The Zipsicle

Thought I’d check out how it pulls with the new swivel hitch. Wow! What a difference. Without the swivel hitch I had to force the bike into a turn and then had to force it back out of the turn. With the swivel hitch turning has become almost effortless again. I still feel the trailer back there but it’s no longer preventing the bike from leaning as required. Big difference. Here’s how everything looks all hooked up – notice we’re not real color coordinated. Probably won’t let us into the Country Club…

I took the seat off of the Goldwing and did some gel and foam mods to it this weekend. Here’s a web page I made showing in detail how to do this mod. I’m sure the general process would be applicable to many other bike seats as well:

http://www.zipsicle.com/wing/seatmod/wingseatmod.asp

Here’s an image:

Showing new memory foam on a GL 1800 stock seat

Tools required:

Narrow bladed screw driver
Wrenches to remove the seat
4 inch sander and disk
Very sharp knife or razor knife
Spray adhesive
Staple gun and small staples (1/8th inch)

Materials:
Memory foam – I used 1/2 inch thick foam
gel pad – I used 3/8ths inch thick gel pads

I cut a bit deep so I used three pieces of foam and two gel pads in my seat. Only things I might have done differently is cut a bit less deeply when removing the old seat foam. This would have saved a layer of foam and one gel pad. I also might have taken the top layer of new memory foam right out near the edge of the seat. All in all, though, I’m very happy with the change to my seat. It feels much nicer than my stock seat did and I’m glad that I did it.

Ride safe,
Zippo and jax

I loaded the trailer up with our new camping gear the other day and took it for a check ride to test it out and see how it was going to pull. I used a bathroom scale to weigh it first and found that it weighed about 220 pounds total with about 22 pounds on the tongue. Here’s a picture of it loaded. As you can see from the size of the sleeping bags, we are definitely not minimalists!:

There are a few more items that will go in the final load when we go camping but I think this is the majority of items we’ll be taking with us. I have read where a lot of other trailer pullers says that they hardly know the trailer is back there but that wasn’t the case for me. I found that it was more difficult to get the bike into a turn and took some extra effort with the trailer connected. Once it was in the turn it took more effort to increase or decrease the lean angle. I’ll need to do some more experimenting with various tongue weights and I’ve also ordered a swivel hitch which may also help to alleviate some of that issue. There are a lot of bikers towing trailers successfully so I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to do so, too…

Out first campout is scheduled for the Memorial Day weekend at the Red Bridge campground west of Granite Falls but I’m hoping we can get out once before then. Maybe run down to Ft. Ebey for a night…

Ride safe,
Zippo and Jax