Transit to Trails
A roundup of trips reaching nature without a car, from Wisconsin to California
DIY Solar eTrike & Velomobile
From a modified boat trailer to a finished velomobile with solar panels on the way
This one’s more of a maker story than a travel story. The habit started back on our cross-country bike trip in 2021 and 2022, when we built our first solar charging tandem ebike from scratch out of parts and stubbornness, mostly because nothing off the shelf did what we needed it to do. Ever since then the pattern’s stayed pretty much the same: buy an ebike kit, bolt it onto whatever frame we’ve got lying around or find on the street, and see what fun thing comes out of it. What follows isn’t three separate builds so much as two: a standalone boat trailer project, and one trike that quietly turned into something else entirely partway through its life.
The boat trailer
We’d picked up a sailboat that came with a car trailer, which isn’t much use to two people who don’t own a car and have no intention of getting one. So we set out to convert it to work behind a bike instead. We already had an off-the-shelf tag-along kids’ bike trailer sitting around, one that had turned out to be too wobbly to actually pull our nieces and nephews around safely, and it turned out to be almost the perfect base for towing a boat instead of a toddler. The original boat trailer hitch had a huge, heavy steel bar bolted onto it that was completely unnecessary for the size of our boat. Turned out all it took to get it off was loosening a single bolt, no angle grinder required, which was almost disappointing after we’d mentally prepared for a bigger project than that.
That setup earned us a spot in what we like to call the Carry Shit Olympics, sailing plus cycling plus towing, all at once, exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. It turns out we didn’t even invent the name. There’s a real, semi-organized cargo bike event by that exact name up in Portland, started by a cargo bike evangelist who wanted something a little more relaxed and underground than the big disaster relief cargo bike trials. We like to think we’d have qualified. There weren’t any drivers stuck in traffic to impress with our sailboat rig, as it turns out, but we absolutely got looks, from drivers, from pedestrians, and especially from other boaters who clearly did not expect to see a sailboat go by under bike power.
The etrike, and where it actually came from
The etrike itself has a more specific origin than we usually admit. The idea came from The Sun Trip, a genuinely wild solar bike race that runs riders about 4,300 miles from Lyon, France down to Morocco and back, entirely on rider power and sunlight, no motor assist beyond what the panels themselves can push. Watching footage of that race, we noticed almost everyone competitive was on a recumbent trike rather than a two wheeled bike, and a big part of why clicked once we saw it: the solar panels double as a shade canopy over the rider, which matters a lot more on a multi-week desert crossing than it sounds like it would from Wisconsin.
Our etrike was built with that same logic, though it ended up being a bit of a jalopy compared to what actual Sun Trip riders show up with. Jalopy or not, it got us from Madison to the Energy Fair in just 8 hours, which felt like a real result until someone else at the fair mentioned they’d covered the same route in a similar time on a non-electric velomobile, no motor at all, just an efficient enclosed shape and their own legs. That one conversation rearranged how we thought about the whole project. If a fully human powered velomobile could match an electric trike over that kind of distance, the aerodynamics were doing more of the work than the motor was, and that realization is really what set up the next build.
The ride home was a lot less triumphant. The shifter caught on a screw sticking out of the hub motor and tore the rear derailleur clean off, which is about as bad a mechanical failure as you can have out on a rural road. We limped along on battery power alone as far as we could, but that drains a pack fast with no pedal assist backing it up, and eventually we had to call for a bailout, partner arriving in a borrowed car to come get a very tired, very annoyed rider off the side of the road. Between the tow and the repair, it turned into one of the more expensive mistakes of the whole project.
Same trike, new shell: the velomobile
The velomobile isn’t really a separate project at all. It’s the exact same trike from above, minus the solar shade canopy, with a found fuselage shell added on top instead, the one we happened to spot sitting on the street at the UW engineering campus. We did eventually get solar panels back onto it, chasing the same idea that started the whole thing, but the result was honestly a little sad looking in practice. We never figured out how to actually form the panels to the curve of the shell, so what we ended up with was a single flat panel just stuck to the top, which hurt the charging output and the aerodynamics at the same time, undoing a good chunk of the exact efficiency gain that inspired the build in the first place.
Update: this project stalled out for a while after we had a baby. Riding a solo enclosed vehicle stopped making sense once there wasn’t spare time or a spare set of hands for that kind of project, and it’s been sitting since. We still think about it. We just haven’t found the time to pick it back up yet.
If we ever do pick a version of this back up, the dream has shifted anyway. Solo velomobiles were a great way to spend an afternoon before there was a baby to haul around, but what we’re actually hopeful about now is something built for the whole family: a small solar powered camping wagon, a tiny hatchback towing a trailer, both roofs shingled in solar panels, with a standalone folding panel we could set up next to camp to feed back into the same system. Less about proving a point with one person pedaling and more about actually getting all three of us somewhere car-light instead of car-free, which honestly feels like the more useful goal at this stage of life anyway.
the dream: tiny hatchback, solar trailer, standalone foldout panel, all one system (concept sketch, not yet built)
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