Thank you all for your replies. I am a bit surprised at comments that the python is easy to ride however. Jurgen's account of learning to ride hardly suggests that. Nor do the reports by several builders that they have been unable to learn to ride their creations. Several of them have given up and gone to trike conversions as a result. I think that with its other advantages and general coolness the Python would be a real hit if it was a bit easier to ride.
Olaf’s comment that riding a Python had similarities with riding a unicycle confirms my impressions from following this and other lists. Both are ridable, but not by everyman.
A bike that requires active action by the rider to keep straight and upright is ridable, but not stable, by my definition at least. Nor by the definition of vehicle design engineers. A problem with requiring continuous rider input just to keep upright is that as speeds increase, things happen far too fast for the rider to react in time. In fact, the rider's delayed action may in fact make things worse in the case of oscillating instability. This is known as "pilot induced instability" in aviation.
I was once saved from very serious injury, or worse, by the true stability of a cheap town and country diamond frame bike. I was descending from one of our hill suburbs on a very steep, very long section of chip-sealed road when I hit something very well-camouflaged, on the road surface. The impact wrenched the handlebars out of my hands. I didn’t have a computer on the bike but I was definitely going the fastest that I have ever been on a bicycle, at least 70 km/h, possibly quite a bit more. I was saved by the instant reaction of the bike itself. It recovered in a split second, no doubt actually helped by the fact that I didn’t have any contact with the handlebars at all. The fact that I was sitting as upright as possible, to act as an air brake, meant that I was not dependent on the bars to stay on the bike. Not surprisingly, I have a strong preference for bikes to be auto-stable at speed, especially in a hilly country.
@Patrick,Forces applied to the bike directly above the rear tyre contact patch are resisted by that contact patch only and not at all by the front tyre contact patch. Hence there can be no effect on steering. Of course, if you add a whole lot of extra weight to any bike it will affect the roll inertia, which can affect handling. However I am not discussing an added weight situation here.
@Vi,At only 15Km/h, aerodynamics isn’t all that important, except in a strong headwind. I like to average about 30km/h over a couple of hours in rolling country, so I would be doing 40 or so a number of times a ride - And 5 or less sometimes too :-) I’m not a fast rider, so a bike that isn’t comfortable to ride at 40 is not going to be ideal for many, in similar country.
Has anyone any thoughts about the utility or not of my idea of a “swing seat”?
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