My customers’ ingenuity has taught me not to to say, “I think you’ve mounted that upside down.”  Sam taught me that flipping over the side-mount kit “L” tube means that it won’t interfere with Catrike’s Arkel side bags, and it also saves tubing and by shortening the arm, makes for a stronger mount.  And Dave’s mounting his CURVE with the clamp mounts on the bottom part of the PVC base gave him more space to customize his neck rest, and also save a bit of tower tubing.

The experience with A.D. Carson’s TerraTrike CURVE kit turned seeming failure into friendship, was a great collaboration, produced a positive but totally unexpected solution, and has left me with enormous respect for his seemingly endless patience.  

I probably went about this project all wrong from the very start – the first thing I did was to embroider his logo on a neck rest cover, and because it turned out so nice it made giving up on being able to mount a CURVE kit on his trike nigh unthinkable.  It really looks good (the cover, that is.)  If I hadn’t done the cover first, and I’d asked the right questions  and looked more closely at the pictures he sent me I’d have said at the start there was no way we could fit a kit on his trike.  


TerraTrikes are enough of a challenge for me in their stock form – two small diameter side-by-side seat frame tubes instead of the single tube other manufacturers use means I can’t mount a simple mtb stem without some sort of adapter bracket to attach the stem to the seat.  To make the challenge even greater AD has a 26” rear wheel kit on his trike and his seat seriously reclined…the effect is that there really is no room between his seat back and fender.  But there was that beautiful embroidered neck rest…  So for weeks we exchanged drawings, measurements, crazy “what if…” ideas, and additional “try this” parts.  It was like illustrating a shop manual. 

It definitely helped that he was  so mellow…of course I don’t know what he was really thinking.  In the end it became abundantly clear that based upon the way he has his trike set up, there really is no way to mount a CURVE kit to the seat back.  This includes the adapter bracket and an extender plate I was sure would work. 

But that doesn't mean we failed.  We modified one of A.D.'s original ideas...one I'd rejected originally, and wound up mounting the adapter and extender underneath his rack.  This isn't something I intend to do again, but that neck rest embroidery is so nice...