Extrawheel Classic Single-Wheel Bicycle Trailer Review

(Last updated 8th February 2010)

There are quite a few trailers on the market nowadays, but none seem to be able to shift BOB and his Yak and Ibex single-wheeled trailers from the top of the pile as the most well-known and popular models. But Polish engineers at Extrawheel might just have designed the trailer to topple it. Mark, who cycled with me for the first 2 months, used a BOB Ibex, andI was able to directly compare the designs. Although it looks odd at first glance, and takes a little more getting used to than the BOB when it comes to loading, I think the Extrawheel is superior, and I want to tell you why.

April 2009: Crossing the Sahara

But first, I want to dispel the negative impression about these trailers that you might have got from watching the Ride Earth podcast. Episode 5 (the latest episode at the time of writing) shows not one but two Extrawheel trailers failing early on in the trip.

Let’s put this into perspective. This episode featured events after just over a month on the road. It’s now over two years later, and I am still happily using an Extrawheel.

When we received the trailers, we loaded them up with all kinds of heavy, bulky stuff and set off to cycle round the world without taking them for a test run or checking that the weight of our luggage was within the rated capacity of our trailers and racks. Subsequently, we were too involved in adjusting to the new lifestyle to pay as much attention as we perhaps should have done to the bikes themselves. But we soon found that we’d done several things wrong, and that we needed to adjust our ’stuff’. We rearranged our baggage daily, went though a number of sets of handlebars and stems, and stopped every few minutes to adjust something… for weeks. You get the picture.

Andy’s trailer was heavily loaded. Too heavily, it turns out, as the seam of the trailer’s cover couldn’t take the pressure that was being exerted on it by the fibreglass rod. This flexible rod, that runs along the bottom edge of each side of the hood, had worked its way through the seam at the rear end on one side, and the structure lost some of its tension. This wasn’t a catastrophe – all that would have been needed to fix it was a sewing kit and a juducious removal of some of the weight to elsewhere on the bike (or into a parcel addressed to England).

My trailer was broken by hand, through human error, one evening in Austria when we had stopped to camp for the night. As we later discovered when we met Pawel, one of the team at Extrawheel, we had received two trailers from a small batch that contained fibreglass rods of inferior quality from a different supplier. When Extrawheel discovered this, they switched suppliers back.

As it happened, the rods hadn’t actually caused us any problems whilst riding. Only that evening was one of them was snapped whilst trying to disentangle a bungee cord in the dark – an accident that could have happened to anybody. I fixed the rod the following day by splinting it with a short length of aluminium tubing.

August 2007: Reaching the Danube

So these two problems with our trailers were basically our own fault alone, and not the fault of the design or manufacturing quality of the trailer. Now that our breakages have been properly explained, we’d like to talk about what makes the trailer a good solution for us as adventure cyclists, and why we’re still using them over 18 months after these initial teething problems. Used as they are now within their designed limits, they continue to perform just as they should.

March 2009: Riding the Nile Valley

There are several reasons you might initially want to take a trailer such as the Extrawheel. It reduces the weight and therefore the stress that your bike and components would otherwise experience. It enables you to carry more if you need to – the trailer can be loaded up with the extra food and water that would doubtless otherwise be added to the growing mountain on the top of your long-suffering rear rack.

What I like about the Extrawheel is that it’s full of incredibly innovative ideas, and they all work. Take a look at the fork attachment that connects the trailer to the rear axle of the bike. It doesn’t look too safe at a glance, does it? Well, the trailer has never disconnected at any speed on any roads or tracks, nor whilst mounting kerbs of various heights, nor whilst blasting down mountainsides on dirt tracks. Only once have I ever seen it disconnect, and that was when Andy let a teenager in Yerevan have a go on his bike. He circumnavigated the public area outside the Opera, whooping joyously before slamming the front brake on and flying over the handlebars, closely followed by the back of the bike. The trailer didn’t follow, having disconnected (as it is designed to do in case of a crash). We have no worries about the stability of the trailer’s attachment.

