Project of the day/week/month(?)
I probably won’t get it done before the Eden’s Gate 400, but the plan has been all along that I’m going to have a porteur rack on the mlcm so it can fulfill its destiny of being a gofaster cargo bike. Today I was waiting for the dishwasher to finish, and I decided that this would be a good time to start on the thing.
Note the elegant rubber band and the absence of squareness. These are not unrelated; I’ve roughed out the cutouts in the ends of the center rails, but they aren’t finished to the point where they’ll fit snugly around the tubing of the rim. This pushes the ends up, which springs the sides out, which means I need to put on a rubber band to reduce the temptation for the whole thing to just go sproinggggg! and fall apart on the floor. (the little check-mark shaped piece of metal on the lower right is a lamp bracket, which will hang down below the bicycle and have an eyelet attached so I can bolt a headlight to the thing. Right now the mlcm has an old Dlumotec Oval attached to the fender eyelet at the dropout, which puts it a little bit too low for my tastes; If I put it up closer to the top of the wheel, it will be more visible to cars without having to be tilted up quite so much.)
I am uncertain of how to attach the rack to the fork. If I had enough money, I’d have a custom fork made with eyelets on the top of the fork crown and about halfway down the fork legs (so that the curvy part of the leg would shock absorb before the bounciness made it up to the rack) but in the short term I might do something like the CETMA halfrack’s fork mount (which is better than using a metal strap and bending it to fit) and then just make a couple of longer legs that drop all the way down to either (a) the dropouts or (b) the fender eyelets at the dropout. In any case, I’ve got metal & files to work it with.
The only thing I need to learn before I can finish this is how to braze. I suppose I could alway use epoxy and glue it up like my invisibly lugged Trek but that would tend to spoil the whole brazed steel aspect of the mlcm. So, no, I’ll have to buy, borrow, or rent a torch and start studying.
And if this rack works out, maybe I can start selling them to go along with the bicycle luggage I’m making (and selling! I’ve got a commission to make someone a handlebar bag, which will almost pay for all of the packcloth I’ve bought so far.)