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#11
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BikeE?
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#12
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BikeE?
Chalo wrote:
.... It is reliable in that you know with absolute certainty that you are completely hosed if your hands leave the grips for a fraction of a second. That much I know from trying to make a BikeE CT my around- town transportation during my first stay in Seattle. .... Chalo I'd agree that most recumbents have poor steering that is impractical to ride no-handed--but then again--with no hand pressure to cause hand numbness, there's not a lot of reason to ride no-handed either. ~ |
#13
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BikeE?
Chalo Colina wrote:
[...] The BikeE is violently unstable. Its front end has an intrinsic tendency to whip to the side and dig in at an oblique angle from the direction of travel. If this were allowed to happen at speed, it inevitably would result in a crash. The range of steering angle within which it does not try to flop the front wheel one way or the other is so narrow as to be like balancing on a knife edge. Increasing speed does not have a pronounced stabilizing effect on the BikeE as it usually does on a poorly configured, unstable but otherwise normal bike.[...] This does not describe the handling of any of the several BikeE models I have ridden, but then I am not 2 meters tall, nor do I have a mass of ca. 170 kg. I believe that Chalo was both too tall and too heavy for the BikeE CT. -- Tom Sherman - Holstein-Friesland Bovinia “Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.” |
#14
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BikeE?
Tom Sherman wrote:
Chalo Colina wrote: [...] The BikeE is violently unstable. *Its front end has an intrinsic tendency to whip to the side and dig in at an oblique angle from the direction of travel. *If this were allowed to happen at speed, it inevitably would result in a crash. *The range of steering angle within which it does not try to flop the front wheel one way or the other is so narrow as to be like balancing on a knife edge. Increasing speed does not have a pronounced stabilizing effect on the BikeE as it usually does on a poorly configured, unstable but otherwise normal bike.[...] This does not describe the handling of any of the several BikeE models I have ridden, but then I am not 2 meters tall, nor do I have a mass of ca. 170 kg. I believe that Chalo was both too tall and too heavy for the BikeE CT. For what it's worth, the reason I rented a BikeE during my trial visit to Seattle was because it was the only rental bike that could be adjusted to fit me correctly (correctly being a relative term in this case). The resulting weight distribution may have been a factor in the bike's handling, but it was within the bike's design limits. I suggest that you may have accustomed yourself to the compromised handling that is typical of recumbent bikes. In my chopper bike club in Seattle, there were a few members who were known to be able to ride bikes that could not generally be tamed by the rest of us. When queried about how they did it, they would say things like "you gotta get your weight back and go real easy on the handlebars", or some variation thereof. Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly the same advice I have heard from recumbent riders when they offer their wisdom about keeping the rubber side down. _Somebody_ can ride just about any ill-tempered bike, no matter how nasty its disposition. Why they'd want to is an altogether different matter. Chalo |
#15
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BikeE?
DougC wrote:
Chalo wrote: .... It is reliable in that you know with absolute certainty that you are completely hosed if your hands leave the grips for a fraction of a second. That much I know from trying to make a BikeE CT my around- town transportation during my first stay in Seattle. .... Chalo I'd agree that most recumbents have poor steering that is impractical to ride no-handed--but then again--with no hand pressure to cause hand numbness, there's not a lot of reason to ride no-handed either. Cruzbike works with no hands. Even take off. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQrgZCXedK0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiOVIVIGBVA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P17maWic4tA The last one shows turning in circles with no hands. But as all bike designs, cruzbike makes some other tradeoffs to their design. Just like BikeE did. You cant get everything. |
#16
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BikeE?
"Chalo" wrote in message ... Tom Sherman wrote: Chalo Colina wrote: [...] The BikeE is violently unstable. Its front end has an intrinsic tendency to whip to the side and dig in at an oblique angle from the direction of travel. If this were allowed to happen at speed, it inevitably would result in a crash. The range of steering angle within which it does not try to flop the front wheel one way or the other is so narrow as to be like balancing on a knife edge. Increasing speed does not have a pronounced stabilizing effect on the BikeE as it usually does on a poorly configured, unstable but otherwise normal bike.[...] This does not describe the handling of any of the several BikeE models I have ridden, but then I am not 2 meters tall, nor do I have a mass of ca. 170 kg. I believe that Chalo was both too tall and too heavy for the BikeE CT. For what it's worth, the reason I rented a BikeE during my trial visit to Seattle was because it was the only rental bike that could be adjusted to fit me correctly (correctly being a relative term in this case). The resulting weight distribution may have been a factor in the bike's handling, but it was within the bike's design limits. I suggest that you may have accustomed yourself to the compromised handling that is typical of recumbent bikes. In my chopper bike club in Seattle, there were a few members who were known to be able to ride bikes that could not generally be tamed by the rest of us. When queried about how they did it, they would say things like "you gotta get your weight back and go real easy on the handlebars", or some variation thereof. Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly the same advice I have heard from recumbent riders when they offer their wisdom about keeping the rubber side down. _Somebody_ can ride just about any ill-tempered bike, no matter how nasty its disposition. Why they'd want to is an altogether different matter. Chalo I agree with everything Chalo has said about the quirkiness of recumbents, but he misses the one and only thing that matters to me and to most all other recumbent cyclists - and that is the comfort factor. Most of us don't much give a damn about speed, handling or any of the other deficiencies of recumbents. The one and only thing we do give a damn about is comfort. It is why Jon can ride his recumbent 15,000 miles in a single year and why most upright cyclists cannot stand to be on their bikes for more than a few hours at most. Not to be able to ride a bicycle for as long as you want and to be perfectly comfortable on it while doing so marks you as an idiot. Viva recumbency! Regards, Ed Dolan the Great - Minnesota aka Saint Edward the Great - Order of the Perpetual Sorrows - Minnesota |
#17
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BikeE?
