Dynamo driven dazzler defends against dim drivers

For me, this is the bike light that revolutionized night time riding.

Dynamo or battery driven, its winning combination of (relative) cheapness, light weight, reliability, and lumens on the road make this a real star.

45mph downhill on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, at 4am with 900km in your legs and 3 hours sleep in the last two days? You got it.

Working heavy traffic, blasting windscreens to help keep the rush-hour cretins at bay? No problem.

Navigating a treacherous canal towpath in the pitch black without dazzling oncoming riders? Priceless.

If you have any interest in riding unlit roads, you owe it to yourself to see a German headlight in action – if value for money and sensitivity to oncoming traffic feature anywhere in your list of priorities, they are almost embarrassingly better than the alternatives…

Some caveats

First off – this is a headlight, in the car sense, not a location beacon in the blinkie bike sense. Make no mistake, it is awesome in urban traffic, but if all you need is to spray photons through car windscreens you can get lights that will be just as effective for much less money.

If you have no ambition to ride outside of built-up areas at night – nothing wrong with that, of course – you simply aren’t in the target market (even if you have a dynamo – there are much cheaper dynamo lights!)

Second, the light stays on your bike unless you want to spend five minutes with a toolkit every time you lock it up. I’ve had no issues with this, hopefully because local thieves can’t be bothered to spend five minutes with a toolkit either (for a light that won’t work without a separate power supply!) but YMMV.

Third, as a consequence of the above, if you have more than one bike which you regularly ride in the pitch black, switching is probably too much hassle (buy two or look elsewhere)

Standlight vs dipped beam – roll over to see the light “in motion”
(Normally you would poke it down a bit!)

No dynamo? No cry!

The big draw of the Cyo for me, as someone who didn’t own a dynamo, was that it can be driven by ordinary battery D/C as well as A/C from a generator. The spec calls for 7.5V, which I have variously provided with:

• Li-pol mountain biking headlight batteries (7.4V nominal)
• 6-cell NiMH radio control car batteries (7.2V nominal)
• 5x Lithium AA batteries (8.5V nominal)

Although I do now have a dynamo (X-FDD, reviewed elsewhere), the vast majority of my experience with the Cyo has been with batteries, including all of the ~3,500km of Paris-Brest-Paris and qualifiers.

It still drives a tail-light when powered by batteries, although I would offer a simple caution that you can easily go off-reservation doing DC power trials, and presumably fry something.

Although I’ve run mine successfully at 10V, I did destroy the capacitor on a rear light by plugging it into a mains battery charger… caveat experimenter!

Blinded by the light!

I haven’t got a large amount of experience of ‘proper’ bike lights, as I only started commuting on unlit roads at the end of winter 2006/2007.

The Cyo is the fourth headlight I’ve used, after:

1. Smart 5/10W twin beam halogen (£n/a)
   
   Big round beam, so half the light isn’t going onto the road – a revelation at the time though. Yellowy, and terrible battery life – I had to ride hard to make sure the battery lasted me the round trip, then recharge every night!
2. Ay-Up LEDs (£150)
   
   Funky twin power LED lights, very lightweight, much brighter than the above and over 6 hours runtime between charges. Again, big round beam blasting into space, but a cooler light, which is… cool!
3. 900 lumen Hong Kong torch from eBay (£40)
   
   I bought this as a second helmet light so that we both had bar+helmet beams for Glentress. It’s stupendously bright, but only runs for 1 hour (a few on low), and takes odd-sized Li-ion rechargeable cells. Sprays more light into space than a laser defence grid.

Of the above, I still have the latter two, although the light from the torch is so badly controlled that I keep it for trail centres only. The Ay-Ups see daily use on the wife’s commuter, as well as a ‘high beam’ / backup light on audaxes (mainly useful for tricking half-asleep randonneurs on PBP into moving to their side of the road because they thought a car or motorbike was coming!). We reduced the cost by buying three sets for just under £300 and splitting them.

If I could only pick one light though, it would be the Cyo. It’s cheaper (even including a dynamo hub) than the Ay-Up, and much cheaper if you can use existing batteries. It’s also brighter on the road, despite using less power and giving out correspondingly fewer “headline” lumens.

Gratuitous Beam Shots

…are not to be found here.

Nobody online has managed to capture the difference between headlights in photo form meaningfully, in my opinion. I can’t see why I would be any different!

