Long wheelbase bike finished

I finished something. Nearly. Amazing but true.

Here's the bit I hate. The endless moving of brake levers and gear changers on the handlebar until
a) my hands drop comfortably onto them, and
b) the cables point in roughly the right direction, Bowden cables hating to go round sharp corners, and
c) the gear changer doesn't get in the way of the brake lever movement, and
d) they don't snag the seat when the bar turns, and
e) they don't snag my thighs when the pedals turn.

Cantilever brake lever for front, and sidepull lever for back brake. You straighten the sidepull lever by disassembling, placing lever in vice with steel spacer to stop crushing, and applying blowtorch while simultaneously applying light straightening-pressure with a steel tube. All of a sudden the aluminium softens, and the lever straightens. If pressure isn't maintained you can't tell when the plastic temperature is reached, and the whole thing overheats and crumbles and melts.
Note wooden tube plugs. Apfelholz, bien sûr.

Here's the bit I hate too. Selecting cables. The main object of this exercise, it will be recalled, is not so much to build a recumbent but rather to use up old bits from the Bike Heap. This includes cables and cable housing. Foolish, admittedly, but one must stick to one's intentions. Most of the Bike Heap cable housings are kinked and rusty inside and nobody but an idiot would think of re-using them but fortunately I am that idiot. Fortunatelier I once invented a sneaky trick which is to use short bits of good housing and join them end-to-end with empty .22 rifle cartridges. Swords and ploughshares.

The trick involves a blowtorch, some zinc chloride, and a dab of soft solder. You stand a cartridge on end and put a drop of ZnCl onto the flat bit without even bothering to polish it, add warmth and a touch of solder and it's instantly covered in silver. Then you add ZnCl to the same place on a second .22 cartridge, invert it onto the silvered one, add more warmth and you have a back-to-back tube with a soldered separator disc in the middle. This you pop into the 3-jaw, drill a 2.5mm hole through the separator, and now two short cable housings can become one long cable housing. I mostly like to do this because it helps obviate the worry of what to do with jamjars of empty .22 cartridges, which problem only manifests itself because I can't bear to see empty brass strewn all over the rifle range, which it is, which I happen to know, which makes rifle ranges so irresistibly attractive. One day the brass will all be gathered up assiduously by my children's children's children and melted in a home-made brazing hearth to re-assemble all the bicycles I've ever sawn up, I expect. But for the moment all they get used for is cable-housing-joiners.

Anyway, here's the machine assembled and I haven't snipped off the cable ties because the other bit I hate - painting - requires their removal. You have to fiddle about with a flattened spoke to wedge between the zip-tie's rack and the jammy-inny-bit and then you can undo them. Have a look at one and you'll see what I mean.

You may compare and contrast with the original drawing which I most kindly posted here because I am good and generous and conceited enough to think someone might be int'rested.

Of course as soon as it was assembled I had to ride it, but before doing so I judged it wise to weld a short tube behind the front fork to stop the wheel turning right round, which it was apt to do on account of being geared up to double the movement of the handlebar, which gearing turned out to be zackly what I hoped. And indeed the machine rode zackly as predicted. Which means either I now know how to design recumbents or I'm very lucky. (Clue: lucky.)

The end of the steering stop tube is reinforced inside it with a washer welded in place. An open tube end is too readily dented by the fork swinging round and giving it a hearty bash. I was going to use a wooden plug like those hammered into the ends of the seat tubes so they don't apple-core me in the event of a crash, but a washer is lighter. The washer didn't fit until I beat all round the edge of it with a hammer, and then it fitted a bit too tightly and I had to use the hammer to whack it into the tube. These are delicate manufacturing details I shan't publicly reveal lest you discover that my engineering is of the bodge-it-and-weld variety.

And here's the cockpit view, showing the usefulness of wide BB axles and those bent cranks that increase the Q factor and allow the steering rod to gear up the front fork without snagging the pedals.

How does it ride? Pleasantly languorous handling, like all long wheelbases. The seat angle is such that 20 miles doesn't give  lumbar ache with a straight seat back, nor neck ache without any shoulder or neck support. Comfortable on ye bumme, so the 700c x 42 back tyre really does compensate for no suspension.  32 lbs (compared with 44lbs for the Duplo Bike) so ditching the suspension does indeed save weight, and a lighter machine makes for lazy riding at low speed. Not especially fast so it's true that the BB has to be 5 or 6 inches higher than the sitzhöhe if you want speed; it's true that light weight doesn't compensate for a bigger frontal area.

But come summer the kids on the bridge will shout "Cool bike mister" because kids on bridges always like LWB recumbents.

LWB Steering rod

Until you have actually been me you cannot know what it is to be stupid. Yesterday I walked into the workshop and picked up a broken rear mech that I didn't need and repaired it which I didn't have to do and then used it to bite three cubic millimetres out of my left index finger which immediately bled as if a mediaeval surgeon was in attendance and had forgotten his leech. And it hurt.

After which uninteresting bit of whingeing, where was I back in the Pleistocene when I last made an entry to this blog? - Oh yes, microscopes, and there are another four to do and still four more after that. (Actually you can get quite bored cleaning microscopes. Actually I don't mind if she doesn't bring me any more for oh about fifty years.) - We're onto steering.

