I first shared pictures of my Big Dummy’s two-bike fork-mount tow hitch in my Happy fourth birthday, Big Dummy! post last December. I’ve used it a lot and adore it. It’s made by Haulin’ Colin/Cyclefab and I hear he’s going to make more! …well, once I do some measuring of mine (tomorrow in the daylight, I promise!). I used it on Wednesday to pick up my road bike, repaired after having been hit by a car when a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend was riding it. (He’s fine! And only the front wheel of the bike was damaged.)
And hey, silver lining: the old wheel didn’t have overlapping spokes so I couldn’t fill it with spoke cards. New wheel is spoke-card compatible!
Dragging a 25-pound bike around is no big deal so I hauled it down to Mountaineers Books to pick up a box of Urban Cycling books for Saturday’s book reading at the Burien Library. Unhitching the bike only takes a couple more seconds than would lifting it out of the cargo bag so I locked up responsibly.
Pretty views by Harbor Island:
And while East Marginal Way South and Alaskan Way South can be pretty horrible on weekdays (I don’t think all the freight trucks operate on weekends, thankfully), the trucks were at a standstill in the center turning lane as I headed back north and only one car passed me in this long stretch. Many people ride on the sidewalk on the other side of the street here.
One more thing:
While my big kid was playing with circuits in an after-school engineering class, my little kid and I went to the grocery store. Three days in a row riding with just the little kid, how fun! We didn’t have a lot of time and decided my Straggler with Burley Piccolo trailer bike would be our fastest machine. He’s only been on the Piccolo once because we usually use it with our tandem bike and I stick his less-eager-to-pedal-hard brother back there and use the stronger kid as my tandem stoker. But even with him happily pedaling, this rig was heavy! Trailers and trailer bikes are awesome devices and I love that a regular bike can be made to carry a kid or two with them, but they’re not the easiest to lug around. Having all the weight on two wheels either in on-bike seats on regular bikes or with a cargo bike is just a lot easier in my experience.
30 Days of Biking stats:
April 26 miles: 23.8
April cumulative miles: 404.1
Family Ride 
Hi there. I use a Big Dummy to haul kids mostly, but I have three and would like to be able to have one out the back. Have you tried using the Haulin Colin fork mount tow bar as a tow along? Thanks for your blog — for the inspo and lots of excellent info on BD’s which is very hard to find elsewhere!
Dan
Hi Dan! My tow hitch isn’t designed for having the weight of a kid on the bike. I think Colin has designed things that do work that way, though. Colin has also made Burley Piccolo hitches for putting on the deck of a longtail…but the easiest/cheapest way to do that is for the bike owner to buy a whole Burley Moose Rack for Colin to cut up. I’ve also seen short posts mounted on the backs of longtail decks to attach seat-post-attaching trailer bikes to. Are you on Facebook? There’s an awesome group called I love my Surly Big (&Fat, & Easy) Dummy as well as quite a few cargo bike and family biker groups with people who have made lots of fun DIY things!