Interested readers could try Peter White (his photo makes the Cyo look much brighter than reality) or W.Scholten (this is an eDelux review, which produces a beam I can’t distinguish from my Cyo). The image below is from that review and comes closest to any I’ve found at representing the experience of riding with the Cyo:

Standlights

If you are powering the light by dynamo, you’ll notice when you stop that it immediately dims down to a sustainable brightness and maintains that for a few minutes.

I’ve timed central Edinburgh’s traffic lights geekily and the longest I’ve ever had to wait is less than half of the time the standlight will stay lit up, and it is lit up brighter than the average “be seen” battery light for that time.

If you were stuck for ages at a temporary set of lights or similar, and you aren’t sheltered by a vehicle waiting directly behind, it’s an easy matter to lift up the bars and spin the front wheel while straddling the bike – a few seconds is quite enough for a minute on standby.

Death By A Thousand Versions

More than any other bike light in the history of human endeavour, the IQ Cyo has a lot of alternative versions. Broadly speaking, you can choose from two primary lenses, the ‘R’ (nearfield) and ‘not R’ (normal). The former takes light away from the road far ahead to focus it just in front of your wheel, in case you are in the habit of riding around very slowly while admiring your front hub.

I strongly, strongly advise against buying an ‘R’ / nearfield version of this light. From the diagram, you can see that the area in contention is just 9 feet, and this distance will be covered in 0.5 seconds – even if you’re plodding along just above 10mph!

At a more whizzy 20mph, you’re giving up seeing down the road to be able to track an obstacle for the final 0.25 seconds, by which time it would be impossible to avoid it anyway!

See also this highly critical review.

 
On left, the odd “nearfield” R version. On right, the recommended ‘normal’ version.

All of this is to ignore the fact that the ordinary Cyo casts quite a lot of light on this part of the ground anyway – the much-quoted diagram above is rather misleading. It’s certainly enough to distinguish between the road and a pothole, for instance. It’s not a pool of inky darkness!

Either of these lens types can be combined with the optional ‘Senso’ feature. This is nice sounding in theory – the light turns on and off depending on the light levels – but in reality, it will only turn off in bright direct sunlight, so you’ll either select ‘on’ or ‘off’ modes and may as well save your cash and skip this extra.

There are also versions without an ‘N’ in the title – this means they have no switch and will be on all the time (if used with a hub dynamo), since they’re intended for use with a bottle dynamo that the rider flicks on and off manually. However, since the drag of a Cyo is not noticable outside of a laboratory, what this really means is that you can eliminate the only moving part and one of the main possible failure modes, all while saving money…

Finally in the alphabet soup are the latest ‘T’ versions, which bizarrely add extra complexity and potential failure modes by fastening a set of mini LED “daytime running lights” under the main reflector, the idea being that you can imitate a car (the light decides when it’s light enough to use the main light).

With the Cyo T, your bike can have the same naff DRL look as your car..?

However, unlike a car, which burns non-renewable fossil fuels to power 110W of headlights and so gets a significant saving from LED DRLs, there is no real advantage to separate DRLs on a bike light which, at worst, will cause you to be just slightly less obese in the very long term.

No, the main beam of the Cyo makes a very effective DRL as it is, especially if you nudge the light a little to apply the dazzling force just below the cutoff to whoever is unfortunate enough to be in front of you… evil.

My recommendation therefore is whichever is cheapest out of the “IQ Cyo Plus” and “IQ Cyo N Plus” (although if one of the others is on deep sale, go for it, these are differences of degree only!)

Competitors in brief

There are three competitors to the Cyo.

The Schmidt eDelux is a remanufactured Cyo with a much nicer case and a magnetic on-off switch. Better cooling offers the potential for slightly more brightness, but I have been unable to distinguish this in real life when riding with eDelux randonneurs. Costs £130, and you’re unlikely to ever find it on sale, unlike the Cyo, which is usually available somewhere at well under RRP.

Supernova make three dynamo models of their light – symmetrical and asymmetrical, plus a triple LED symmetrical (in case you really want aircraft to see you). They do look very nice but come in at £150-200. I’m not aware of having ridden beside one of these, so they may be brighter (as you’d hope, for the price of two Cyo’s and change!)

Philips make a dynamo light that has a reputation for noticeable extra brightness but awful reliability. They are priced competitively with the Cyo so this is unfortunate – perhaps later batches will be better?