On Sep 6, 3:53*am, "Edward Dolan" wrote:
wrote in message ... On Fri, 5 Sep 2008 10:05:42 -0700 (PDT), Chalo wrote: 'Bents seem to be in a state of development comparable to where normal bicycles were in the 1870s-- there is no real consensus as to the best configuration for a 'bent, and nobody has yet succeeded in making one that clearly demonstrates the inferiority of other basic designs. Dear Chalo, That's an interesting comparison. Velocipedes were the first bicycles with pedals. They appeared in the 1860s and looked like huge, clumsy modern bicycles with a crank attached to the front wheel. By the early 1870s, velocipedes had evolved into highwheelers. The front wheel grew larger and larger to provide decent gearing, the rear wheel shrank to allow easy mounting and to save weight, and the seat moved up higher and higher for comfort and leverage, so the rider ended up perched close enough to the front axle to tumble forward on his face if he braked hard or hit a bump. Safety highwheelers were developed at the same time, since the danger of a header became obvious as soon people started riding highwheelers. The safety versions were either dwarf highwheelers with mechanical gearing to overcome the limits of a small front wheel, normal-size highwheelers with mechanical gearing tricks to move the rider back toward the rear wheel, or reversed highwheelers, with the big wheel in back. The safety highwheelers were never very popular, even though they were prized by collectors. The primitive mechanical gearing tended to fail outright or else wear out quickly, it cost far more than a simple solid crank, and there was some stigma attached to riding a small wheel bicycle when real men fearlessly rode 56-inch wheels. The triumph of the highwheeler around 1880 was clear--it was known as the ordinary because the brick-simple highwheeler was indeed the ordinary bicycle, and everything else was just a silly contraption that was less reliable, more expensive, and so on. Like recumbents, the safety highwheelers did well in competition, often winning races. The victories of the safety highwheelers had about the same effect on their sales as recumbent victories have today--the Tour de France is not likely to switch to recumbents, no matter how fast the Varna Diablo II goes. In 1884, half a dozen or so bizarre versions of the modern safety bicycle appeared, most of them using chains, sprockets, and steering borrowed from the thriving tricycle world. Tricycles were enormously popular back then. Uncle James Starley is famous because he came up with tangent lacing for highwheelers in the early 1870s, but most of his production was tricycles, not highwheelers. (And Starley's tricycles mostly used radial lacing. In fact, most highwheelers ignored tangent lacing until 1885.) Why were tricycles so popular? First, tricycles were much easier to learn to ride. Nowadays, anyone who tries to ride a highwheeler already has has years of experience riding safety bicycles. Back then, the typical bicyclist was a grown man who had never balanced on two wheels or turned a pedal. Next, tricycles were much safer. They didn't fall over, anyone could get on or off them, and they didn't go very fast. Just learning to mount and dismount a highwheeler on flat ground usually involved a number of falls. Most of all, tricycles handled hills much better. You could climb hills with a tricycle and pass highwheelers whose riders had gotten off and were pushing. Then you could turn around and go back down, comfortably and safely, while the highwheelers were careening out of control past you, unable to brake safely and liable to being thrown over the handlebar if they hit a bump. That's why so many old books have titles that mention bicycles _and_ tricycles--the tricycles gave bicycles serious competition for just riding around in the 1880s. But 1884 was the beginning of the end for tricycles and highwheelers. A spate of weird-looking two-wheelers with tricycle gearing and chains and steering erupted--Humber, Marvel, Antelope, Pioneer, BSA, and the prototype of nephew John Starley's Rover with remote steering, which was improved in 1885, and soon we had the modern double-diamond safety bike. Curiously, nephew John Starley later wrote that he had hill climbing in mind when he built the Rover, not safety. Looking back, we tend to emphasize the obvious safety of sitting between two wheels, while our great grandfathers took the highwheeler's dangers for granted and cared more about getting up those damned hills. The safeties quickly evolved to the classic double-diamond, with inflatable tires appearing in 1889. Again, our modern notions lead us to the wrong impression. The cushioning advantage of the pneumatic tire is so obivous to us that we assume that Dunlop was looking for comfort, but in fact his first experiments were aimed at showing that an inflated tire rolled faster and farther than a solid rubber tire, and the early pneumatics were used for racing. By 1894, a decade after the first horde of chain-driven designs appeared, the modern bicycle design was practically set in stone: http://www.nostalgic.net/index.asp?S...BicyclingWorld.... Page down past the aluminum bicycle ad at the top and look at the 25-lb 1894 Warwick. It's a fixie with wooden rims, balloon tires, and inch-pitch chain. The big chain disappeared first, the wooden rims lasted longer, and many riders still use big tires for comfort (and more riders would use wider tires if the roads were still unpaved). Caliper brakes, rear