bike slider
Thank you thank you thank you Far Out Ride for the plans for this bike slider. It’s been essential. I cannot imagine how jacked up our backs would be if we had to wrestle our bikes out of the back of the van, or how jacked up our bikes would be if we stored them outside. (We once saw van lifers with their bikes stored on the front of their rig, like on a bus. It was unspeakable. Like, do you enjoy scraping an inch of dead bug carcasses off your bike every time you want to use it?)
Bridget and Lucky in action.
Anyway, just a few words about our experience with the slider and what we’d do differently:
Use a hardwood — definitely harder than pine.
Consider reinforcing the mounts with metal brackets.
Use bolts rather than screws to attach the mounts.
Just a few images from the construction of the slider
Doug’s gonna elaborate on this. Take it away, babe:
Doug takes it away: The sliders were really sturdy, but upon the later stages of construction, I realized I had used quite a soft wood — pine.
This structure is going to take a lot of torsion. I mean, the bikes swing on it. They test its lateral strength every single time we take a turn. I saw evidence of this pretty quickly when I was first testing the bikes out after I put the mounts on the front. The wood was kind of waving.
So I knew I had to reinforce it with metal brackets. And it’s held up tremendously so far.
Bridget’s mount was screwed in so close to the edge of the slider that it moved enough to pull the threads out of the wood. Thankfully, I had saved as much space as I could by making the bike slider extend out over the floor a little bit — basically as close to the rear doors as I could get it. So I drilled holes straight through the bottom of the slider and then used bolts instead of screws. If it happens with Lucky, it’s fixable too — I could route out a half an inch in the bottom of the bike slider to account for the nut.
Happy biking!