After breaking One Less Ute in the expected way I decided to build something easier to ride and easier to store. Mostly that meant a little shorter and with the load behind the rider rather than in front. I thought a lot about building an 8- Freight style bike (excellent 8-freight review at VeloVision (pdf)) but decided that it would be longer than One Less Ute (to get heel clearance) and it would be harder to make a folding load platform and hence even harder to store and move.
So I settled on using standard-style racks over 406 wheels and
just live with having the load over the wheels. Having the load low
makes the bike easier to handle when loaded, but more difficult to
design. I ended up with something similar to the Kemper Lorri with some
Moz tweaks for more load carrying capacity.
Megan decided she probably wanted one too, so I wandered over to her place and we threw together a prototype using a BMX from The Bower. It only has one brake and is a bit flexible but it worked well enough to convince us to go to the next stage: A Plan!
(The 8-Freight is sold by BikeFix who have the stupid idea that if they stop people linking to their products people are more likely to buy them, so I can't give you a direct link.
Diary
- October we built a prototype, then bought the steel and got Ben at Trisled to get dropouts laser- cut and send us up a big box of bike bits. He bent up a bit of 16mm tube for the racks (nice, round bends because he has the gear) and turned some oversize head tubes (he has a lathe too).
- November... broke my collarbone
- July: decided I'm healed enough to work on the bike.
- 21 July 2006: Spent much of the weekend getting back into building bikes! Hooray! After a 6 month hiatus we can make the transition from "bought the steel" to "real progress". Megan is much happier. Anyway we finally started brazing so there's actual shapes to show for all the work to date (3 or 4 weekends of cutting and filing).
- Spend a weekend filing and cutting to get everything ready. Realise that the plan we have is not the plan we bought steel for. Fake it.
- weekend four: a little more filing, lots of brazing.
- weekend five: assembly and test riding
Pictures of the completed bike
Bringing my binbike home from the powder coaters on Megan's bike. This made it easy to explain what the frame was to people who were asking. 
Sealed tubes are a pain, because there's always a pinhole somewhere. Some coaters explain this at length, and I knew it. But I thought I could get away with it. Worse was that I'd put oil in this tube because it was drying very slowly after I washed the flux out of the frame. So the coating really died here. 
The other problem tube. Luckily they're small tubes and the cruddy bits face down so it's not obvious. I'll clean it up once I get some white paint. 
Siliding adjuster for the rear brake calliper doesn't work very well, it only has about 10mm before the calliper hits the dropouts. But it does help a bit. I can swap from the 38T to 42T chainrings just by sliding, which is useful. Note the slot for the Rohloff reaction arm too. 
Top of the stand. The block at the back holds the stand off the chain when it's up, and the beefy support is because that's the low point on the frame and i don't want it getting bent if I hit a bump. 
Stand: we tried a standard 2 leg stand but they poke down a very long way, they seem to be designed for much higher bottom brackets. Megan stuck with it but scrapes the stand on bumps so she's coming around to this idea. 
Ben customised the fork but welding a 400mm extra- thick steerer tube in place (2.4mm wall). You can see some of the welding here. The mudguard mount is my addition. 
The Rohloff rocks! But when people ask how much the bike is worth it does bump the numnbers (and lots of people ask). I'm sure someone else could build one of these around derailleur gears but I have a rohloff and I like it. So no derailleur hanger for me. 
This is what a bicycle towbar looks like. Remove the front wheel, put the quick release 9or a 10mm bolt) through here, drop the front fork in place. 
Voila! How to tow a bike with minimal hassle. 
And no load bike is complete without 10mm nuts to attach megatrailer with. Especially on the other side it's quite busy and much easier to have a separate towing point for my trailers. 
Drivers eye view. Note the braze-ons for attaching stuff to the bike, the "wings" are front light mounts and the wee 5mm brazeon is just in case I think of something later. A front pannier rack, perhaps. 
front disk caliper on the right side of the fork so the braking reaction force doesn't pull the front wheel out of the dropouts. Note the brake-ons so I could add lowriders if I really get carried away (for a total of 6 panniers plus racks :) 
The sticker on the top tube says "you don't have to f people over to survive". A LegoKid special.