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Multi-skilled home “handy ma’am” Jade Musther is looking to crowd-funding to help construct a unique car-less solution to get her philanthropic repair and construction collective Cahoots up and running in Wellington’s hilly suburbs.
Since 2021, Musther had been pedalling her e-bike towing a trailer full of tools and materials to get to jobs around the capital.
“I have a visual disability which means I’m not allowed to drive. I use the e-bike to get everywhere. I’m very much in that space of the bike being the norm, and I think that’s becoming more common, but there are areas where people hold out still or are unsure.
“‘Could I be a tradie with a bike. Is that possible?’. I think it is possible. The technology is still emerging, and that’s what we’re a part of, but we’re already showing that it’s possible.”
As demand for their services grew, she recognised the need for a more powerful tool to conserve her energy.
Cahoots "handy ma'am" Jade Musther. Photo / RNZ
The solution was to design and build an e-powered and independently braked trailer.
The trailer connects to Musther’s bike via a load cell that senses the forces acting on the towbar, sending that data through an algorithm which in turn controls the application of electric motors and disc brakes attached to the trailer’s rear wheels.
“I want to have a trailer which has a significant carrying capacity. The design is for a 250kg gross weight which should give us about a 200kg payload capacity that can get up and down the steep hills in Wellington safely and with just a bit more ease,” Musther said.
Cahoots, a non-profit, LGBTQIA+ friendly organisation, uses a sliding scale to make jobs more affordable for people with low incomes while better-off clients can pay towards supporting others.
Musther said some people were drawn to the initiative by the payment model while others chose Cahoots because it offered an alternative to the traditional masculine tradie experience.
“They may have dealt with regular tradies in the past and it’s not really their cup of tea. They don’t feel comfortable speaking up for themselves and saying ‘can we not do it that way’ because they have an experience of being made to feel silly or being spoken down to by the masc culture in the tradie space and, finally, you’ve got people who want to support queer tradies who have a hard time [in the industry].”
Juniper Bevensee said she arranged for a quote from Cahoots when a shared accessway to her flat was blocked by the new owners of a neighbouring property.
Despite being charged at the higher side of the scale, she said Musther’s quote for a 60-step staircase through the steep section turned out to be very competitive and her landlords quickly agreed to the project.
“The work was done in a week and it looks beautiful. It went from being a major emotional, depressive access issue to this kind of retreat. I just hang out on the steps. I set a hammock. I read graphic novels now in my own little private sanctuary and the landlords were totally happy with it,” Bevensee said.
Jade Musther is crowd-funding for an e-powered and independently braked trailer. Photo / RNZ
Musther’s influence had encouraged her to back herself and have a go with her own handy ma’am projects.
“Jade’s just like a genius and can do anything. She knows so much about so many different fields that when there’s a complex problem she’s able to approach it from different [angles] and can try to find an ideal way. When you’re talking to her about a problem you don’t feel condescended to. She explains things in a way that you can really understand, Bevensee said.
Musther hopes to raise $10,000 to fund the trailer’s construction. Local businesses and a Canadian e-motor manufacturer had already stepped up to provide discounts on the parts. She planned to keep the design open-sourced for others who might want to construct their own.
“There are people around me that say I should be making more of the fact that I’m doing something that has not been done before but it’s not strictly true. It has been done but it’s extremely rare,” she said.
“There’s a company in Germany that has made a handful of trailers but they won’t ship them outside Germany because they’re worried about liability issues overseas and not having the support network and things like that. It’s pretty unique.”
