Steady Ride Universal Thru Axle Kids/Cargo

The Steady Ride Universal Thru Axle Kids/Cargo is a Swiss-engineered solution for people who want to add a kickstand to their bike where none was provided for by the manufacturer, or it can be used to add trailer-towing capability. Or both. Once purchased, it’s easily and cheaply adaptable to different thread pitches and axle lengths should your needs change. Like most premium European-engineered and manufactured bike gear, the up-front cost isn’t for the faint of heart.

Kickstands

There are few hills I’m truly up for dying on, but kickstands on bikes is one of them. Every bike should have one – including UCI-weight-limit road bikes, as every cafe owner who’s ever had a cycling club arrive for coffee and cake will attest. Thirty years ago I had a car parking space replaced with a 10-bike stand, after the neighbour of our favourite Rotorua cafe, Zippy Central, complained about the raft of mountain bikes being leaned up against his lovely glass window after every group ride. The bike rack is still there – as is the problem of many bikes still being sold with no kickstand.

Kickstands make every bike ride better. No more lying your lovely bike down in the mud. No more risking damage to the mech or disc brake rotors from rocks or sticks. No hunting for a convenient tree or wall. No risk it’ll get gently nudged and fall, risking all sorts of damage. It’s also much easier to faff about delving into luggage with both hands free, not holding the bike upright. I get that a few people will baulk at the weight, or the look – but honestly, you are 0.00002% of the population. Everyone else wants a kickstand, even if they don’t know it.

Adding a kickstand

As a mechanic, adding a kickstand is one of my most-requested bike upgrades. When my wife needed a new mountain bike, ‘Does it have a kickstand?’ was pretty much the only question. This then influenced the decision to purchase a Mondraker Chaser with a solid rear triangle, so we could fit a Pletscher ‘Multi’ kickstand.

The Multi kickstand clamps to the chainstay just in front of the brake caliper, and then has an extension that clamps onto the seatstay, ensuring the kickstand can’t pivot under load. This need to clamp in two places limits bikes the Multi kickstand (or similar designs) can be fitted to. You can’t clamp carbon at all, and if your bike has suspension that pivots around the dropout, the clamping will restrict movement for a bit before the stand is ripped apart as the suspension articulates.

My Decathlon Stilus eMTB pivots at the dropout, so for years my wife has enjoyed the convenience of a kickstand whilst I’ve gone through several sets of grips from resting the bike on the ground as we stop for views or whatever.

A friend regularly tows two Labradors in a Thule trailer and the lack of a kickstand on his carbon Lapierre full-suspension eMTB makes the trailer on/off, dogs in/out process far more of a faff than it otherwise should be. Surely this is not beyond the wit of mankind.

Steady Ride Universal Thru Axle

Fortunately, following a Kickstarter-style launch in 2025, Swiss firm Steady Ride has solved the add-on kickstand problem – and for good measure it’s added the functionality of towing bike trailers to boot.

The core of the Steady Ride solution is a beautifully-machined and laser-etched 12mm alloy through axle, with an 8-point spline on the non-driveside end and a removable threaded section at the other. This is one of the first genius tricks of the Steady Ride axle: you take the universal axle and add the appropriate threaded section with the pitch and length to suit the bike you want to adapt. This means that if you purchase the axle kit for one bike, then a few years later end up with a new bike with a different thread pitch or axle length, you can purchase the appropriate adapter (€10) and swap it over. Or you may already have two (or more) bikes that you want to swap a kickstand or trailer-towing axle between, in which case you can again just buy the required adaptors.

Trailer

Towing a bike trailer usually involves adding a wee hitch plate to the back of your bike, pinned down by the through-axle, that you then connect the trailer arm to. This requires a special through axle that has a 10mm threaded section protruding from the non-drive side that the trailer hitch plate can be bolted to.

Thule will sell you an axle for £60 to suit their trailer hitches, but it lacks the kick stand functionality, and if you change bikes to a different thread pitch or length, you’ll need a whole new axle. The 10mm x 1.0mm thread stub at the non-driveside of the Steady Axle has plenty of room to accommodate the thickest of trailer hitch adapters and is rated to 80Kg tensile pull strength.

Kickstand

Kickstands need something pretty hefty to bolt to, and that comes in the form of a thick alloy L-shaped plate that locks nicely over the eight splines on the through axle, anchoring it in place with the same washers and 17mm nyloc nut that holds any trailer plate in place.

