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Just over a month ago we posted an entry on a car that was pedal powered. Turns out the cops were not happy with the combustion free vehicle and ticketed the driver for safety reasons.
Michel de Broin, who created the bike car as a piece of art ended up the winner in the case as it was dismissed by the judge. The news story can be found on the TheStar.com web site and de Broin has a video of the car in action on his web site. The video is of the car making its way around Hell’s Kitchen, NYC - where I live! I’m sorry I missed it. Visit his site for the video.
One of the most common bike hacks you will see on the streets of Gotham are custom fenders. I have been a pretty big fan of modifying water bottles for fender use for some time. I covered one such a hack in a previous post featuring this first method of fending off road grime. Simply cut some bottles in half and zip tie them to your seat tube.
Another bit of creativity involves a reflector bracket, water bottle, and hanger. For this one I drilled a hole in the water bottle cap and bolted it through the rear reflector braket, cut the bottle in half, zip tied the two halves together to make it longer, and then gave it rigidity by giving it a metal hanger spine connected with duct tape and zip ties.
Plastic buckets are a common site as featured in this photo. This guy actually hacked down a rear rack to the bare essentials and then bolted the cut bucket to the top.
One of the most common fenders used by delivery riders involves hacked mail bins. If these things are considered federal property, the FBI could arrest half of the delivery cyclists in the city. I took this one with my camera phone so it’s not that clear, but it simply involves chopping a mail bin up and using some string to anchor it on.
Possibly the most important thing about cycling that people may not pay necessary attention to is bike fit. There is a lot of opportunity to make cycling unpleasant by picking a bike that is not the right fit. Wrong fit can result in everything from a sore neck to tendon problems in the knees.
Jim Langley has a great tutorial on making sure you and your bike are a good physical match. In my opinion, you should not purchase a bike from a shop if they do not take the time to explain to you the details of bike fit. There is nothing worse than purchasing a new bike and being sore after every ride, for the wrong reasons.
And if you are going to buy a used bike, make sure you do your homework on fit beforehand and bring a tool kit with you so you can make adjustments while you take your test ride to make sure of proper fit.
Cool article on a German dude who builds really crazy bikes. And lives on his wife’s salary. What a life!
His name is Didi, though he goes by El Diablo (who wouldn’t), and he’s a bike freak who holds a bunch of Guinness World Records. This, boys and girls, is a standard to which we should all aspire.
Bikes come in a range of styles with mountain bikes, bmx bikes and road bikes. Manufacturers include Raleigh Bikes, Giant Bikes and Kona Bikes.
I’ve seen a few implementations of a bike-on-a-bike rack, but the Xtracycle really does seem to be made just for this kind of application. This thread on BikeForums has some great shots of a couple of Electras, one with a homemade Xtracycle-mounted bike rack holding the second bike.
The owner of the bikes, Derek (blog), is a photographer up in Seattle. I don’t think he’s doing the eco-photog-on-a-bike thing, like Russ Roca, but he sure does takes purty pictures!
It’s survey time! This won’t hurt, I promise. Here’s a quick ‘n easy one-question survey so that we can make BikeHacks all that you want it to be. (if you’re reading via RSS and the form doesn’t show up, I guess you’ll need to click through…)
There are those who come up with hacks and ways to make riding more enjoyable, and then there are those who put the rest of the world to shame. I first saw this video at the Bicycle Film Festival a few years ago. I was happy to see that it is available for full world consumption on the Internet.
The next time you find yourself whining about riding in the rain or stiff headwind, all you you need to do is think of Dexter Benjamin. He lost a leg riding his bike and was homeless for a time, and he came back to become a messenger. This is 8 minutes well spent so set aside some time and take it in.
Answer: lose weight. You can shave ounces from the weight of your bike with tweaks and upgrades here and there, but you can shave POUNDS from your body. Okay, not everyone has this luxury, but I bet most of us can spare at least a couple of pounds.
On the first of this month I started eating ‘slow carbs.’ Coach Levi turned me on to the idea, though he’s trying to get bigger and I’m trying to get smaller. The eating is pretty easy. I eat as much as I want from a pretty limited selection of food for six days a week (seventh day is a free-for-all). Fortunately it’s all food I love. Lotsa beans though. Kinda tough on the coworkers, but it’s not about them, is it?
I’d love to drop 20lbs, but we’ll just see how I do. Last Tuesday morning I weighed in at 233 pounds (hey, I’m 6′4″, gimme a break), though I’d seen as high as 240 over the previous couple of weeks. My “anything goes” day was yesterday and in that morning I came in at 229. Gobbled tons of “bad” food on Saturday and bumped up a pound this morning. Back on the regimen this week until next Saturday. I’ll post results here, probably once a week.
In the past I’ve dropped weight basically by burning more calories, but eating the same. This time I’m switching that around. I’m doing the same amount of exercise but eating differently. I’m not sure I’m eating fewer calories, actually. I’m not even sure I’m eating less volume, either. Just different food. Seems to be working, but the end of the month holds the real answer.
In case you’ve got credibility issues when you stop in at your local bike shop, have a look at this video from Quickrelease.tv. It’s got everything you need to know about the anatomy of your bike!
Just a quick heads up about a new feature on BikeHacks.com: our job board. You’ll find the link to ‘Bike Jobs‘ up there in the navigation bar. Over time we’ll be putting up a little list of available jobs over on the sidebar, as well as featuring a job or two in the footer of the RSS feed.
Organizations wishing to get a fair bit of exposure (20k pageviews/month and growing) to the bike hacking community are welcome to post jobs on the board. The price is right: a buck a day for a 15-day posting.