]]> http://mccraw.co.uk/2012/iq-cyo-headlight/feed/ 0 http://mccraw.co.uk/2012/winterwear/ http://mccraw.co.uk/2012/winterwear/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:07:49 +0000 Dave http://mccraw.co.uk/?p=477

Luckily there was an easy solution to this problem, in the shape of a Thule 518 front-wheel-removed bike carrier that is more usually found on the roofrack:

I chose this over our “wheels stay on” racks just because it doesn’t project forward of the front mounting point, which would require a longer trailer hitch. It’s very solid, although I had to use a couple of small bits of wood to pad out the clamps.

Very rideable, but with quite a high centre of gravity I did manage to roll the trailer (!!) just outside the office – dropping off a high kerb at an angle and steering round the roundabout at the same time, the wheel that was last off the kerb bounced up again, and up.. and up… should have steered into the turn, but working out how to do that while staring over your shoulder is pretty difficult!

No harm done, and a good cautionary lesson learned on a quiet bit of road…

The other two bikes in my house have pretty conventional front hubs – one hydraulically braked Deore disc (on the hardtail) and a featherlight radially spoked carbon rim job (on the recumbent).

So, with the Sturmey Archer X-FDD – a 70mm drum brake / dynamo mash-up – I crossed into two unknown voids: the creation of light on demand, and all-weather braking that never needs adjustment.

Field test

To be fair, I was lucky enough to sell myself on this hub by trying one in the flesh – probably not an option for most people who are not lucky enough to live close to Laid Back Bikes in Edinburgh.

However, David at Laid-Back has a Paper Bicycle equipped with this very hub, and while that bike is certainly a more sedate sort of vehicle than the one I planned to build, a hub’s a hub and I cheerfully hopped on for a quick whizz round Marchmont one Saturday afternoon.

Image from Laid-Back-Bikes.co.uk

I was mainly keen to try the hub braking – if you pop on the internet and search for drum brakes, you will find a variety of opinions spanning the spectrum of “it sucks!” to “it’s great”, probably with a healthy bias towards the former. Happily, I disagree. The lever and brake feel is very different to an Avid Elixir hydraulic or a Dura-Ace dual caliper but I found the hub had a nice predictable bite-point and was easily modulated – it also slows me down just about as fast as I’m comfortable with on the road, and I’m no shrinking violet.

The real clincher came when I decided to turn on the lights. “Okay, so there’s no noticeable friction riding around like this, but I bet it will be a different story when I turn on the juice”. I was tickled pink when I realised that the lights had been on throughout the test ride and I really couldn’t tell the difference.

It’s all very well “knowing” that a dynamo slows you down, but if you can’t tell when you switch it on and off, what on earth is there to worry about?

Spec & Build

So, a couple of weeks later I was lacing a shiny new X-FDD into a front wheel for the urban utility weapons system that is the ‘White Fright’. The hub comes in 36h only, which is fine because if you’re putting together a wheel around a hub like this, there’s no plausible reason to care how many spokes it has.

Similarly, I can report that the hub is heavier than the hub on my carbon race wheel, while confirming that it is not significantly heavy if you are interested in what a drum/dynamo hub represents in the first place.

The one downside to running a hub brake is that you get this reaction arm sticking out of the brake plate, which needs to be secured to the fork leg. Proper forks would have a custom braze-on for this to slot into, but in the absence of this you need to make do with a jubilee clip. Not the prettiest, and adds a few seconds onto a wheel swap, but not much of an inconvenience.

I guess you could look upon it as an offset against never having to think about batteries for your bike ever again.

[edit Feb 1st] I was reminded by the good people of YACF that Sturmey provide a band-on for the reaction arm that lets you remove the wheel tool-free. I forgot all about this as it was hopelessly undersized to go around a modern fork – if you have one of the slender steel jobs though, this would be great.

Performance

I’ve now been running the X-FDD for a little over two months / 500 miles. In that time I haven’t really thought about it at all, and certainly haven’t adjusted it. When I get on my bike the lights come on, and when I pull the brake lever the brake slows me down.

It’s powerful enough that I have to be careful with the lever to avoid tearing out the studs from my Marathon Winter tyres, and I’ve also ridden with a gross weight of around 180kg (bike plus rider plus trailer plus 73kgs of wood), as reported elsewhere.

