Mark urged everyone who could make it to come on a ride Thursday morning, starting at his house at 8:30. The ride is intended to entertain Nick Hein, an out of town recumbent builder who has read about our club and the Twin Cities area bike trails on the web and would like to get acquainted with both. Route to be negotiated, but the pace will be fairly easy since Mark is still recovering from his recent surgery. (Though not well attended, the ride went well, giving Dave Siskind's nephew from PA, as well as Nick from WV, a look at possibly the best trail system in the US. Mark)

Ray Allison reminded us that next Saturday the 23rd is the day of the Forest Lake Cycles trail ride. It is all on nice paved rail trails and consists of two out and back legs with several possible rest stops. The length is quite modest, and you can do just one or the other leg if you want something even shorter. This is the second annual edition of this ride, and several HPV club members rode last year and enjoyed it.

Bob Stuelke brought in his lean steer tadpole trike, which he had told us about at a meeting a year ago. It was first built in 1983 but has spent most of the time since then in storage until he got motivated to work on it some more (in part to have a father-son project with his teenage son Josh). It has been shortened from the original design while changing from a two stage drive to a single chain run, and he has been through four generations of front end designs by now. It turns out that it is somewhere between tricky and impossible to get a tadpole to have good Ackerman steering motion and little or no brake steer while also being able to lean, but he has achieved a good approximation of that goal by now. There is a dead axle between the front wheels and the rest of the bike leans relative to that axle while an arm sticking down from the main frame applies steering motion to the Ackerman arms on each front wheel by two tie rods. Seems to work pretty slick. It also has front drum brakes now (though they weren't connected yet), using an axle made of a half inch bolt turned down in steps to 12 mm and then 9 mm to fit the cartridge bearings he is using. The front wheels are 24 inch, but he is thinking about going smaller (maybe to 16 or 20 inch Greenspeed Scorchers?) to improve the available steering angle. The handlebars weren't installed yet, but they will be fixed onto the front beam and used just to brace yourself and help regulate your weight shifting and leaning. In the meantime, he uses a nylon strap from one wheel to the other for bracing and pulling (but obviously not for pushing!), though Josh gets around pretty well no-handed. Turns are initiated mainly by weight shifting with your hips.

Guy Costa brought in his wife's new Tour Easy clone with indirect steering that he built using the home-made carbon arc torch he showed us at last month's meeting. The steering uses an extra head tube added just behind the front derailleur post and one steering rod connecting to an arm on the original steerer, a setup that needs a little more tweaking to get more consistent action and a lower steering ratio than it has now. He scavenged a MTB front fork that works OK at speed but needs a little more rake to reduce wheel flop at low speeds. The seat base is plywood with some fiberglass on both sides that is covered with foam and a spandex cover. The seat is braced with a long bolt and a stainless steel tube with a threaded coupler on the end so it can be adjusted for seat angle. The chain tensioner is adapted from an old Suntour derailleur, which he took apart and added another turn in the coil spring to increase the amount of tension it can produce.

Jon Nygren showed his new pedal powered personal watercraft, a $2 garage sale special. It has an inflatable hull, basically an air mattress with a back rest and an opening on one end where a small set of four-bladed paddlewheels is inserted. It has VERY short cranks (even Mark thought so!) and no visible means of steering, but in weather as hot as we've been having anything is worth a shot if it gets you out on the water. (Somehow I failed to get a photo of this masterpiece. Those of you who weren't there don't know what you missed. Mark)

Jeff Bird brought in a MTB tandem that he converted to a recumbent by adding a pedal boom on the front, a different stem and bar, and two recumbent seats. The rear cranks are now unused and the stoker uses the old captain's cranks. The seats are both rather high, making starts and stops a little awkward and causing some thigh interference for the stoker. He tried USS at first but couldn't get a configuration he felt at all comfortable with so he converted it to OSS. The front wheel contains a 750 watt hub motor he bought from California for about $600 including the controller and 36 volt battery packs. He really swears by the electric assist for hill climbing and range extension. The frame used to have an extra middle tube, and unfortunately he removed it to give room for the USS mechanism rather than removing the top tube to get both seats down lower. Live and learn. Mark also had a few ambitious ideas about a beefier pedal boom and indirect steering, but for a first try it seems to be doing the trick pretty well.

Mark showed his wife's purple LWB that he has now converted from a 21 speed derailleur drivetrain to a 5-speed Sturmey-Archer hub. Now it will be “legal” on the Lake Pepin 3-speed tour. Jane had elbow and wrist problems on the ride last year, riding a wedgie.
It was originally built in 1993 for a twenty-fifth anniversary present, to keep Jane somewhat mollified since the anniversary date fell during the World HPV championships we hosted in Blaine that year! Jane spent her special day working the sign-in table.
The trickiest part of the conversion was narrowing the rear triangle, which led to cracking one of the silver brazed joints so he had some extra fixing and refinishing to do. After riding several three and five speed bikes in last few years Mark is firmly convinced that they are all you need for puttering around town, though the Lake Pepin Tour may be pushing the envelope a bit. But for local flat land use, give him a compact recumbent with a 5-speed hub and short cranks and he is one happy camper.

Jim Black showed his original Quadribent based on converted BMX bikes with bolt-on rear extensions and a couple of beams to connect the two bikes (Mark urged prospective builders who are leery of brazing to look carefully at how Jim did this bike). Even though the extensions and connectors both seemed a little flexy when he first demonstrated this configuration, the rig is still going strong. Talk about a proof of concept prototype! (Due to the orientation of the flat aluminum stock used for the extensions and the swing arm, I suspect there would be no noticable flex when used as a single bike, with much lower side loads Mark) Since this version it went through another BMX version and about four more major revisions using EZ 1 bikes instead. He says the Quadribent concept has gotten a lot of acceptance, especially from couples or families with some handicapped members. He knows of blind stokers, and also a couple with one deaf member where they take turns steering or signing!

Jeff Caswell showed the latest Super Micro Bike in the final stages of construction. The main changes are to use heavier gauge main tubes for his weight and to increase frame clearances so he can use the 349-40 (16" x 1-1/2") Greenspeed Scorcher tires that Mark sold him on trying. He even had to cut away parts of the handlebar and a few other tubes and then braze a bit of steel sheet on to close the holes and restore some of the lost strength. It is nearly finished now, with the main remaining task being to finish braze the subframe that holds the Shimano Nexus 7-speed hub for the intermediate drive. He says he was able to narrow the front end a bit by using “an old Campy ten speed chain” (?) from his parts bin and machining the cogs narrower to match, a very time-consuming task he wouldn't want to do again. The seat base foam now has butt dimples sanded into it using a half inch belt sander and a lot of practice, and he says they make a LOT of difference to the comfort of the seat. The whole seat is then covered in a thin layer of a neoprene-like foam he got out of the bargain remnants bin at A-1 Foam on Lyndale Ave in Bloomington. He applies it with the thicker type of double-sided tape after lightly sanding the fiberglass seat pan for better adhesion.

Jeff also reports that his next bike will be a back to back tandem based on the Micro Bike configuration. It will have more upright seats for slightly improved compactness (it's already about ten feet long!) and will have several homebuilt joints so it can be disassembled for transport. It will use 406-20 Comp Pool tires to handle the added weight of two riders. Mark urged him to use Scorchers instead, since they are improvements of the Comp Pool tire rather than just copies as Jeff had thought.