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Photo credits Smasher

25mar2003

A combination upright and front-wheel-drive recumbent bike. I'm leaning towards naming it "Recombinant" over "Redundant" 'cause a friend says "redundants" is already slang for recumbents.

This bike has the women's Quickrun for the back and it started out with the little girls' 20"-wheels Tyler for the front - both facing forward, but the Tyler is tipped-up rearing, on end. Steering turned the whole Tyler - the front fork of the Quickrun is hose-clamped to the Tyler's seatstays - and what is the front wheel of the composite bike is the rear wheel of the Tyler. The stem and bars are the ones off the Quickrun but stuck in the Tyler's head tube, with rubber o-rings instead of bearings, because the bars shouldn't turn with respect to the Tyler. You can sit on the Quickrun's seat and use its pedals, but once the recumbent-type seat is installed in the V of the Quickrun, you'll be able to pedal the Tyler instead.

So, I stuck on a temporary recumbent-mode seat, which was a pad-on-a-pipe off a weight bench or something - sitting on the lower pump clip and strapped on with IT - and turned the regular seat around 180 then 90 for a backrest - and I tried it out.

It was kinda cool, the Tyler was from Poland and the Quickrun from Holland. But the Tyler is just awful - really little for one thing, so the handlebars banged the knees - and the cranks are short and shot. Impossible to pedal fast enough to get going on flat or worse without significant contusion.

07may2003

So I upgraded the front bike to a 24"-wheels Ross road bike I accidentally picked up at Goodwill for $5. Now the bars are nice but the pedals are a little far away. Adjusting the fork/seatstays interface would be one solution, but I kinda like where it sits and I'm tired of messing with hose clamps, so I'm investigating new seat ideas. Best so far: clamp a BMX stem to the down tube or seat tube and use that for a seat post.

problems:

• The BMX stem I have handy has odd-thread screws I can't find replacements for - and they're too short for this application.
• The handlebars still turn a little in the Ross head tube. When provoked.
• There's some give in the whole assembly =/
• It'd be nice to find a banana seat or soemthing, to use for the top seat and back rest! The cushy tricorn(?) seat is on the beater Slow's borrowing...

It has a fine old rear rack. And I've just acquired an insulatey racktop trunk pannier - which would make this a fine beer-mule ship for hot days with a small crew complement (looks like it'd hold eight Schlitzen?).

29may2003

What if I took a 26"-wheels one-piece-crank bike and flipped the drive train left-for-right and hose-clamped that to the Quick-run? Then that'd be a long-wheelbase recumbent... The stem would probably come out of the... wait, does this make any sense? Is there room for the derailleur and stuff?

14jul2003

Haven't looked at this in a while. When last we met, the bars were thoroughly rotatey in that head tube. (Replace its 24" front wheel and lash it down hard to the down tube??)

I'm thinking about this bike again because I've got to do something with the Quickrun - it's in real nice shape. And Smasher said it was chopped enough to count even without recumbentizational capabilities.

26sep2003

Went ahead and called this a headfirst bike for the moment and took it on Sparky's unofficial Friday mission - wished I'd had time to swap in a more-tooth cog and shim the seatpost - ugh!