Recumbent-gallery.eu

Thanks to Peter from udobnoposvetu.si I found this set of pictures of a quad homebuilt in Russia by Alex Reah. All four wheels are 26″, left rear wheel is powered by man power and the right one has an engine. The machine can be disassembled and transported easily.

Alex has more experiences with building recumbent vehicles. I especialy like his description of his first recumbent trike he built. You can read not too long article about where he saw a recumbent for the first time and about all the things he had to do in Russia to build such a nice trike.

It seems that there are only few of them existing. Most probably only three, although there are far more back-to-back recumbent bikes on the roads. It is a bit strange as people are more interested in recumbent tandem trikes than bikes because they are afraid of manouverability and problems with balance. The main two reasons why there are only there or so B2B trikes are that it is pretty complicated to design a trike like this and to build it and the second would be the lenght of the vehicle as it is even longer than the B2B bike.

The picture shows an ICE version and you can read a bit more about it here. There is also a little video showing it in work.

I have found a blog post on Electric trike mentioning some threads on BROL forum about trikes with all three big wheels. There is definetely a big demand for large size wheels on trikes as same as people want to have two 26″ or even 28″ wheels on their two wheel recumbents. Yes, it make sense to have biger wheels. They are definetely faster on flat roads and more comfortable, but I think a standard recumbent rider can hardly feel the difference. (there is bigger difference when you change from 1,5 to 1,1″ tires). Big wheels have also also some disadvantages. On two wheel recumbents, the bike is pretty high than so it is hard to get on and off it, it is worse to ride in difficult situations and I think that if you have less than 180 cm a suspended dual 26″ wheel recumbent is a non-sense for you.

With trikes, the biggest problem is in the life time of those wheels. Bicycle wheel is simply not designed for side powers which appears when going through curves on trikes. Than the spokes loose their tension quickly and the ride is also not that stiff. Well with such carbon rims, it can be far better, but with standard width of the hub and standard rims, the properties will not be that good. Just look at the logo of Greenspeed. They had a 26″ wheel in the rear but at the moment they do not have a single model with 26″ wheel. And I take them as the trike producer which test their trikes by far the most on this planet. They were simply not happy with the behaviour of the 26″ rear wheel.

At the end, I would like to say, that the pictures seen mostly here are impressive. For those who want to ride really fast on their trikes, this might be a good solution, kind of road racing trike, for those looking for comfy rides during weekends, 20″ should be better. It is like a difference between super light road racing bike and some touring bike when talking about uprights.

I always like to look at different design concepts. I like to see the effort, the designer’s passion for shapes and development, for evolution. This one is from Baigorria designer Peter Sturm. I found it on one of the spanish webs about recumbents. It has interesting organic shapes, big wheels and the seat is quite steep. All that make the concept different to current common trikes. Well, all that also mean a lot of troubles for functionality, but as you can see, this concept is not about function and practicality. It is a design study.

I like those as I mentioned before, but I have to say that many of them are only good for watching, not for production

If you look at all those recumbent related videos on Youtube, you see mostly those from US, western Europe or from Japan. Or you can see some from distant places but those are from recumbent travellers. But to see a video or even Youtube channel from Saudi Arabia is pretty unique. And there is one there on Youtube and it is worth to look at it. A bit funny, a bit unusual but it shows that the world of recumbent riders is spreading all around the globe. And this is goood!

I was pretty much amazed when I found this tutorial of how to build a recumbent trike from bamboo poles. As same as when I saw another tutorial about making a recumbent seat from plywood, which was not onlyabout the seat itself but also about how to make a steam machine at home. Quite impressive. Bamboo bicycle frames start to be popular and also few recumbent bikes has been build from bamboo already. I have seen at least two of them during the Annual Czech Recumbent Meeting. So if you want to see those two tutorials click on two links here under.

bamboo recumbent trike:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-a-Recumbent-Bamboo-Trike-Frame/?ALLSTEPS

plywood recumbent seat:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Building-a-Recumbent-Trike-Seat/?ALLSTEP

And here is a video of how the trike looks like. Amazing!