jawfish

Strapless Biking Part 1
john posted in rides on June 9th, 2008

All you biker boys and girls who haul your bikes on trailers or pickups have a set of ratchet or cam-lock nylon webbing straps to hold them down. They work pretty well inside a closed trailer or in the back of a pickup, but on an open trailer like mine they are an irritating pain-in-the-tail. They take too long to install, loosen, flap in the breeze, jam, fray, and rub your paint. They aren’t cheap and the ratchets are designed by some drop-out from the Technical Institute of Inner Berzerkistan. The most troublesome aspect of all, is finding the right length: they just won’t work at all in short stretches, so we couldn’t tie down at the proper angle to the edge of the trailer. With a five-foot wide trailer each bike’s outside hand grip is approximately at the trailer edge, so there is no place to tie to at the proper 45 degree angle. The inner ties interfere with the other bike.

So when we saw a new (to us) kind of locking chock on a fellow’s rig, my riding partner Matt demanded that we get some. I had a set of truly fugly but battleship-rated set of chocks made from quarter-inch steel channel on the trailer. Replacing them with new Bike Shoes from Pit Posse made it lots easier to load the bikes single-handed, and gave a positive clamp on the front wheel. They cost us about $70 each plus shipping.

Part 1: The Chocks - ATK Bike Shoes (only for dirt bikes)

..The inspiration.

These chocks are intended to bolt down to your trailer bed, but as an alternative to permanent mounting, our friend had them bolted to a sheet of plywood which he just threw in the pickup when needed.

....Bolted to the trailer bed.

You can see from the pictures that they are made from tube steel and are sturdy, with good welds and paint. It’s trivial to bolt them down, just drill and bolt. Don’t forget the Locktite and big washers!

Magic thread locker goo.

The mechanism is a bit hard to understand. Look at the picture above with the blue chocks. One is in the open and one in the closed position. One hoop reaches forward under your fender to grab some tire tread, the middle hoop goes along for the ride, and the biggest hoop is pulled down to apply pressure against the tire. This holds the bike upright and locked into the chock.

The Loading Sequence:

	Rolling up onto the trailer.
	Set in open chock.
	Look Ma, even with the chock open, the bike stays up!
	Push the first hoop as far back as it will go, and tuck into the tread.
	Pull the big hoop forward until the tire is squeezed.
	That’s it!

Once we had the chocks bolted down and tested, we were still in the same old situation with the rear of the bikes. Always the rear bounces around and slides sideways, even with a pair of tie-downs. I thought at first that I’d add a piece of of steel channel to the back for each rear wheel, and just tie the wheel down to the bed. But that would have made for awkward permanent trip-me-ups right in the middle of the trailer, and it just didn’t seem like the best solution. Worse, I didn’t have any scrap of the right size, like I did for the front. See Part 2 for the solution.