Field of Science

Bicycle design - forkless bike

When we were kids, we routinely took apart and rebuilt bicycles to raise the seat and handle bars to ridiculous heights, but mostly just to have fun and learn about the physics of falling.  However there was only so much you could do with the materials at hand and a welding torch.  As a long time cycler, who himself has a fairly novel bike (a BikeE, not to be confused with an Ebike), cool bicycles have always been a fascination (bamboo bike, conference bike, school bus bike, rickshaw bike), so imagine how disappointed TPP was that Santa didn't leave one of these forkless bicycles.  Imagine if you were tasked with designing a bicycle without a front fork (which by the way, if you are missing a front fork from a bicycle, one seems now to have been incorporated into a neighbor's new garden sculpture, which is not to suggest they took it).  Some designs are so ingrained, it takes and illustrates real creativity to come up with something new, like a forkless bike, which then takes on a certain strangeness by just being so different.  Maybe next year.

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