The L-plate has three holes, accommodating the 18 and 40mm standards for kickstand mounting. Steady Ride provides a number of bolts and nuts for fixing the kickstand to the L-plate, as well as a rubber bumper that screws onto the frontmost kickstand bolt, and sits up against the underneath of your chainstay to prevent the L-plate and axle rotating clockwise under load when the bike is parked.

Due to the nature of my bike’s dropouts I had to mount the kickstand on the outside of the L-plate with the bumper on the inside. Steady Ride’s installation YouTube Video shows it on the inside. Both ways work fine.

The lever arm potential of a long kickstand holding 25-30kg of bike upright is pretty hefty from the perspective of a 12mm axle typically specced to 10-12Nm tightness, so this anti-rotation stopper is a critical part of the design. It takes a bit of trial and error getting the spacing of the axle just right to remove the chance of the L-plate contacting your paintwork.

On my bike, the chainstay flares out from the dropout, necessitating adding a few of the provided spacers inside the through axle to effectively shift the whole setup outward by 5mm. I still had plenty of thread left at the other end, but if that outward packing meant you were compromising thread engagement at the drive side, you can just go for a longer threaded adaptor. If your bike’s non-driveside dropout exterior is cone-shaped, there’s a cone-shaped spacer provided for that.

Steady Ride sells threaded adaptors for 12mm x 1.0, 1.5 and 1.75mm pitches, as well as the 2 x 1.0 Mavic Speed Release thread. There are 30, 40, 50 and 60mm thread lengths available, so chances are you’ll be able to find one that works for your bike(s). They are colour-coded, so if you have different bikes, it should be easy to keep track of what goes where. The website has a configurator where you select your bike brand and model to arrive at the suggested combination, or you can do it manually if you know your axle dimensions or your bike isn’t listed.

In use, the Steady Ride axle works perfectly. The plate holds the kickstand solidly, there’s no noise or vibration, and it takes about 30 seconds with a 17mm spanner to remove or add the kickstand, still bolted to the L-plate.

Battering about some pretty rocky fast trails the kickstand did rotate a wee bit anticlockwise, but it can’t go more than about a quarter-turn before contacting the dropout again and stopping. Some trial-and-error got the torque sufficient to hold it steady even over very rough surfaces.

Racks

Once you have the Steady Ride axle in place, another option is the brand’s circa £30 Luggage Carrier Adaptors. These two curved stainless steel plates fit to the axle ends – one over the non-driveside 10mm thread, the other bolted into the end of the threaded section, using hefty M6 bolts. The adaptors then point upwards, ready to have the lower leg bracket of an alloy rear rack fitted to them, so if your bike lacks rear rack mounts (ie most carbon and many metal frames) or you’ve used them for fitting mudguards, you gain a solid rack mounting option.

Conclusion

If you use your bike for around-town jobs, commuting, the school run or whatever, but want to quickly remove the kickstand to make things as light and svelte as possible for a mountain bike or road ride, the Steady Ride axle is your solution. Likewise, if you have multiple bikes in your house and need to swap kickstand-required or trailer-towing functionality, it only takes a minute or two, even if you need to swap threads.

If you have bikes with different wheel sizes that will require different height stands, you can buy extra L-plates and rubber bumpers for around £30, preserving your investment in the axle and threaded sections without needing to faff swapping kickstands on or off the L-plate.

At circa £130 delivered from Europe (UK resellers are being sought) the Steady Ride axle is what fiscal boffins call ‘not cheap’. That said, the go-to aftermarket axle provider The Robert Axle Project charges from £75 per axle with no kickstand option, and you can’t swap threads.

The market opportunity here is driven by growth in utility cycling as well as older folks riding electric mountain bikes for the comfort, safety and performance benefits. If you want One Bike To Rule Them All, it’s likely to be a mid-drive electric mountain bike – comfortable, large tyres, powerful brakes, etc – but many models don’t come with kickstands, limiting urban or casual-ride utility. If that’s the sort of bike you own, and the Steady Ride axle will unlock kickstand and trailer-towing functionality, then the asking price is likely more acceptable. Given the importance of a reliable, strong axle in these use cases. (I can’t see much of an opportunity for knock-off copies to gain much traction. Why risk it to save a bit of cash?)

Steady Ride has come up with a beautifully engineered and executed solution that swaps quickly on, off or between bikes with different thread specifications. Your investment is therefore future-proof, and like other high-end cycling accessories should retain value in the second-hand market.