it to fence with some chain-padlock set and travel the last 500m with solo bike (yeah, especially in 10" of snow)
-do as I do until today (and be unable to carry a water to my home, whole winter)
-make a narrow, about 42"-wide sidecar (but - narrow rig flips left very easy)
Of course, I could live elsewhere, but this place is really cheap and it's country/rural enclave in our agglomeration, it gives me a chance to be woken up by wild rabbits etc 🙂 So - no way to leave 🙂
A problem to solve:
Project and make a sidecar rig, that can pass 44" wide gate in every weather conditions, with less effort than with usual rig. Any idea is welcome.
At the time I have two ideas that can help save few inches:
-cut left handlebar 2 inches (or make it foldable, with left part of windshield foldable also) but what with clutch handle? I could shorten it by 2" max, until I can still operate the cutch
-make car's fender foldable to allow car's hub almost rub a gate when passing