September 2007: Romania, testing an early prototype of the Extrawheel Voyager. (Minutes later, we were arrested.)

The bearing surfaces benefit from a quick wipe in the evening if it’s been a muddy day’s riding. The luggage itself is stowed in cargo nets on either side of the main body of the trailer. Extrawheel can supply big yellow canoeists’ drybags that are perfect for this purpose. (We also use a third bag to waterproof our rack-top luggage.) The nets are secured by a simple but clever drawstring system which is (again) unbelievably effective. Once you’ve got used to loading the bags into the nets, it’s a quick and simple process, and you can organise your luggage more efficiently with two bags rather than the BOB’s single carry-all.

I find that a cargo bungee linking the nets together over the top of the hood is a good idea if you’re carrying a smaller load, as the reduced volume of the nets in this case can cause the bags to hang lower than usual. With a normal-sized load, this isn’t necessary. It’s also important to check that the bags are oriented so that they hang horizontally – if they are pointing downwards at the front, you might find that they bounce a little close to the ground when traversing bumpy terrain.

The learning curve of loading the trailer soon becomes second nature, and then you can really see the benefits of the design. It’s extremely light, for one thing, and has a shoulder-strap so that you can sling it over your shoulder if you need to carry your bike and luggage anywhere. The drybags also have shoulder-straps for carrying by hand. The frame of the trailer is a steel construction, as is the attachment fork, and the supplied quick-release skewer comes with a rubber end-caps for when the trailer isn’t mounted.

The handling is something else. The Extrawheel tracks incredibly well behind the bike, even on high-speed descents. With my normal touring load, I don’t really notice it being there – it’s a lot less noticeable than Mark’s BOB, which imparted a very different feel to the handling of the bike with its higher centre of gravity. If it’s overloaded, of course, you can expect from the Extrawheel all the stability issues inherent in any single-wheeled trailer – that’s why it comes with a 30kg maximum load rating! (I try to keep my load well below that limit, with the weight distributed between my rear panniers and the trailer.) On technical terrain, the trailer really comes into its own, the 26-inch wheel bouncing easily over anything your bike can make it over, and the cargo nets adding an element of suspension to the luggage itself.

Let’s not forget that with a 26-inch wheel, taking an Extrawheel theoretically gives you all the spare parts you need for a complete wheel replacement (except for a rear freehub), so it probably makes sense to use the same wheelset for your trailer as for your bike. That also means you’ll only be carrying one set of wheel spares. Removing the wheel itself is a breeze – all you have to do it pop the flexible lower edges of the hood out of their retainers to access the dropout, and pop them back in again when you’re done. The trailer comes in 27- and 28-inch wheel sizes as well.

July 2007: Camping in Switzerland with the trailers

In the long term, the Extrawheel is just as susceptible to wear and tear as any other piece of touring equipment. In April 2009 in Ethiopia, I discovered that the bearing surfaces, which I had neglected to clean in the dusty conditions I’d been riding in for the previous months, had been wearing away at each other. The tipping point came when the ‘ball’ of the coupling on the trailer body wore through the ‘cup’ part of the coupling of the fork. I was able to continue for several hundred kilometres with the trailer in this condition, before having a machine shop in Yemen turn me a new pair of bearing cups for the fork, which solved the problem completely for five dollars.

This experience highlighted the fact that the fork attachment really does need to be cleaned regularly to avoid this kind of wear. Had I done so, I am sure that the parts would have lasted much longer.

In conclusion, the trailer has a number of innovative design features, organizational advantages and handling benefits that make it the Smart Car to the BOB trailer’s Volvo. It’s also considerably cheaper. If you’re going to use it, spend some time getting to know how to load it before you set off. If we’d done this, we could have saved ourselves the problems we encountered at the start of the trip.

P.S. Extrawheel have recently added a new trailer to their line-up – the Extrawheel Voyager. This was developed in conjunction with our road-testing of their early prototype models. We’re hoping to get our hands on the finished piece of kit for a future road-test – watch this space!

Ride Earth Rating: 4/5

More information:

• Extrawheel English-language website
• Extrawheel online store

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