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.

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

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.

Agatha and Piotr

Yes, they are from Poland. Yes, they cycle together. Yes, she is disabled. As you see on the picture, Piotr is the only one who really pedal and Agatha is siting in her beautiful suspensioned trailer. Right now, they are on their trip from polish Wroclaw to Wien (A) and through Bratislava (SK) and Brno (CZ) back to Wroclaw. Thay would like to cycle all this 1000 km long trip in about 18 days. Their main motivation is to show, that life with disabled people can be so full of experiences, full of enjoyable moments, full of adventures. They want to show that disabled people can also live as “abled” people as same as you and me.

On their trip, they are using a Velokraft trike and specialy made trailer.

Velokraft trike

They are follwed by three other cyclist. Let´s visit their web page and you can also see more pictures here:

day 1

day 2

day 3

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