I literally learned how essential a center stand is shortly after I took this picture, which was my first Costco run with my longtail Big Fat Dummy.
I had upgraded the kickstand to the very beefy one PDW makes. I forget the name of it but if you google Portland Design Works you'll see it. Its a great stand but not good enough for a heavy cargo bike. I had no idea those 4 paks of soda totalled about 125 lbs of weight (after I survived the ride home I weighed a can and did some math).
For the Surly BFD and a number of other bikes, a company makes a stand known as a Rolling Jackass. Its the cat's meow as these things go, but it is colossally expensive. I modified my wideloaders - which use chrome steel marine railing elbow fittings - to T fittings to integrate a stand into the bike, using leftover tubing from the stand project. Additional cost was almost zero thanks to the leftovers situation. Here's what it looked like:
And it worked splendidly. Unfortunately you had to lift the front of the bike up and over onto it. Thats a task that got easier with practice, but its nowhere near as easy as a kickstand product made to raise and lower normally. After a few months, I bit the bullet and bought a Rolling Jackass and, like many other owners who use the thing across many different cargo bike models, I never regretted its convenience. Only its price.
I wrote up the kickstand build story, details and parts here in case anyone wants to try and do something similar. I still use the thing for a first-class work stand. The description of the wideloaders which this thing builds off of is described in a separate linked installment.
A whole page on a kickstand? For a bicycle? If you are riding a 100 lb freight train whose weight can quadruple when loaded up, there’s more to ponder over than you might expect.
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For my Mongoose Envoy mid-tail, a bike that has a different frame structure with a central, more conventional single-screw mount, an
Ursus Jumbo double leg kickstand is a common aftermarket buy. I didn't discover it but I was put onto it by the cargo bike community. You also see them as original equipment on a lot of manufactured cargo bikes. Amazingly, in 2023 they are only about 2/3 of the price I paid for mine in 2019.
The biggest deal about the Jumbo versus most center stands is its super-wide stance (the Envoy comes with a center stand, but its narrow footprint makes it very unstable). When I put on much bigger tires, I figured out how to extend the stand's length by about an inch. Its still in use today like this so its a permanent solution if its needed:
I had an aftermarket kickstand that was too short. Here’s a way to add a tough-as-shoe-leather extension that should last forever. My Mongoose Envoy received a much-needed upgrade to its kick…
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Something else that works for all center stands: You can use little furniture dolly thingies to make rolling the bike around a breeze. They let me get my bike into my at-work garage thru a twisty entrance that is a nightmare to get into without them. I have a pair in my garage at home as well.
If you can or must do a side stand, the king of the capacity wars is the Pletscher / Esge ebike rated stands. The Comp 18 Flex, the Comp 40 Flex or the Multi Flex. They have ratings of 50 kg which is an awful lot for a single kickstand. I use the Multi Flex on at least three different bikes that were my cargo bikes before I took the plunge and started building real ones.
