Seat tube mounted rear child seat on a road bike?

kingofthetailwind

My son is about to turn one and I want to get him out on the bike.

I have two road bikes, neither with rack mounts. We've no room for a trailer and no room for any more bikes! So a seatpost-mounted rear seat seems to be the only option. Does anyone have any experience of riding a road bike with this kind of child seat? Will handling be badly affected? Would some old inner tube or something protect the frame from the clamp?

rafletcher

Yes the handling will go to hell, especially when your kid decides to lean/point to one side or the other! And the mounting is quite "springy" so you'll get him bouncing up and down too.

Garry H

Do you mean a seat tube mounted one? If so; used one on a cross bike ( with road tyres) and had no problems at all. You just need to remember that there's a child there!

kingofthetailwind

Yes I meant seat tube. Doh! (title corrected)

He's only one and slightly smaller than average (definitely a future climber) so I might give the seat a test ride with a bags of spuds!

Other option is to let my wife take him on the Bobbin Blackbird she's ordered. And when I'm out on my own with him take her bike and wear a disguise.

markopic

I'm using Thule child seat mounted on seat tube of my mountain bike. Seat instructions state that the seat can be fitted to road bike, although carbon frames are not supported.
I think that the handling is not a problem, especially for a kid of one. You should check if the seat mount fits the seat tube on your bike (seat mounts can be pretty large, there could be issues regarding frame clearance and cable routing).
I did not mount child seat on my road bike due to skinny tires (I'm riding road 35s on my mountain bike, only have 25s on road bikes) and riding position, but it can be done.
Also, you should consider road gearing, hope you have a compact, since it can become difficult to ride due to additional mass.

debeli

I did this many years ago on an old 531 steel road frame.

I used a turquoise Hamax child seat that attached to the seat tube and the seat stays.

Its main home was on a shopper with basket, but I bought a second set of mounts to put it on the 'road bike'.

I used it on the road bike very few times. It was wobbly, lurchy and hard to ride smoothly at slower traffic speeds. As I was carrying a binky-blinky little toddler (now a woman of 22 and a fierce and keen cyclist) I was slightly nervous about the bizarre changes to the handling of the bike. The pendulum effect of a toddler several centimetres above and behind the centre of the rear wheel brings a new vividness to the term 'fun and games'.

The frame is still in use (as a single-speed hack) and it still bears the scars of the teeth of the mounting clamps on the seat stays.

In brief: I wouldn't. It seems like a wonderful idea but it is not a happy compromise. On the basket-equipped shopper and (later) on a rigid-fork MTB, the seat was magnificent. On a road bike, it was twelve different flavours of poo.

kingofthetailwind

Thanks for the replies. I'll give it a test ride with some weights I have in the house.

term1te

I did it back in the day. I can't remember the brand of the seat, but it clamped to the seat tube and had some sort of quick release mechanism. It was a steel 531 frame and worked fine cycling around the Dordogne for a couple of weeks when my son was nearly three. It was also great for getting him to fall asleep, especially when he was younger. Five minutes into any ride and I'd feel a thud on by back as his head slumped forward. Just remember to adjust your cornering and braking, the bike felt very strange the first few time I went out with extra weight high up above the back wheel.

alex222

I limit the child seat to my MTB. My wife wouldn't let my son anywhere near my road bike with my history of falls.

backo

Have used a "wee ride" for both kids on both CX and MTB without issues, it bolts to the seat post and the top of the front fork.

Both kids love it as they can see where they are going and you also have added safety of naturally having your arms around them.

you do have to ride with your legs slightly bowed outwards but not a big issue.

Worth a look.

JoostG

In Holland all of us use child seats attached to the seat tube to move our young ones around. Keep in mind that most of us use a 'normal' city bike, but I have seen pictures of Nikki Terpstra with such a seat on his Venge....

Brands like Bobike, Yepp and Thule have them.

kingofthetailwind

[url=http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=19678191#p19678191]backo[/url] wrote:

Have used a "wee ride" for both kids on both CX and MTB without issues, it bolts to the seat post and the top of the front fork.

