Planning, Planning, Planning

Cart #1 on over night camp Cowan

Over the last few months its all been coming together.

I organised to meet up with Lucas Trihey at his house in the Blue mountains. Lucas has a great knowledge of desert walking , and has built up a company that looks after event safety and logistics.

We chatted for a couple of hours and decided I need to write up a risk assessment plan. We also discussed all things carts, axels, tyres , bearings, brakes harnesses, water ,food, nightwalking, distillation, blisters and everything in between.

I built cart number 1 from steel box section 25x25, bought some 29inch wheels and tyres on ebay, bought some aluminium scaffold for my draw bars and thought I would give it a crack up and down my drive way loaded with 100kg of water. Well going up was relatively easy , down was a little different , me 75gk cart 100plus kg wow I needed brakes. So my first attempt at brakes came in the form of your old school rim brakes but soon realised I need to go for disks. A little reinventing and I had a set of disk brakes controlled from make shift handle bars and brake levers from my old bike that I bought when I was 15.I borrowed a set of Large Marge rims and fitted tyre to these. For those who don’t know about FAT bikes these are a 100mm tyre they look like motor bike tyres(they look a bit silly really.)

Fat wheel this side and normal MTB farside

This s a great training cart heavy and very strong but not one to take across the desert.

After many sketches and conversations about which size aluminium to use I finally settle on 40mm round 3mm wall thickness T5. I have also decided to go with singles sided axles like those on a car or box trailer. 20mm thick axle.

The draw bars (really that’s the only way to describe them the things that I will hang onto to pull the cart across the desert) are 42mm 0.8mm wall T7 aircraft alloy super light and super strong. I purchased these from Moyes Hang gliders. These guys where great and gave me heaps of help. There work shop was a dream.(maybe next I might hanglide across the desert.)

One thing that has been on my mind constantly whilst planning the cart in my head was tyres and punctures. I had this idea to fill the tyres with a profile of EPDM rubber. So I made contact with a company in Brisbane called Trelleborg. I spoke with a really nice bloke called Victor who is doing every thing he can to find a product that will suffice.

Charging all the equipment along they way is also another small drama , I was unsure how to work out how many amp batteries I would need and only want to carry the minimum as weight is crucial. I drop in a spoke to the guy a Battery World Hornsby , these guys are fantastic and are working out all my power needs. At this stage it looks like it will be 2 solar panels, one on my backpack/harness and the other on the cart. (2 systems  2 batteries so if one breaks down you have the other)