Initiation

My initiation into the obsessive world of recumbent building began with this wooden wonder.  Not (yet) being versed in the art of welding I realised this would pose a significant handicap to creating my own version of some of the home built masterpieces I had seen on the internet.  But being reasonably competent at working with wood, and having lots of odd bits of wood and stuff lying around, I acquired a thrown-away child's bike which I hacked up for parts and key frame elements - notably the front wheel, fork, and down tube - and the result was this.

A keen eye might notice that  the chain is on the LHS of the frame.  This was simply because  I did not yet possess a tool for removing the crankset from the bottom bracket, so I had to make do with it being on the wrong side when I exploited the down tube as my front boom.  The bike didn't yet have any gears shifters, so the problems that a LHS chain line would create at the rear sprocket for changing gears didn't arise.

Note also that I am already experimenting with an intermediate sprocket cluster as part of a future gearing mechanism.  I thought this was quite ingenious, and no doubt original.  I was soon to discover - as with almost every original, cunning, and unique new idea that I had - that someone else had got there first quite some time ago!

This first incarnation was enough for me to overcome the weird sensation of having my bum on the ground and my feet in the air, and was sufficient to convince me that it was indeed possible to ride this strange thing and that the project was worth pursuing.  The next step was clearly to add the ability to change gears, and this required moving the chainline to the RHS.  I still didn't possess a crank remover tool, so I cut the front boom in half, rotated the BB by 180 degrees, and used a seat clamp to join the two halves of the boom together.

This model was - surprisingly enough - able to be ridden with ease, and I spent some time acclimatising to the novel experience of the recumbent position by riding around an outdoor basketball court.  I was soon confident enough to do U-turns and figures of eight.  An early highpoint was when two young lads, who happened to be present during one of my test rides, asked me "where did you buy that mister?".

The main objective of this wooden wonder was to see what fork angle and trail I should use to make a good handling bike.  This was easy to adjust by simply loosening the four bolts on the wooden head tube clamp.  I spent a lot of time playing with these parameters, and - despite knowing from bike magazine journalists how just a degree or two difference can radically transform a MTB from a nimble handling XC bike into a rock stable Downhiller - I began to get the impression that quite large variations didn't actually seem to make any difference.  

Perhaps this empirical discovery was what gave birth to my cynicism and mistrust of ever believing anything of any technical nature about bikes gleaned from bike journalists or self-proclaimed experts on the internet.

Perhaps not the most elegant of contraptions but, as you can see, I'm quite chuffed with my new toy!