Both kids love it as they can see where they are going and you also have added safety of naturally having your arms around them.

you do have to ride with your legs slightly bowed outwards but not a big issue.

Worth a look.

Wee Rides look awesome. I had ruled it out as I thought it would be too wide for me to hold road bars, and the position on a road bike wouldn't be upright enough?

t4tomo

[url=http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=19678639#p19678639]KingOfTheTailwind[/url] wrote:

[url=http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=19678191#p19678191]backo[/url] wrote:

Have used a "wee ride" for both kids on both CX and MTB without issues, it bolts to the seat post and the top of the front fork.

Both kids love it as they can see where they are going and you also have added safety of naturally having your arms around them.

you do have to ride with your legs slightly bowed outwards but not a big issue.

Worth a look.

Wee Rides look awesome. I had ruled it out as I thought it would be too wide for me to hold road bars, and the position on a road bike wouldn't be upright enough?

yes any "between the arms" type seat wouldn't work on a road bike, you need wider bars and a more upright position of a mountain bike or a hybrid. I used one back in the day, much better place to position the extra weight from a handling point of view.

cyclingsheep

I've been using a Hamax Siesta with my two girls for three years, the advantage of this particular model is that when your child is sleeping you can recline the seat so their head isn't nodding forward into their lap. I initially used it on my MTB but didn't like the way it made the bike handle at all, as your weight is already quite upright having all that extra weight over the back made it feel terrible. When I moved it onto my ali CX bike I found it much better as your weight is already further forward. Yes if your child leans the opposite way to you into a corner it will feel odd but even an average bike handler should be able to cope with that. My youngest is now 21 months and she loves it, every time she sees my bike she gets all excited thinking we're going for a ride. As for damage to the frame, the clamp has an overlapping plastic sleeve and if the clamp is correctly tightened there should be no rubbing. I currently have 23mm road tyre on my CX bike and it handles fine. I use it to train with during the day when I have my youngest with me, obviously not intervals or anything but great for a bit of base work.

kingofthetailwind

Sounds like they work on some road/cx bikes and not on others. Different geometries I guess.

I've a new problem though. With it fitted the left arm of the seat is hitting the rear brake cable outer and barrel adjuster of the rear brake. Moving the clamp up or down the seat tube doesn't fix it. The compact frame of my Felt means the seat tube is quite short. Only way to fit it is with clamp rotated slightly which means the seat is off to one side by a few inches. Not going to do the handling much good! Might try and shorten the cable housing slightly as looks a bit long. I suspect it's not going to work though. A £30 Gumtree MTB may be a better option. I can just chain it to the wall in the front yard.

tangled_metal

I had a hybrid that the hamax siesta worked wonderfully on. I had to learn to high kick over the top of my toddler's head to get on as I could not get my leg over the crossbar. Get that manoeuvre wrong and you've just kicked your child in the head!!!

I then lost that bike to a tea-leaf and replaced it with a PX London road gravel bike. I have only tried it once on a trip with a trailer. When our lad got bored in the trailer we swapped the seat from my partner's MTB to mine and I tried it out with toddler. I got 20 yards down the cyclepath and only just managed to hold it together. I do not know what is wrong but I had towed an empty trailer with the child in the seat on my hybrid and it was ok. It was something to do with the only variable that was drastically different, the change in bike. The lad had put on a little weight but not enough to matter much.

I think it does depend on the bike, not sure what about the bike makes it work or not work but I have found that it works very well indeed on some bikes and doesn;t quite spectacularly on others. I would say try it out. Just be very careful because I found on my bike the handling was dangerous, not because of the child bouncing around but because of some kind of instability in the bike from raising the centre of gravity or some such reason. I reckon it felt like the problem you get with a so called tank slapper fall due to bike wobble at speed only it happened from set off and never got better with speed increase.

kingofthetailwind

This worked OK thankfully. Not ideal, but didn't feel dangerous in any way. I wouldn't want to be carrying a heavier 3 year old, but as long as you keep your centre of gravity low it's fine. ie DON'T STAND!