The best family bike ever made? The WorkCycles Fr8 (pr. ‘Freight’) is a modular, heavy-duty transport bike, designed and built by the WorkCycles team in Amsterdam. As a family bike, the Fr8 is truly outstanding; designed from the tyres up to deal with the demands of parents, the safety of children, and the rigours of daily life. Thoughtful features like the frame’s Adaptive Seat Tube mean that the same bike can be easily adjusted to fit riders from 160cm right up to 200cm. This is ideal when sharing between riders of different heights, as it is a truly universal frame geometry. In the cockpit, there’s plenty of knee-room for peddling, even if the bike is fitted with a front child seat. By adding a front rack, the Fr8’s cargo capacity essentially doubles, and you’ll wonder how you lived without it. Advantages

• Frame mounted front rack can cope with exceptionally heavy loads
• Special adaptations mean the WorkCycles Fr8 can carry up to three children
• Wide bi-pod kickstand means the bike is always stable when loading and unloading
• Low and central centre of mass results in excellent handling
• Step-through frame for easy mounting
• Highest-quality components used throughout
• Unparalleled build-quality, genius design, and legendary reliability

   

 

Equipping the WorkCycles Fr8 family bike with a long rear rack means that it can accommodate up to three children, or two children and a set of panniers. If you need to carry more stuff, just add a city front carrier and essentially double the amount of cargo you can carry – the Fr8 has a total load capacity of 250kg, so you don’t exactly have to worry about overloading it! Comfortably carrying 3 children + cargo is a pretty incredible feat for a bike with the same overall length as your average hybrid, road bike, or mountain bike, and this should give you an idea of why we venerate the Fr8 so much at Flying Dutchman.

One particularly nifty WorkCycles feature is the ingenious ‘Escape Hatch’, which make it easy to replace things like the rear tyre, inner tube, or rollerbrake without opening the chaincase or having to adjusting any of the Fr8’s more fiddly parts. Moreover, the enclosed gears, brakes, and drivetrain keep all of the bike’s more sensitive components totally protected from the weather, meaning that you can more or less forget about maintenance and just enjoy years of reliable service.

Short of going the whole hog and getting a bakfiets, the WorkCycles Fr8 is pretty much as good as it gets in the world of family bikes. From the rust protected 4130 chromoly frame, to the specially made wheels and super fat tyres, this bike is certifiably bomb-proof. In our experience, there really is nothing even close to as tough as the WorkCycles Fr8 family bike, and nothing that handles heavy loads quite so confidently.

The Fr8 is one of our most versatile bikes, and more information about its many distinctive features and applications can be found on the WorkCycles blog.