[python] Re: riding attempts

Ok

You guys are scaring the crap out of me.  I turn 62 in 5 days and I do not
want to spend my birthday in traction :.)

I plan to try to start riding mine next week end.  Just a few minor
adjustments to make first. 
Maybe I should start with the trike rear end first.  LOL

Stephan, please keep us posted as to how you are progressing and good luck.

Jim Sparks


Siwmae pawb,
Solidarity Jim and Stephan! I'm a bit older, and about to undergo the same baptism of tarmac. I really look forward to launching out on Jurgen's mystical journey towards joining the elect. But I'm wondering: since my plan, like Jim, is to have both single-wheel and two-wheel trailers (back ends), interchangeable on the one front end, and I'm building everything at once, should I start learning on the trike rig rather than the bike? My instinct is to learn on the bike, with a pair of thick-walled industrial gloves, and then switch to triking now and then when I'm competent, and I need to haul a load. Also, I have this intuition that part of the often-described mystical epiphany of advanced python-masters comes from powering, steering AND balancing the bike all by the same single harmonious learned action. Sort of biker's tai chi. I guess you don't get quite that on a trike.....? 

What guidance from the trailblazers?
A further part of the plan is to have an alleweder fairing for my python, in either configuration, made from the sort of slightly-stiff, flexible closed-cell foam sheets that hikers use for bivouac sleeping pads. Previous trail-blazers in Deutschland say that works well. (Part of my dream of final, total independence from car-ownership, and even from car use, except maybe the rare, five-days-in-a-year hire for special occasions, like the Dansker guy who pioneered the Leitra. I just recently gave away my Landrover to my buddy Eric.)
And then another part of the plan is to have an add-on fore-and-aft-swinging handle bar mounted on the front end, with con-rod to a pedal; or maybe, if it proves essential, to both pedals, with one of them turned around 180 degrees on the BB axle. That's to allow me the alternative of riding the python as a rower rather than a pedaller. (For the sake of the upper-body exercise which most of us in the over-prosperous countries lack chronically. If I can bear to let anyone photograph my ugly self, I'll do a before and after photo record, a year or so apart. If I survive all this.) 

But first, build and learn to ride the bare bike.
The coast path is in Parc Cenedlaethol Sir Benfro (Pembroke National Park) in the south of Cymru. Our English neighbours think of it as a British national park. We, of course, know better: it's a Cymreig national park. My family is from Penybont-ar-Ogwr near there, but my Cymreig place now is in the north, beside LLyn Padarn, one of the long ice-gouged lakes there, where the blessed, beautiful mountains just manage to scrape into the very smallest category of alpine peaks. Much more of a challenge for bikers. No road stays flat for more than half a kilometer. Most gradients have at least short stretches of 25% or more. The narrow lane between LLanberis, where the nearest shops and things are, and my buddy Eric Maddern's place at Cae Mabon, where I live much of the time, (google up Cae Mabon and eat your hearts out, guys!) is a kilometer of solid 30%-plus hillside, followed by another kilometer of lakeside dead-flat cycle-path, as compensation. Such terrain demands ultra-low winching gears as a matter of course, especially for plodding old gits like me. That's where the trike rig will be a real plus. And it pours down rain about every third day, right through the year. You see why I have to include an alleweder faring in my plan. Well, we'll see....... 

Cofion gorau i bawb,     Rhisiart G




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