The Ricardo bike (see past entries if obsessional or sufficiently moved) yielded some beautifully light-weight seat stays. In the Olden Days I got my steering rods from East Midlands Alloys, but lacking ready access thereto, I welded these seat-stays together end-to-end and back-to-back with the usual pokey-inny bit inside to stiffen the joint.

And welded 6mm nuts on the ends. And cycled to Richmond where the Exclusive Brethren have a bearing supply shop where I bought some track rod ends. Actually it was an Exclusive Sister who served me, probably the owner's wife. I've often wondered if the shop is owned by several Exclusive Brethren or just one, because if the latter we are posed with the difficult quandary of what to call him. Is he an Exclusive Breth? Exclusive Brother does sound a bit mundane. And since they aren't allowed to have computers and will never happen on my linguistic concerns I suspect we shall never know the answer.

Then back to the bike heap to see what else I could recycle, and it struck me that I could weld a cantilever brake stub to the fork to connect front wheel to handlebar, and so it proved.

So next I have to steel myself for the task of making webbing strips, which I most hate doing, and then fitting cables, which I moster hate doing, and painting it, which I mostest hate doing.

The longer arm at the handlebar sort of gears up the steering movement. How much is a bit of a guess at this stage, but a guess based on past machines.

And right now the flowering cherry's doing its annual fortnight's worth of decorative garden-work so it must be springtime in the Dominion of New Zealand and soon it will be dry enough to resume gluing together yon proa hull which has spent the winter getting in the way and generally being a tripping-over workshop nuisance. But right now it is eventide so I have to stop to check on Mr. Larrington's progress as he attempts to cross every bridge in our Colony of America on his way back from Battle Mountain.

Long Wheelbase resumed

Okay, where'd we get to? Somewhere or other I got distracted. - Actually this isn't true - what really happens - always - is that I find the smallest, tiddliest job and spend weeks staring at it wondering if there's an easier way. There never is. I just have to Get On With It.

In this particular instance it was how to mount the seat. So I did. First I had to calculate (guess) where the chain run goes, and then dodge it with the seat support. That meant welding it on the back of the base, not beneath the base.

Note favourite welding clamps: inner-tube strip. Jigged with bits of wood screwed together to ensure parallel sides ten inches apart. Overall seat width = 12"

Next, something to stop the seat support flopping over sideways.

 Cut...

... precision cold-set  (okay, whacked with a hammer)...

 and welded to the frame.

About now it occurred to me that I might, just might, not get the angle of the seat exactly right at the first weld. Actually, not might at all. I never have; never will. Ten miles into the first ride I'll know it's wrong. Slightly wrong, but wrong. Twenty miles and my back will be killing me. Dead.

All of which I didn't want to think about but now had to. So another week of staring dumbly at it before it occurred to me that the 1 1/8" seat support is the right diameter to sit neatly inside a retired head tube, and those I have in abundance.

 Sacrificed Raleigh head tube, plus one of two U-bolts

 Notches filed to weld titchy tubes for the U-bolts...

 ...and U-bolt tubes welded...

...and the whole welded to the frame. Now the seat can tilt.

So the next bit of complete engineering paralysis - if I can dignify anything I ever do with the epithet engineering - concerned how to use the former seat stays of the mixte frame, as seat stays. - Gah? - so I'm repurposing a thing to be what it already is. God I'm stupid. - Anyway the complication was that the Frenchmen who make Peugeot frames use 13mm OD tube, which is 0.3mm bigger than the half-inch ID tube I had. But luckily Messrs Huffy turned out to be generous in their half-inch tube,

and the already chopped-up bike yielded two bits that would slide over the seat stays. By cunningly keeping the ends of the bridge between them (above) I had some sticky-outy-bits to file neatly to accept a couple more bits of tube -

- which made the welding altogether easier. And here they are, one of them already drilled and hacksawn ready for the clamping bolts -

Then all that was required - another week's dithering - was to figure out how to weld the back seat support...

and close the ends off...

and get it in the right place. Which I dismally failed to do. Because I'm useless. It was a quarter of an inch too high.

So I made the extra little bits to screw the slidy-clampy-bits* out of the Huffy dropouts and welded other clampy-on-y-bits to the slidy-clampy-bits in a sticky-outy-sort-of-way so they'd all fit. Approximately. There isn't a pivot at the bottom of the seat stays. Some bending must perforce take place, but it won't be much.

And I screwed them together with 5mm bolts which, I believe, conversation with my brother who actually is an engineer having suggested, have a shear strength of about a third of a ton**. Which I don't weigh.

And conversation with Matt*** at the bike shop yielded a 42mm back tyre, which I rather hope, may make up for No Suspension. - We shall see. -

Anyway, here it is, roughly ready to start turning into a bicycle.

From behind...

and from the side.

*slidy-on-y-bits and clampy-slidy-bits are Highly Technical Terms, strictly used by recumberent (sic.) builders. (Shut up, Mrs. Hague.)

**actually he said a 6mm bolt has a shear strength of half a ton. But six sixes are thirty-six, whereas five fives are twenty-five, and twenty-five over thirty-six is about a third of a ton.

***who rides up Marahau Hill in ten minutes. Hmmph.