Bob Yak Trailer

The B.O.B. (Beast Of Burden) Yak trailer, does what it says on the tin – carries loads of your stuff and just gets on with it, never complains, and never misbehaves.  At least, that’s been our experience since we attached it to our Pino tandem, over 10,oookms ago, in July 2011.

The manufacturers give it a capacity limit of 32kgs, but we may have exceeded that once or twice and they also say that it shouldn’t be taken above 40kph, and I think we may have exceeded that too perhaps just once or twice, but it has handled perfectly despite how we’ve treated it.

Compared to the Extrawheel trailer which weighs less than 4kg, the Bob Yak is a hefty 6.1kg.  This was one of the reasons why we didn’t buy it at first, however it behaves faultlessly and has carried our kit, over good roads and bad, without complaint.  In 2011 we covered about 6000kms with the Bob, from Poland (where we gave up on the Extrawheel, our first choice of trailer) through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and into Russia.  Now in 2012, so far (as at early August) we’ve covered nearly 6000kms and it tracks behind us as good as the day it was new.

During the course of our 2012 trip, we have made a few tweaks to the Bob Yak.

• First tweak was to construct a new tube for the warning flag-pole, so that the flag could be mounted as far back as possible to allow space for our solar-panel.  The sturdy metal support for the back of the mud-guard (fender in manufacturer’s language) proved an excellent place to tape on a carefully sculpted tube (made from a plastic beer-bottle & duck-tape).
• Next, was the addition of 2 standard bottle-cages for carrying some extra water and these were first attached to the rear of the frame, on the bosses provided by the manufacturer, but then moved to the sides of the trailer to allow for the next tweak.
  

  New carefully constructed shelves for securing extra water

• Carrying enough water on our tandem, in the hot summer sun, is often a problem.  Last year, we tried just strapping big bottles of water on, but they fell off more than once.  So this year, we’ve constructed two shelves right beside the trailer wheel, where we can strap on one or two large 5 or 6 litre water bottles, one on either side.  By carrying the load so far back, it keeps as much of the weight as possible off the tandem back wheel (tandem’s weakest point) and doesn’t affect the trailer handling at all.  The shelves were made from some (probably) 1mm thick sheet metal (possibly galvanised tin) that we found on the roadside just before getting to Moscow, and some tools borrowed from our hosts during our stay there.  The extra capacity has already proved very useful as in some of the parts of Russia that we’ve already covered, we can travel for a full day without passing a shop and we are consuming about 6 to 8 litres of water each day.
• 

  Carefully sculpted spare bit of wood-effect vinyl – just what every trailer needs!

  Last tweak, is an extended mud-flap, to stop the trailer and the trailer bag becoming destroyed with mud and road-grit when it rains.  A bit of old floor vinyl and some wire ties to attach it have proved very successful, and the vinyl can cope with being squashed for a while when the trailer is off the bike and just resting on the ground.

Reversing the trailer to park it is a bit of a knack, but easily acquired. The advantage of the Bob’s long wheelbase is that you can go back in a straight line more easily than with the Extrawheel trailer, but if you want to reverse round a corner, the Bob takes a bit more encouragement to take the turn.

The big bag is surprisingly easy to pack and keep organised. We had initially feared that smaller items would get lost in it, but if packed carefully then things stay in place on the flat base-plate and we quickly got into a routine of packing items in the same place each day.

One minor niggle is that the 16″ wheel means we’re now carrying spares for 3 different size wheels (20″ front and 26″ rear on the tandem plus the 16″ on the trailer), and it’s hard to find good quality tyres for 16″ wheels so we do get a few more punctures than we’d like.

We also had a bit of a problem related to the horizontal drop-outs. We’d picked up a puncture in a Ukrainian city and some helpful local cyclists insisted on helping us fix it. We were surrounded by about 20 people, and simultaneously trying to keep an eye on our kit, answer questions about our travels and keep watch on the guys who’d insisted on helpfully fixing our puncture. We should have checked their work, but after an enjoyable and lengthy amount of chit-chat we failed to do so. The local cyclists escorted us out of town and we said our goodbyes and pedalled off on a busy, bumpy road. We’d gone hardly any distance when the wheel parted company with the trailer and rolled off into two lanes of traffic. We managed to rescue it before it was run over by a lorry, but the mudguard is now irredeemably bent, and it was definitely a lesson in not letting anyone else help you with mechanicals…or at least to check they’ve done the quick-release skewer up sufficiently tight yourself after they’ve finished. But if the dropouts were vertical there would have been less chance of the wheel falling out at all.

The bag is starting to wear a bit thin in a couple of places after 10,000kms of use, so it may need some repair work quite soon, so we must constantly be careful not to pack items with sharp or even rigid edges close to the outside of the bag, and don’t have anything sharp rubbing on the outside either.

Niggles aside, we’re really pleased with the Bob and would happily recommend it to anybody, but owing to the many bumpy roads that we find when travelling, I sometimes wish that we had bought the BOB Ibex – same trailer, just with suspension, and thus a bit heavier.