Bike Month DIY: Xtracycle Running Board

We had a two nice days of Bike Month before the rain came. May is consistently wet on Tacoma, which can give you plenty of time for little maintenance tasks and bike projects.

Xtracycle now sells a nice pair of runningboards for $149, which are out-of-my-price-range and out-of-stock. So on a rainy Thursday, inspired by this photo by some folks at Clever Cycles, I started making a running board for my Xtracycle.

I used a wideloader as a frame.

I have a pair of these guys and rarely use them.  They are a bit wide for navigating sidewalks and bikeracks, and they get in the way of my small passengers doing running mounts/dismounts.  So I removed the spring pins with an old spoke, hacksawed 4" from each end, and drilled new holes for the pins.

While I was under the hood, I removed the broken Kickback plug and replaced it with a wine cork. I found out later that you only want to leave ~2mm of cork sticking out. This is too much:

[Not shown: biking to three hardware stores to find 3/4" P-clamps. WTF? - MN]

I shellacked and old flooring board that I found in my basement, drilled and clamped. Those are cut-up road tubes under the clamps.

Mounted:

I decided to only mount a running board on the drive side for a multitude of reasons: kids climb aboard curb-side, protects derailleur, I push-off with my left foot and it would sometimes get caught under the Wideloader, and one platform seemed like enough.

The Snapdeck and handlebars also received a fresh coat of shellack whilst I had it out. Now I'm ready for more rain!

[I finished this on Friday night, right after receiving an email from Xtracycle stating that their Running Boards will be back in stock next week. FYI. - MN.]