Hi All,
It has been a long time since I have posted, I generally follow the
list, but I am in my last year of my PhD so have been very busy. On
the question of whether or not to build a tilting trike, I feel I have
some personal experiences that may be worth contributing. I will start
by saying that I do love riding my tilting trike, personally it was a
technical accomplishment that I always get a kick out of, and it gets
a lot of attention. That being said, from the point of view of being
the right bike for my commuting needs, it has been an abject failure.
It is rather heavy, has low visibility in traffic and on the
increasingly busy roads I started to feel less and less safe. I also
got hammered by the bumps. Trikes have three contact patches, so when
there are rough spots it is very hard to avoid them. The rear
suspension has helped, but crossing tram lines with 100psi tires at
any reasonable speed is brutal.
So last Christmas holidays I went back to the drawing board. I started
from scratch by listing all the things that I wanted my bike to be
able to do for me.
- it wanted a recumbent because that did not put any pressure on my
hands (I have very bad RSI)
- it had to have full suspension to compensate for high psi/low
rolling resistance on bad roads
- it should weigh as little as possible
- it should have a clean/uncomplicated chain line
- it should allow me to cycle with other road bike riders on the
weekend and not feel like the poor cousin - I wanted to be at their
eye level.
After quite a bit of doodling I realised that I didn't want a tilting
trike, or a low racer, or a SWB. I ended up with the LWB design you
see above. I drafted the plans in Solidworks, and two weeks later I
was riding around on my new bike - it worked first time - I call it
the Longbow. The suspension is awesome, a natural frequency of 1.3hz
on the front and 1.6hz on the back, which means they both list
together if I go over a speed bump at 28kph - no hobby horsing. The
chain-line is clean, and the gear rations are perfect for the kind of
riding I do, flats and rolling hills. It is not a steep hill climber,
but there aren't any where I live.
So have I gone off low racers and tilting trikes? No, I still plan to
build a few more, I would also like to build a rear wheel steer bike.
But for my daily commute and for social rides on the weekends, it
turns out that this new bike is perfect. We did a 130k ride a few
weeks back, and while I had saw legs, the other guys on road bikes
really had an uncomfortable ride for the final 40k or so. As I said,
this things is amazing on corrugated dirt roads and chewed up bitumen
a speeds above 20k, which is exactly what I needed it for.
Now getting back to the original question, should you build a tilting
trike - what I would say is that this is the wrong question, start
with a list of things you want your new trike/recumbent to be able to
do, then ask us to help rule out the designs that won't give you the
things you need. I have always found this forum a great place to get
feedback on whatever design you ultimately choose to build.
Wishing you all the best in your adventure.
Warm regards to everyone.
-h
On 03/11/2009, at 4:24 AM, Marcel Maatman wrote:
Hi,
Maybe the solution of Bram's Tilting Trike will do?
You can go to his site: www.fastfwd.nl <http://www.fastfwd.nl/> It
has an English part .
Als trike builder Henri Thomas has a lot of information. He has used
the Python design for his Jetrike.
See http://www.jetrike.com/index.html
A lot of succes!
greetz
Marcel (Twello, the Netherlands
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