In my opinion it’s virtually flawless for its intended market. It cost less than a Deore front hub plus a replacement LiPo battery for my Ay-Up headlights. It will stop you without drama (in pouring rain) even if you are to bike maintenance what Philip Hammond is to transport policy. It will drive a blinding German dynamo headlight and accompanying tail-light without you being able to tell if it’s off or on.

Sure, it’s heavy, the laws of physics demand that the dynamo works by slowing you down and it’s a bit marmite in the looks department (I was unsure at first, but now love it!), but if you’re worrying about the weight or efficiency of something like this, you should either be completely reassured or give up the idea of a utility wheel completely, because you just don’t have the right frame of mind.

A real no-brainer in my opinion. I got mine from Derek Folgate at Old Bike Trader, who will be pleased to send one your way

If you don’t want to overlap the load bed at all you’re pretty limited. The secret in this case is to strap the leading edge onto the hitch arm, keeping it out of the way of the back wheel:

This prevents you getting more than half lock right, so if the load is fragile like coving, *watch out*.

I’ve been looking into getting an extended hitch from Nick at Carry Freedom. They cost £50 which is steep for a bit of bent aluminium square section, especially given that the stock trailer is so capable already.

One to think about. In the meantime, I made a small improvement to performance by greasing the bike hitch mount post. As the angle changes when I put the bike up on its stand, it was taking me a couple of seconds to work the elastomer free – not any more!

During a recent argument discussion about the cost/benefit analysis of a transport infrastructure project, the following question was asked of efforts to make cycling more attractive (at the apparent expense of driving):

“Does the benefit analysis take account of state revenue lost due to lack of car fuel tax and vehicle tax, corporation tax on oil companies, car manufacturers etc?”

On the face of it this sounds like a fair question. The Exchequer makes £0.80 for every litre of fuel, so if efforts to promote active travel succeed, and people stop driving hundreds or thousands of miles a year – doesn’t this represent a substantial loss to society, with everyone from 11 Downing Street to your local garage or AA man missing out?

Ironically this question was addressed by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 classic Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen). In it he discusses spending problems of the day cast in a very similar light – particularly the analogy of the shopkeeper with a vandalised window, who is reasurred “it’s for the best – otherwise think of all the glazing businesses that would go bust”.

Imagine that all across the country, broken windows are supporting a large and prosperous glazing industry; any change that results in fewer broken windows (whether that is stamping out kids throwing stones, or just inventing better glass that breaks less often) will put glaziers out of business, crippling the economy to one degree or another… right?

The point Bastiat makes – which is both simple and yet ignored in the modern media almost without exception – is that money not spent on glaziers (in our case, not spent on driving-related expenses) does not disappear into the void. Quite the contrary – he points out that if the window was not broken, the money would have gone to the shoemaker instead of the glazier, and it is a fallacy to judge the transaction as ‘lost’ as though the alternative to hiring a glazer is for the money to evaporate.

In the same way, every penny of money not spent on driving is recirculated into the economy in one way or another, and the Exchequer (and everyone else) is still taking their cut. Even if people took the savings they make not driving and banked it, the government still receives an enormous revenue from taxing the banks (even if we now own half of them – but that’s another story!)

Just as in the case of broken windows in the 19th century, driving in the 21st century (the sort of driving that is displaced by cycling, at least) represents a straightforward and almost total loss – the only advantage it has going for it is that it transports people from A to B, but other transport modes achieve this too, without many (or any) of the downsides. The sad reality is that it costs society just under 10p to subsidise every kilometer driven (after the 3p/km in taxes paid by the motorist is taken into account).

Unfortunately, precisely because driving involves such large costs, measures are generally taken which prioritize small improvements to the lot of motorists. Things are apparently better than they were in the 60s and 70s (the lost decades of short-sightedness) but there’s still such a long way to go before our public institutions can claim even to be in the same century as the infrastructure planners and policymakers of other European nations.

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—”It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

- Frédéric Bastiat, from Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (1850)

This is my Carry Freedom Y-frame with a startling 73KG of wood ready for drying and then to be put to good use…

The trailer itself was quite happy with 73KG (I can see it coping OK with the rated 90KG max, or even more) but the supplied velcro strap wasn’t really sufficient to control logs of this size – they really need to be secured at two points to prevent the load shifting over our crazily potholed streets!

