bicycle modification in the wolrd

Arizona Whip Lighted Flagpole

I have been looking for a way to light up the flagpole on my recumbent trike, and found a product that looked like it would work, the Arizona Whip.  Jerry at arizonzawhips.com was very nice to work with, and I got it hooked up this past weekend. The whip is 5" tall, and is of clear lexan. Inside the clear tube are 24 LED lights, 12 facing forward and 12 facing backward. Each side has a red group, and a yellow group, and on one side the red and yellow groups of LEDs flash on alternately. Jerry has other color configurations, including a red, white and blue one. The whip screws into a clamp that grips the 1.25 inch tube of the rear wheel fork. The clamp is for 1.5 in. tubes, but with some rubber and duct tape shimming, it grips the 1.25 inch tubing nicely with one Allen bolt for tightening. It extends up through the frame and clears the panniers, rack, seat, and headrest nicely.  These pictures show the whip in daylight, and the clamp attached to the frame.


I ran a switch forward to the left hand grip, so I can turn it on and off from the seat. It runs off a 9 v battery. I have not ridden it to work yet, so I don't know how long the 9 v battery will last.

The picture below is how it looks at night, from the rear.  The bike is facing not quite straight, and the bag on the rack is blocking one of the LED lights.  The headlight is shining across the street at an angle, and provides lots of illumination.

This sucker is not cheap at $150, but if I can get noticed by a car either ahead of or behind me, it will be worth it. 

I am declaring the 1973 Motobecane restoration done!  I have not been riding it lately because the Catrike Speed is so much fun.  I got a Motobecane headbadge, decals, a Cinelli stem, and Campy seatpost.  The saddle is the original Brooks Professional, and was always pretty comfortable.  The aero brake hoods are an upgrade from the original centerpulls. 

Catrike Speed

I have been enjoying my newest ride, a Catrike recumbent trike, the Speed model, since the spring of  '08.  I have been riding it to work about everyday, and building up my trike muscles.  Pedaling a recumbent trike uses different muscles from riding a DF (diamond frame), and it takes several months to build them up.  My ride from home starts with a fun little hill that gets the heart racing.  I have hit 38 on this hill, then on flat sections of my route I have hit 26 mph for short bursts. This video was shot after I had the trike for a week, and shows the fun part of my ride to work.
I have found that riding a trike is a lot of fun, but no way is it as fast as a road bike.  However, it is fun and comfortable.  There is back support, no need for padded crotch pants, nor padded gloves.  You also can't fall over, and can crank up a steep hill as slow as you want. 



To the stock trike I have added a chain guard, locking handgrips for the brakes, a rack, an air horn, and a speedometer.  The speedometer mount is a triangle of foam that is strapped to the telescoping boom.




I am using a powerful tactical flashlight for a headlight, and it puts out 240 lumens.  Its a Surefire flashlight with a replacement lamp that really boosts the light output from the stock output of 80 lumens.  A special rechargeable battery lasts for 8 hours on a charge.  I have no idea who the old guy on my trike is in the picture below.

Paul Arany's Recumbent Trikes

I don't know much about Paul Arany's trikes, except they look like a lot of fun!

 

The Recumbent Couch-Cycle

Nate Welbourn showed me his recumbent couch, and I had to know how that beast came to be built.

"The whole notion of an amphibious tall couch trike is the beer-induced brain child of a Rat Patrol member who goes by the name of Nancy Porker; I am simply the conduit between a fantasticly absurd idea which should never have been done, and something that now exists and is actually practicle to use in the real world.

Why? That's a fair question, but one that I haven't seriously considered until now; I guess we were looking for a ride with style so we figured a couch bike is probably going to satisfy that brief, and it had to be a tallbike so that the eye level of the pilots would be well above that of all but the tallest pedestrians (good for concerts and the like)... also the couch had to be easily removeable for parties (it's held on to the frame by 8 bolts, and the brake and gear levers simply pull off)...

Yes, we happened to have quite a bit of refuse steel lying about our workshop too... Plans are afoot for a parasol cover, fold-out bed, etc, etc. This is a chick magnet by anyone's standards! In any case, it probably hadn't been done before, and that seemed like a sound reason in itself. It made sense at the time!

What else? Well, you'll notice a bit of a cocktail bar/table at the couch; this will soon be completed with drink holders in which to put one's beer, thus affording our no-doubt-soon-to-be-patented Steer by Beer Technology (you need a beer in order to steer!). Seing as we were already building a tall trike with a serious inherent danger of off-camber cornering disastery, I thought it would also be great to have a reliable 360degree-turning system, allowing it to (theoretically) spin on it's own footprint in traffic. And guess what; it turns on it's own footprint!!! It was all "educated guesswork" (I'm a graphic designer working at a university, so that seemed to make excellent sense!), but I tried to design the weight distribution such that most was over the back wheels so that the bike would turn well and minimise the tendancy to roll over and snap people's backbones...

After working out some basic dimensions, it just seemed to make some kind of 'lateral sense' to create such a thing which could be ridden into and through the water without stopping (we had consumed a lot of beer at this point)... that makes sense, doesn't it?

After a lot of talk about using empty coke bottles, discarded newspapers and old candy packets for displacement, I found myself insiting on retaining 'some kind of hydro dynamics'. We ended up sourcing some old plastic barrels, chopped the tops off and smashed them together with a film of epoxy. All of a sudden the hulls became very strong — even stronger than I had invisaged. Then, we used a 2-part expanding polyurethane foam to fill each barrel, ensuring enough displacement (and that at the very least, the hulls couldn't sink), based on some rather blurry mental calculations. A rudder? The front wheel would do.

The floatation hulls and associated frame attach or detach easily by one person and are held in place by 4 high-tensile bolts. The aqua propulsion system also easily detaches when required. I think the floatation system weighs about 80kg (you'll be used to do your own metric conversions of course, living in probably the only country in the world still using emperial measurements! Anyhoo...), while the rest of the bike is probably around 70kg. Surprisingly (and this REALLY surprised me!), she is pretty stable on land and absolutely stable in the water. We have tried to capsize her, but to no avail!!

I think I must be quite good at guess work and bring with me a wealth of good luck, because the test float was so successful that no further structural changes were required. This was good news, after about 250 humorous hours of late-night labour and much domestic anxt.

OK, it probably has a top speed in the water of about 1 knot, but it's a STYLISH ride! The cops aren't sure how to take this one, it's a bike but it's much bigger than a car... or is it a boat? We are quietly confident that she is legal in this country.

So, what's the next project? Sleep :)