hub brakes, hub gears, and derailleurs were all available before 1900. It took only ten years for safety bicycles to wipe out the highwheelers--1894 was last year that highwheelers were produced. Since then, the safety bicycle hasn't really changed much in 120 years. We have more gears, lighter frames, fewer spokes, thinner tires, and so on, but 99% of the pedals are still attached to upright double-diamond designs. A few illustrations . . . Velocipedes with two big wheels and front crank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:T...Velocipede.jpg Highwheeler with small rear wheel and lamp hanging under front axle: http://i12.tinypic.com/4tz3tp0.jpg A dwarf Kangaroo safety highwheeler, with coasting pegs sticking out front and chain gearing hanging below the axle: http://tinyurl.com/5ugd6o The Star safety highwheeler, which put the big wheel in the rear: http://tinyurl.com/5ugd6o Starley's first remote steering Rover with a 36-inch front wheel: http://books.google.com/books?id=VDl...ntcover#PPP237 The more sensible Rover: http://i13.tinypic.com/4v67a5z.jpg Again, Chalo makes a good point--the enormously popular upright bicycle went through its bizarre variations in about ten years and then settled on the modern bicycle design that hasn't changed much in over a century, while recumbents have been wavering between various designs since the 1930s (or earlier) without ever achieving much popularity. Cheers, Carl Fogel Excellent review of the early development of the bicycle. Many more posts like this to ARBR and you will have been responsible for bringing this newsgroup back to life. Dumbass - Please go away. thanks, K. Gringioni. |
#18
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BikeE?
Chalo Colina wrote:
Tom Sherman wrote: Chalo Colina wrote: [...] The BikeE is violently unstable. Its front end has an intrinsic tendency to whip to the side and dig in at an oblique angle from the direction of travel. If this were allowed to happen at speed, it inevitably would result in a crash. The range of steering angle within which it does not try to flop the front wheel one way or the other is so narrow as to be like balancing on a knife edge. Increasing speed does not have a pronounced stabilizing effect on the BikeE as it usually does on a poorly configured, unstable but otherwise normal bike.[...] This does not describe the handling of any of the several BikeE models I have ridden, but then I am not 2 meters tall, nor do I have a mass of ca. 170 kg. I believe that Chalo was both too tall and too heavy for the BikeE CT. For what it's worth, the reason I rented a BikeE during my trial visit to Seattle was because it was the only rental bike that could be adjusted to fit me correctly (correctly being a relative term in this case). The resulting weight distribution may have been a factor in the bike's handling, but it was within the bike's design limits. You may have been within the limits of seat adjustment so you could have the correct leg extension while pedaling, but you would not have been within the proper weight distribution range - the BikeE does not fit normally proportion people taller than 1.9 meter. The handling does get odd when the front wheel has less than 20% of the total weigh on it. I suggest that you may have accustomed yourself to the compromised handling that is typical of recumbent bikes. In my chopper bike club in Seattle, there were a few members who were known to be able to ride bikes that could not generally be tamed by the rest of us. When queried about how they did it, they would say things like "you gotta get your weight back and go real easy on the handlebars", or some variation thereof. Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly the same advice I have heard from recumbent riders when they offer their wisdom about keeping the rubber side down. Well, recumbents do not take well to being manhandled like many uprights. Newbie cyclists or those adults who have not ridden in many years can generally hop on a BikeE and go, while experienced upright riders who have a riding style that involves yanking the bike around a lot probably can not ride it at all. I have been able to teach several people who had problems with recumbents to ride by simply instructing them to hold the handlebars with their fingertips only, which led then to stop over-controlling the bike. _Somebody_ can ride just about any ill-tempered bike, no matter how nasty its disposition. Why they'd want to is an altogether different matter. Well gee, I am below average in learning new motor skills, gross motor coordination, balance and general "athleticism", so if I have no problem with a bicycle, any normal person should have no problem once they get beyond preconceived mental notions of how the bike should ride and handle. -- Tom Sherman - Holstein-Friesland Bovinia “Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.” |
#19
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BikeE?
"Kurgan Gringioni" wrote in message ... On Sep 6, 3:53 am, "Edward Dolan" wrote: [...] Excellent review of the early development of the bicycle. Many more posts like this to ARBR and you will have been responsible for bringing this newsgroup back to life. Dumbass - Please go away. thanks, K. Gringioni. On the other hand, if morons and idiots like KG keep posting to ARBR, we will never recover. Regards, Ed Dolan the Great - Minnesota aka Saint Edward the Great - Order of the Perpetual Sorrows - Minnesota |
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