Royal was kind enought to send us photos of him and his wife on their recumbents. All the way from Venice, California, via Copennhagen, to you.Over to you, Royal:
The bike my wife is riding in Venice Beach, California (blue LWB recumbent) is made from the plans I bought from Bentech.
The maintube started life as a piece of muffler pipe. The seat is made from EMT tubing (cheap tubing used for electrical wiring). The rest of the parts came from cheap thrift-store bikes.
The pink bubblegum LWB lowracer is based on a delta trike design by S&B Recumbents. They worked with me on developing this bike in exchange for me maintaining their website. We went thru 2 prototypes before the pink one. The first prototype was merely some thinwall steel tubing tacked together. They thought it was going to fall apart when I flew around the corner at 25 mph. The 2nd prototype moved the crank from on top the main tube to under ... changed the head tube angle ... and worked on the chain routing. On the pink one, we had to add "wings" (gussets) to keep the bottom bracket from tearing off ... used a shorter front chain tensioner (the long one tore off when I hit a speed-bump) ... changed how we attached the seat ... and discovered the proper setting for the intermediate idler (so the rear chain wouldn't fall off when I switched to the littlest gear).I normally can't afford to buy recumbent bicycles ... so I've had to resort to making my own.There's a wonderful bike path that runs along the beach from Palos Verdes to Pacific Palisades (just this side of Malibu). It's about an 80 Km roundtrip. I have a friend & his wife that ride their tandem about 128 Km every Sunday.
My wife and I aren't exactly young skinny people, but we've always enjoyed riding our cykels. I'm in the process of making a couple of delta trikes for us to ride."
