Scooter Accessories

In an effort to make the scooter into a semi-useful vehicle, I built a set of attachments for it.  The first step was to make a fender for the rear wheel.  In the event of me riding through water, based on the angle between the back of the scooter frame and the top of the rear wheel, water flung off the back wheel could easily end up somewhere between the back of my shirt to the back of my head.

The fender was made from a long piece of approximately 3/8" square-ish aluminum bar left over from someone's water-jetted stock and a piece of 1/8" polycarbonate.  The aluminum was bent into an arc, the ends were filed to curves, and it was drilled through to attach the polycarbonate.  Two more holes were drilled and tapped into it, so that the fender could be bolted to the crosspiece from the rear suspension assembly.  The polycarbonate was scored and broken to size, since the MITERS bandsaw is currently out of commission.  The polycarbonate was drilled and tapped, and screwed to the fender's aluminum backbone.

The second addition was a a cargo rack, because trying to ride the scooter while carrying anything other than a backpack is pretty much impossible.  The cargo holder started out as a milk crate found inside a trashcan at the Stata Center loading dock.  I went to the loading dock looking specifically for a milk crate, and I actually found one.  It was magical.  Like the rest of the scooter, the cago holder had to be absurdly overbuilt and contain massive quantities of aluminum, so I made it from a 1' long segment of 6" x 4" rectangular aluminum tubing with 1/4" thick walls.  I shaped the tubing on a mill, using the small saw-blade-attachment-that-I-don't-know-the-name-of to slice off the extra metal.

The crate-holder is fastened to the back of the scooter using a system of cutouts that fit around bolt heads and two thumbscrews, so it can be easily added or removed.

The crate is clamped to the rest of the structure by an aluminum plate and four bolts:

Here you can see the attachment mechanism disengaged:

And here engaged.  Once the bolt heads are engaged, I simply screw in the hex cap bolt with my fingers.  It fits into the hollow space where the suspension pivots:

Everything assembled:

I've been told that my scooter needs a name, unless I want people to refer to it as just Ben-scooter.  No good names come to mind under the accepted nomenclature of "x-scooter", where "x" is a word that describes the scooter (a few examples are brick-scooter, melon-scooter, and pneu-scooter), so I'm open to suggestions.