Thursday, September 21, 2006

TENT BICYCLE TRAILERS
Does Carry Freedom make any bicycle trailers that can fold out to become a sleeping area with a mini-tent attached that could sleep one person?

Its a common idea to make a trailer that can convert to being a tent, but to my knowledge none of these get beyond prototype stage. Carry Freedom has concepted out a few of these, but with no great enthusiasm.

There are a couple of reasons that a product such as this has never realy taken hold

1) Its expencive to build, and therefore expencive to buy.

2) The market for people who only use thier tent only when cycling alone is small.

3) There is no great advantage of using this type of product over a seperate tent and trailer.

The closest I can think of is the tent made by topeak which uses the bike to support it. This is a nicely engineered one person tent, but it is not very wind/waterproof and is heavier, slower to put up, and more expencive than good one person tents.

For example the two person Terra Nova tent I use is 2.2kg, and is suitable for use in wind speeds up to about 120mph, and it will keep all rain out no matter what. That and I can have it up(single handedly) in under a minuite. Also this tent comes with a full lifetime guarantee, and is rather nice to live in. By our estimate a single person trailer tent would weigh about 4kg more than this tent combined with our normal trailer, and it would cost about 200GBP more than a trailer/good tent combination.

When touring solo I tend to take a homemade Gortex bivibag (900grams)/sleeping bag combo, as this is reasonably hassle free. My main complaint of tents when touring are they are a sod to get dry the next day after condensation/rain, wheras a bivi bag tends to be less hassle.

I only really use my tent now for extended stays in the same place, ie for more than an overnight stop. All this said a Y-Large can make a good sleeping platform you make two plywood bases 60cm wide by 90cm long. These are hinged so they would create a 180cm by 60cm sleeping base. This hing point would also be where a number of support poles hinge about to create the structure to support the roof. The plywood would need to be drilled for lightness and ventilation, and you'd need some form of foam mat glued onto them for comfort.

This type of trailer pops up every now and again in Velovision they should be able to tell you whether there are any trailers of this type in existence just now.

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