Ooh, something new to look at! How fun!
It looks like a nice little cart for the money and I bet the horses enjoy it very much. Does the aluminum leave streaks? I've begun to hate that stuff in its unpainted state as I find black streaks all over my horses when I keep them in aluminum corral panels.
Don't know if there's a way to seal it so it doesn't do that or if you have to paint it or what....
Sue_C. said:
I do like that the driver's feet remain inside the shafts, as I feel they are safer there; less likely to get caught on a hazard/obstacle.
I can see where you'd worry about that. One TD brought that up in the early days of me using the Hyperbike and I couldn't fairly say she didn't have a point but I think of it a lot like driving my horse trailer- I always feel like there's this big wide thing behind me and I'm going to smack it on a mail box but have to remind myself that if the truck mirrors go through an opening, the trailer will.
If the opening is wide enough for the wheel base, I'm not going to clobber a stirrup on it and the stirrup does not stick out further than my horse's head turns when he's bending so I think it works a lot like the mirror that way.
Still, it could happen. What bothers me about roadster carts like this is that they are narrow and tall. Converted show carts aren't usually and this model really isn't bad but I've seen one wannabe-Hyperbike that someone had built for marathon that just made me cringe. It had brakes and marathon shafts and all sorts of nifty things but it was incredibly narrow, incredibly tall behind the horse, and you could not have paid me to drive it in a hazard. Sure enough she tried to make a sharp turn at the bottom of a steep hill, hit a rock or overshot or otherwise overbalanced and the vehicle flipped over and dumped her. The mare took off bucking, got a rear leg caught in the stirrups and shaft assembly and had to be wrestled to a stop on three legs by a large group of people. I have never seen anything so heartwrenching as watching her being led back to camp one painful step at a time, leg bandaged to the stifle and drugged against the pain by the onsite veterinarian. It made me really think about the fact we are truly putting our horses at risk in this sport, and how we owe them the safest equipment possible. (The Hyperbike, by the way, ate that hill for breakfast.
)
Breanna Sheahan (Minihgal) had a couple of neat little roadster carts she used on marathon before she switched to the Aerocrown and I thought those were nicely designed. Wide wheelbase, low to the ground, shafts curving up to the tugs, steel wheels...all the good things that make them safer and hard to tip but kept the stirrups and closed wheel assembly and such that make these carts you're showing so nice. I wish somebody would make more of those! They'd be great training carts and great for driven games like you show here.
The picture below shows that tendency for the inside wheel to get light on a turn, which is what I'd like to prevent.
Sue_C. said:
Thank you for sharing the cart, the pictures and the link, Sue. I'm going to add their company to the CDE4VSE website as a resource.
Leia