With a low gear of ~39″ the White Fright was struggling to tow this kind of weight up from sea level, too – I was in bottom gear the whole time (and my hub gear was particularly stroppy with random ghost shifts and clunking to make matters worse!). A more sensible gear around 30″ would make it much lighter work – or ideally a recumbent trike, which can tow virtually any weight with style and panache…

Next up, a washing machine challenge across Edinburgh?

Much to the horror of the CTC, my subversive utility / commuter assassin bike doesn’t have a pannier rack. This is purely an aesthetic choice – with a hub dynamo, hub gears, chaincase and full mudguards it’s not exactly going to slow it down!

Nevertheless, as it is pretty important to be able to carry stuff on a utility bike, I decided to add either a bar bag or a basket. Honestly, I was thinking about a basket. The weatherproofing was the main thing…

So, there are all kinds of bar bags available but generally they are overengineered, with quick release systems that leave a huge baseplate on your handlebars. I also happened to own a Carradice Barley saddlebag which is tantalisingly close to what a nice commuter / utility bar bag might resemble, if it wasn’t for a couple of snags:

1. The bottom of the Barley sags, especially when empty, and this totally obscured my fork-crown mounted headlight.
2. Even if the bottom didn’t sag, the bag as a whole hangs just a little uncomfortably low if you simply strap it to the bars
3. If you figure out some way of holding it up between the bars, the side pockets (especially the side buckles) get in the way of your hands, especially on a 42cm bar.

As you can see, however, I managed to get around all of those.

First, I sewed a couple of thin strips of material into the base of the bag, and cut a little bit of wood (in imitation of the existing upper dowelling) to keep the empty bag at full width. Not pretty, but pretty functional.

Second, I wrapped a couple of cable ties around the stem and the bar straps in that kind of hard-to-describe loop which means they hold the bag up nicely between the grips (you can more or less see how this works in the second picture on the page).

Third, I took a short pair of scissors and cut off the side pockets / picked out the stitching. I’ve never used the side pockets anyway since the buckles are sufficiently fiddly that the separation convenience isn’t worth much over the time advantage of just sticking everything in the middle!

Voila. One more traditional yet subversive bike part to prowl the pathways with…

In terms of size and other practical stuff – it will take milk or bread but milk and bread together is starting to risk a bit of squashage. I keep my pump strapped to the dowel under the lid and other assorted tools in there full time, then pop clothes etc. in and out in one of those long-life carrier bags.

It doesn’t make any appreciable difference to the handling (it might, if you were transporting gold bullion).

I’ve now put a hair under 50 miles on my Carry Freedom Y-Frame trailer, so I thought it was about time to post a quick update on four-wheeled living since the introductory post.

1. Storage space required: negligible

It really does pack down very slim, and the best of it is that the wheels pop off at the press of a button – it’s not even as inconvenient as a conventional “quick” release.

No doubt some people haven’t the room for a Y-Frame, but nobody I know springs to mind. The trailer needs about 3″ of width against a wall somewhere, while the wheels, with axles removed, are around the same.

2. Awesome hitch is awesome

Let’s not kid about – it takes five seconds to hitch to the bike and less to remove, you have complete freedom to turn while riding, and if anything happens like your bike falling over, it just bends without damage or complaint.

Even more excellently, nothing more is involved in changing the hitch between bikes than unscrewing the axle nut / QR nut on that side, nothing to adjust or fiddle with.

In the picture below, my bike is leaning over further than can really be achieved while riding, just for illustration:

Note that I’ve mounted the hitch on the drive side of my hardtail, which has a couple of advantages:

• When walking on the left of the bike, you don’t hit your own legs on the towing arm. (You should always present the sharp and oily bits to a hostile world, rather than let them get a taste of your own flesh).
• The fitting is not as noticeable when the trailer is not being used, and would potentially save your mech if you came off.
• The towing arm is positioned out into traffic. This raises the possibility of fitting a light in a prominent position in the traffic stream.

However, I haven’t reversed the hitching post in the above photo, which means the trailer is resting on the retaining pin, rather than the hitch. The red elastomer should be on top, and the large nut hidden underneath (just in case anyone tries to imitate it literally…)

Unfortunately, my shiny new piece of urban transport weaponry doesn’t have enough axle thread to accommodate a right-hand fitting, so I’ve had to swing to the left for this bike. Happily, it’s just as easy to move the towing arm as it is to hitch and unhitch (in fact, it uses the exact same retaining pin).

