Recumbent-gallery.eu

There was a recumbent meeting in teh Czech Republic in town Hodonin from September 11th till 14th. There were around 140 participants and about 100 recumbents what shows that about 40 people uses upright (upwrong) bicycles or lend some other recumbents or trikes from friends.About 50% of recumbents were homebuilds and the rest wasmostly AZUB brand or some other like Velokraft of Lightning. Also some trikes has appeared and three velomobiles.

On Thursday all the people did a trip aroun 110 km to the borders with Austria. On Friday only a short trip was done and than there were races in 2km sprint and also a trike races. As seen mostly Greenspeed were used, what is not that big surprise, because for Europe they are assembled in the Czech Republic in AZUB company. From pictures which we got from our friend, you can see that they had also some tough times and also velomobiles had two go over some ligh terrain. On the other side to see women racing on trikes is really nice.

On Saturday the participants went tovisit some villages under the Carpatian mountains and later in the evening they spent some beautiful time in wine cellar close to their base camp in Dubnany.

The Czech meeting seems to grow each year about 30% so we are expected how it will look next year.

It is true that you almost cannot see recumbents on Eurobike. Well, HASE had quite nice stand among halls, but other producers (two or three?) were hidden somewhere outside of all the action. So it is very difficult to come with some more recumbent pictures and news from such big show as the Eurobike is.

But, as another news we can see the Toxy trike which was standing somewhere, but not on their own stand. They simply didn´t have the stand there. At the first look the trike looks great and all the technical details seems to be perfect. But if you look closer you realize that the complete front part is from Pirol trike which was shown on couple of other places around the show. The difference is the Toxy uses the 20″ rear wheel, compare to Pirol´s 26″. Sure this is a good change, because we st on the Pirol and tested it on the e-bikes test track and from our point of view it was not what we expected. The Pirol trike is too high and when cornering you feel a movement of the rear swing arm and you definetely do not feel stable on it. So it seems that the 20″ rear wheel will be solution. But as you can see from pictures, the upper chain lead goes through the front suspenion complicated part which would definetelly cause some troubles with the chain line. Right now, it is OK, because it has only single front chain ring, but we would say that many customer would like to have some MTB components on such technicaly and off-road looking trike.

Well, Toxy presents it as a prototype so we think they will improve this and that and it might be quite nice trike after.

In photogallery you can see the yellow Toxy prototype and the blue one is a Pirol trike.

Finnaly we got the time to write some posts about the Eurobike show which was in Fridrichshafen (D) one week ago.

Fow us the biggest news were the Ortlieb recumbent panniers, which we think will be a bestsellers in Europe and all the world. They have some beautiful features like map holder or the water bottel holder and also some small pockets on the upper part near your hand. In fact all that what you normaly miss on your recumbent. Simply beautiful. And of course, they are WATERPROOFED! What we see as the only one problem is their weight more than 3 kilos, but on the other side, 2 pairs of another waterproffed bags would be of almost the same weight.

This is the best news which we have heard today. Same has managed it and improved his own speed record. It has happened yesterday in Battle Mountain, Nevada (USA). And the world highest human powered speed is… 132,4 km/h

And here you have him on video!

More informations and also great pictures you can find on: http://www.recumbents.com/wisil/whpsc2008/speedchallenge-2008.htm

Today we leave to the Friedrischhafen (D) to visit the biggest bicycle show in Europe. The Eurobike is huge and in more than ten halls it shows thousands bikes. We hope to come back with thosands pictures to prepare at least three or four interesting galleries for you.

We were so surprised when we found a video with Velayo velomobile. It looks completely different than any other velomobile. The design with open wheels looks quite retro and is beautiful. Probably because we have not seen anything like that before. It looks that the guy prepares this velomobile to be produced and sold in batches. Unfornatenully on his web page www.fortschritt-fahrzeugbau.de you cannot see much, expect two pictures, but couple of videos gives good idea of how the machine looks like. From the first video where is only the frame the velomobile looks quite huge, but it seems it has the right height to be visible in the traffic and to go over smaller or bigger bumps. Also the weather protection seems to be good. The only problem we see in open front wheels which can cause a big geysir in the rain. We do not know much about the project nor about the steering or riding properties, but from pictures and videos it looks really nice.