Stokes' ProjBlog

Kickin’ it February 18, 2012

The new Artisan’s Asylum space is big. Very big. 31,000 square feet big.

The space maintains a fleet of Razor^tm kick-scooters. In a space the size of Artisan’s Asylum, they are actually quite useful; the space is the width of two city blocks, and it can take several minutes to walk from one end to the other. A scooter can make it in half the time. The only problem with the scooters is that you really can’t carry much of anything on one. I decided to remedy that.

One of the scooters has a ‘basket’ on the front, made from a square nail bucket. It’s very handy, good for moving small tools from shop to shop, but you can’t carry anything much larger or heavier than that. I decided to build a trailer hitch and trailer for handling bulkier cargo.

The hitch consists of a pair of rails that clamp onto the sides of the scooter deck. The rails extend behind the scooter far enough to provide enough room to kick (the image to the left shows the hitch in its ‘retracted’ state). The eye bolt, the hitch proper, is level with the deck, so the scooter can bank when it turns.

The hitch itself came out well, but the trailer I built was just a proof-of-concept, thrown together from scraps of wood. It was far too heavy, and it had a tendency to bounce off the hitch and travel in straight lines when the scooter and I turned. I dismantled it within a couple of days. I plan to eventually build a ‘real’ version, probably from welded aluminum, with scooter wheels and a clip hook instead of a peg.