3. Night time fail

One of the bigger annoyances is that the Y-Frame makes no provision for the use of a rear light, even though this is a UK legal requirement.

While working around this is not rocket science (if you use a regular box, for example, attach your light to that), it is frustrating to have loads of old red LED flashers, none of which can be used on the trailer by default. Strangely, the trailer does come equipped with double reflectors – although these are fixed too close to the trailing edge and can hit the ground when the trailer is unhitched – so it is obviously anticipated that you might want to transport things during the other six months of the year.

For the time being, I’ve just added two obnoxious ankle bands to the axle members. While you might not think these would be especially visible, for all but the last few yards of a motorist’s approach, they are actually annoyingly bright:

There is hope, as Nick Lobnitz commented on my earlier article “I’ve been working on a combination light mount/flag mount this summer, a few prototypes went out to customers and I’ll probably do a series production over the winter”.

Some might argue that a trailer which costs almost as much as an entry-level bike could come with a 1″ cylindrical light mounting point for no extra money, but with small volume stuff like this, a gradual iterative approach is probably fair enough.

4. Laterally stiff, vertically compliant.

You really can forget you’re riding with a trailer – that’s how nice it is. It affects the bike so little that I can still trackstand at red lights. Or at least, fail at it no more badly…

What about the weight though?

In a world where 50g saved from a groupset is worth £1000 or more to a keen cyclist, it will come as no surprise that hitching up 7000g of trailer, plus luggage, may have a noticeable impact on performance.

What is moderately surprising is how little the impact really is. On the flat, I have still been able to duel with my commuter peers, and on the hills, it seems to cost about 1 gear.

That makes intuitive sense, since total laden weight rises from 100kg to 107kg so speed up a given hill should be 1/1.07 = 93.5% of previous maximum. 9.35mph instead of 10mph (or 18.7mph instead of 20mph, if you’re a strong climber) is not terrible.

I’ve taken the Y-Frame, unladen, on the weekly circuits of Arthur’s Seat and while it was a bit of a sweat, it was doable…

5. Think of a huge amount of stuff. Now double it.

That, scientifically, is about how much stuff you can carry on a large Y-Frame. Can you even see the tiny bike at the front of this lot?

So far the heaviest load I’ve managed is 27.5kg (for a gross laden weight of 34.5kg). I had to climb a couple of gears lower, but it was no big deal.

Regarding stopping distance – you weigh as much as a cyclist 1 stone heavier who isn’t towing a trailer, plus however much your cargo weighs. If you’re an average 12 stone, you’ve got about 35kgs of cargo capacity before you weigh as much as a rugby player cycling to training. They just use ordinary brakes, so can you.

6. Cunning recycling and shopping tricks

The council sent us a couple of recycling boxes a year or two ago, but as far as I’m aware they’re never collected (or certainly not at the frequency we require). This led to many excess car trips to the local supermarket / recycling depot at Cameron Toll, often tempting me in for a snack…

Now, with the aid only of the velcro strap that comes with the trailer, I’ve discovered you can carry not only one Edinburgh Council standard recycling box, but two! This beefy loadout (paint and decorating materials for a bedroom plus most of a week’s shopping) is a good example – the boxes are just existing ones seeing a new lease of life, bonus.

On the shopping front, I have taken the trailer as a handcart into the local Sainsbury’s and into B&Q, by rotating the towing bar 90 degrees, so it sticks up as a kind of handle. But while it worked well for the latter, it wasn’t such a success at the regular supermarket aisles. Consider the small Y-frame if this is a priority.

However, the power of the Velcro strap means that you can just park the trailer (yes, someone could steal it. I’m not really worried) and fire the box into a shopping trolley. You use the shopping trolley to take the paid-for, repacked box out into the car park, lazy motorist style, then just fire the box back on the trailer. Takes about the same time as opening the boot…

7. Extreme traffic fear

Motorists are so well behaved that it’s almost worth towing full time. They hang back, they pass really wide – as well they might, with a tin-opener of a trailer heading for their paint work!

This isn’t because they love bicycle trailers, of course. If they became at all popular, you can be sure that prejudiced howls would appear in all the usual channels. It would still be lovely to ride on the road though, because of the physical reality of it:

Take that, status quo!

(Interested parties may wish to note that the trailer has now 1/15th paid for itself. I’ll keep you posted!)