The Engineer is Still at Work

On Monday, we moved to Oscar Scherer State Park that is located on the gulf side south of Sarasota. We've been to this park several times before — one of the reasons we like it is that the paved Legacy Bike Trail runs right through the park.

For this trip, Greg worked on the second iteration of the bike trailer. He made it bigger and used a different design — one that could more easily be taken apart and folded down.

He was excited about his design using carbon fiber hockey sticks as the frame underneath the crate. And he created a two-piece arm that connected the bike to the trailer.

Upon beta testing the trailer on several trails, the engineer has learned that there are some design flaws, particularly in the arm. He has made three different redesign attempts on the arm to stiffen the attachment point, but it continues to fail when the trailer is loaded with weight due to the stress.

We did test the third fix by riding to the Nakomis Beach which is about a 12-mile round trip.

We had some periods of sun in between periods of "sea fog."

When we got to the beach, it was clear that we had more "spring break" activity than last week. We saw a mixture of families with younger children and college students. It was a nice afternoon reading, people watching, and watching the waves crash.

We made it home without a total failure of the arm attachment point. However, the plan is to ride to Venice tomorrow (without the trailer) to a hardware store. The engineer has "another fix" in mind for the remainder of our trip. And he has decided that he will go back to his original design for future bike trailers.