World’s Best DIY Bike Cargo Trailer

Reader Contribution by Kyle Chandler-Isacksen and Be The Change Project
Published on May 16, 2016
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Kyle Chandler-Isacksen

I built a fabulous, DIY bike cargo trailer that smoothly hauls loads of up to 300 pounds. Spend about 10 hours and $250 to build your own.

For the past 7 months, I have been collecting food waste from Reno restaurants by bike and trailer which then gets turned into compost at local gardens.  The Reno Rot Riders, our name for this effort, has so far been a great success and a lot of fun.

Not a day goes by during my pick-ups when I don’t get a thumbs-up, a “thank you” from across the road, or questions from interested passersby. Most of the questions have been about the first trailer I built – a very functional though cumbersome contraption I put together at the Generator, a Reno makerspace which evolved out of the annual Burning Man festival just to our north.

First Attempt Building a DIY Bike Cargo Trailer

I am not a welder, so for the first trailer, I used a salvaged steel rectangle for a base, ¾-inch conduit for the tongue and wheel wells, 20-inch bike tires, and a lot of wood for the frame. The wood was fence slats painted school-bus yellow, which I salvaged from someone’s Burning Man camp. All of this was attached using lots of bolts and lock nuts.

It could carry two full bins of food waste (we use these nifty 21 gallon bins with wheels) and got the job done transporting over 13,000 pounds of food waste in 6 months.

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