ExIT Shoes

Make an Xtracycle Pad

by jeff

July 11th, 2008

Ok, after many hours of editing, the first amateur how-to video co-production between Jeff Mandel of ExIT Shoes and Matt Menely of Mountain Soles is ready for viewing!

In this video we present how to make a pad for an Xtracycle. It’s basically a fabric slip or box cushion, wtih elastic straps to hold it to the Xtracycle Snap-Deck. I got the idea from a pad I tested from Clever Cycles. The first run of those had some room for improvement in the padding. I believe the maker of those pads may incorporate my suggestion for some more robust padding.

Whether you want to buy one or make your own, you may be interested to see how we made ours. There are a lot of design possibilities here. Let us know what you think.

Materials: Fabric and or leather for top, bottom and sidewall. Elastic, closed cell foam, contact cement and (optional) zipper. You can recycle jackets for good outdoor fabric and camping pads for closed cell foam.

Tools: Single edge razor blade or box knife, rotary cutters or scissors. Sewing machine.

This assumes some basic sewing skills and if you want to put in a zipper, it does not contain all the info really needed to face the zipper to match the material. We left that as an excercise for the viewer!

The movie!

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Click on the picture to start the download of the movie. It’s 15MB and about 10 minutes. The video can be slow to load with no visible progress until it’s done, but hang in there. I don’t have the friendliest player interface, but it’s late on Friday and I just wanted to get it out there so people could make some pads on the weekend if they had time.

I think this will be one of the hottest movies of the summer! We’ll get a copy of this on Matt’s Mountain Soles site ASAP.

Make an Xtracycle Pad by
Jeff Mandel and Matt Menely is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.