First-Impressions Review Of The Extrawheel Voyager

Dur­ing 2007 and 2008, Andy and I road-tested some pro­to­type trail­ers for the Pol­ish com­pany Extrawheel who have been help­ing to sup­port Ride Earth. Today we took the final pro­duc­tion ver­sion of the Extrawheel Voy­ager for a spin to see how it com­pared to those early models.

The Extrawheel Voy­ager is now being pro­duced along­side the ori­ginal Extrawheel Clas­sic, and is inten­ded to com­ple­ment rather than replace it. The designs appear sim­ilar – they use the same light­weight sprung fork attach­ment, and a sim­ilar steel frame with a single 26-inch wheel. Look­ing closer, how­ever, the dif­fer­ences are many – and most of them seem to be wel­come improvements.

Gone is the plastic and fab­ric hood and net sys­tem for car­ry­ing big dry-bags of lug­gage. In its place is thin carrier-style steel tubing for mount­ing pan­niers. The tubing has been rein­forced in all the right places too, after our test­ing showed that rest­ing the loaded trailer on the ground put pres­sure on the tubing in cer­tain places.

Unlike the pro­to­types, which car­ried four pan­niers each, the Voy­ager takes two pan­niers moun­ted slightly in front of the wheel axle. This means half the amount of metal in the frame, help­ing to make the Voy­ager the light­est single-wheel trailer on the mar­ket, and two full pan­niers are enough to take the trailer to its com­fort­able max­imum weight.

In effect, the Voy­ager gives you a free-floating pan­nier rack with its own wheel. The advant­ages of this need not be stressed – say good­bye to broken spokes, frames and rear car­ri­ers by mov­ing your heavy and bulky items onto the trailer. We’ll prob­ably use rear car­rier racks as well, in case we need to carry extra food and spares (extra capa­city is always handy). The hand­ling of the trailer is still second to none.

Large pan­niers instead of the Classic’s dry-bags makes access­ing your kit some­what easier, and the pan­nier sup­pli­ers Crosso have also improved on their pan­nier designs since 2007, fit­ting beefy mount­ing hooks and sup­ply­ing remov­able lids for extra rain pro­tec­tion and secur­ity. I can get my tent, sleep­ing bag and inflat­able mat­tress into one of these pan­niers with room to spare. The removal of the covered hood exposes the wheel and makes it much less of a tar­get for fly­ing children.

While many aspects of the Classic’s design were ingeni­ous, we found that in the long term, there were a few issues with dur­ab­il­ity and main­ten­ance. Spe­cific­ally, the nets and hoods were vul­ner­able to abra­sion and wear, and the integ­rated bear­ings were exposed to the ele­ments and very dif­fi­cult to replace.

Extrawheel have respon­ded to our cri­ti­cisms by mak­ing the bear­ing sur­faces replace­able – not likely to be an issue for most users, but in the long term this could be the dif­fer­ence between a visit to a work­shop and a visit to the dump­ster, and it’s cer­tainly an improve­ment that I am very happy to see.

From the build and fin­ish qual­ity and the mech­an­ical improve­ments, it’s clear that Extrawheel are ser­i­ous about com­pet­ing in the trailer mar­ket. The new Voy­ager is simple, effi­cient and rather beau­ti­ful. I’m look­ing for­ward to tak­ing it on the road with me next year, when I’ll have an extra per­son to carry kit for…

• Read more on Extrawheel’s website