Little Tikes Push Car: Wheel Hack

My cousin and her husband hate me.** They bought Spawn a hot pink Little Tikes ultra-girl push car for Spawn’s first birthday. I call it the anti-feminist, engendered push car. One day, I put it together and we had a great time wheeling around the neighborhood. Spawn LOVES this push car. I mean, she will pull it out of the garage and sit in it, waiting for me to push her in it. She prefers the push car over our jogging stroller. WHUT.

Little Tikes Push Car: Wheel Hack

This photo was taken in 100-F weather. She would NOT leave the pushcar.

The problem with this Little Tikes Step 2 Buggy push car is that the wheels are plastic. We’ll push the car out and it just “thud thud thuds” along the sidewalk. It’s also loud because there is no shock absorption from wheel to sidewalk/asphalt. The Wife and I were concerned that Spawn was getting a crappy spinal workout from all that thudding and lack of shock absorption.

So we hacked the wheels.

What you might want handy:

• Drill and screws
• Scissors
• Tape measure
• Glue
• Safety gloves
• Screwdriver

1. Strip off your old bike tire from the tube. You just need the tire part. The Wife tried to use some kind of handled cutting thing. I’m not even sure what it was. It took forever. Then he tried using a pair of regular old scissors. They cut through the tire seamlessly. Duh.

Old bike tire.

Our bike tires were pretty nasty from not riding for so long. We rinsed them off before cutting them into pieces.

Clean your tire.

2. Cut the tire so that you can wrap it around the wheel as a guide. You can also use a tape measure to measure the circumference of the wheel and then cut your tire. I’m assuming that you’ve already taken the wheels out of the pushcar to do the rest of this hack.

Original wheel – close up.

3. Line up your tire around the wheel. Then slather glue to bind the tire to the plastic wheel. We didn’t have any fancy glue on-hand but we did have Gorilla Glue. So that’s what we used.

Use your drill and drillbit to create a few holes in the tire where you’ll be screwing in nails.

You should use safety gloves. Don’t follow The Wife’s footsteps.

4. Drill in the screw. We didn’t use any washers or nuts underneath. The plastic and the rubber held the screw pretty well. We screwed in 3 more screws in each wheel.

Screws

5. Re-assemble the wheels and axel back onto the push car.

Ready to ride.

Finished product.

Voila. The result is pretty neat. The wheels roll without a ton of noise. Spawn’s spine doesn’t seem to be shaking all over as we push the car.

Tell me – what’s your latest product hack? 

** No, they don’t. I’m being sarcastic.

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