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The 1980s-era Winchester Burley bicycle trailer I've been using for a few months finally packed it in today. A steel tube ripped. This steel tube was welded at a right-angle to both tube segments which held the wheel axles. It ripped just below the welded join with the axle tube for the left wheel. It took a good hour for the tube to rip all the way through. As the rip progressed there was less-and-less to hold the left wheel at a right-angle to the road surface; the loaded trailer box was pushing down, and the unbraced axle couldn't maintain a right-angle, and was hinging upwards, driving the top of the wheel towards the side of the trailer box.

The office chair "fix" that almost got me to the bottle depot

[caption id="attachment_4331" align="alignleft" width="257"] 1. office chair wheel holding trailer wheel away from trailer box as, 2. the rip, is pushing the wheel towards the box. At right, a close up of the office chair wheel.[/caption]



I found an office chair in a dumpster (lucky) and pulled off one of the swiveling plastic wheels (I should have grabbed two or three). I wedged the little plastic wheel between the trailer box and wheel. This goofiness allowed me to ride normally for a good distance -- about 3.8 kilometers -- getting me within about two blocks from the bottle depot. It actually began to melt from the friction!

Another, much handier bike-and-trailer binner tried to help me fix it enough to get to the depot, but it was hopeless -- the tube was completely ripped through by now, and nothing could hold the wheel away from the trailer box. I had to load the contents of the trailer, mostly bottles, and cans on the bike, and lock the trailer to a pole.

I binned for some years with just a bike, but a trailer has spoiled me. The repacked bottles filled one-and-a-half large construction-weight garbage bags. I wrestled the full bag onto the bicycle's back rack, and it was all but impossible to keep the front wheel on the ground. I didn't remember that problem from my pre-trailer binning days. Of course with a bike trailer I'm hauling much more weight. I finally sat the half-bag across the top bar sort of like saddle bags; this distributed the weight enough so the bike wouldn't teeter-totter.

After cashing in my bottles at the recycling depot, I made the two block journey to my storage locker, and retrieved the trailer frame-in-waiting. It's lucky I found it, and nice of the storage locker company to let me keep it in the back.

I thought it was steel, at first glance, but it's actually aluminum, but painted the same colour as the steel trailer it replaces. It's branded on the hitch arm, "Winchester Touring Designs." There's a very small amount of old info on the net about their steel-tubed trailers, which made me think the just-deceased trailer was a Winchester, but no, it was a 1980s Burley.

Prepping the new trailer

The trailer box came off the old-old Burley, and went on the new-old Winchester, which now looks just like the my two previous Burley trailers. Before the box went on, I had to do a few important things to get the Winchester ready:

1. Attach the Burley Classic Connector, now used on all four of my trailers.


2. Disassemble the double-tubed hitch arm, and move the reinforcing tube from the top to the bottom, so the box will lie flat on the frame.


3. Cut off the four corner perpendicular tubes which held the original canvas child enclosure in place. Again, this is so my box will lie flat on the frame.


4. Check and tighten every bolt.

I'll post a photo of the "new" finished trailer tomorrow. I still have to put on the Duro Fantasy tires. Should have done it today, but I'm plum tuckered. Click the images to enlarge them.