Extrawheel Classic Single-Wheel Bicycle Trailer Review

Look­ing at get­ting an Extrawheel? The trailer reviewed here has been replaced by the improved Extrawheel Voy­ager and is no longer avail­able. Go and read the new review.

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, and I 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. 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.

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.

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.

Ride Earth Rat­ing: 4/5

Look­ing at get­ting an Extrawheel? The trailer reviewed here has been replaced by the improved Extrawheel Voy­ager and is no longer avail­able. Go and read the new review.

More inform­a­tion:

• Extrawheel English-language website
• Extrawheel online store

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