Hello,

As is well known now, Babboe did a massive recall of its cargo bikes, especially of its two-wheelers (Mini and City).

For those with older bikes, though, Babboe offers so little money in exchange that people might want to keep it and just find a welder to solve the problem.

While the rear can easily be strengthened by welding a bar accross, what about the front? Can you think of a simple solution?

Thank you.

Where are they failing? The first image looks quite nice. The second a good example of why if you want to weld on a bike frame you need to use a TIG and have some practice with it

The problem is with the broken tube in the front of the bike.

What could a professional welder do?

It's steel FWIW.

Interesting that they didn't carry that keel reinforcement through further and it broke right at the front of it. Which to me is foreseeable.

A lot of front load cargo bikes have multiple tubes under the load, and they are bent and only join each other near the head tube. That's not an easy fix though. I would think about adding reinforcement to the sides that carry through to the head tube.

Or maybe carve the box and weld the same kind of "quarter circle" used by Bakfiets to reinforce the section near the bottom bracket?

Bakfiets has a half circle at the bend in the front?

This is all pretty hard to see because of the platform. It looks like the person that repaired the broken one in the OP put two keel plates further forward of the stock reinforcement.

Nope, they just use bigger pipes than Babboe.

In the bottom picture in the original message, the part was replaced by Babboe — reinforced section introduced circa 2018 — but that part isn't available to people who'd like to keep their older cargo bike for which Babboe offers a pitiful voucher… hence the inquiry to see if a welder could do some magic.

Their fix seems pretty reasonable, I would copy that, with mods as I will explain later. Joining the tube back together is going to take some thought, but wouldn't be too difficult for most people that can weld bicycle tubing. It would be nice to have the reinforcement laser cut, but I'm sure it would be more expedient to just bandsaw it. I would have it overlap the existing reinforcement. I'm not sure baboe isn't asking for problems with what they did. Again, it's possible I'm not fully understanding what they did from just one picture.

In the new part, they simply prolonged the gusset/keel:

There's your answer then-- a welder could easily just add that extra gusset.

It's that simple to do?

Yes doesn't look hard. Especially easy because in one of the shots it looked like that's just a regular mild steel ERW tube, probably about 1mm wall or greater. Much easier than quality thin-walled bicycle tubing. You could probably get away with MIG.

You also have to have something done about the tube being broken in half. But I also suggested copying what they did. I would make the gussets overlap though.

Those pictures were found on the web. I'm just wondering what could be done realistically for existing users who are stuck with a failure-prone older bike for which Babboe only offers very cheap vouchers to buy brand new bikes from them that might not correspond to what they want, eg. three-wheelers to replace a two-wheeler.

Weld on some of those gussets I reckon. Easier if it hasn't already broken. But check carefully for cracks. If you were feeling enterprising and knew someone with a plasma cutter you could sell a bunch of pre-made gussets plus instructions (and extensive disclaimers!) on eBay.