futuristic city bicycle

What a cool concept bicycle!  Look at this thing!  In particular the rim drive makes for spokeless wheels for such an unusual look. It's just great to see so much creativity in bicycle design.  No center bar so reasonably well dressed people don't have to kick their leg up and over.  This is a problem with TPP's BikeE where the chain comes just too close to your pant leg to allow you to wear anything but shorts unless you like dark grease stains. 

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.

Crazy bike stuff

All of a sudden crazy bike ideas are appearing all over the place.  So what has we got?  In the biomaterials category, there's a bamboo rickshaw that is rather aesthetic and terribly cute as well.  How practical is it?  Hard to say.  Besides getting a student to do the pedaling is tricky, and unless you've lived in Asia for some time you probably just don't get pedal cabs or rickshaws.  At least with this design you aren't looking at the driver's behind.  Here's a really cool looking bentwood bicycle that also has great aesthetic appeal.  This thing is a fix-gear bike with no brakes, a concept TPP has a hard time wrapping his head around, just as using this bike will probably result in wrapping your head and beautiful bike around a tree.  Still the economy of the design can be appreciated as well as it's furniture heritage.  Lastly, the weirdest entry of all, a seat-less, pedal-less bicycle and somehow you just feel this can't actually work all that well even though it's certainly creative.  Just thinking here from the male perspective, this doesn't seem to be any improvement in terms of comfort upon the way too little bicycle seat.  And where's the coffee cup holder?  Do short people just dangle lower?  Reminds me of the landstriders from Dark Crystal.      

Bicycle design & human anatomy

The design for the classic bicycle seat was actually found in a dungeon torture chamber. Not only is too little surface area supporting too much weight, but the nose-shaped front of the seat puts a lot of pressure on a fellow's johnson. This can lead to erectile disfunction that no little blue pill can fix. Of course the tight little shorts don't help any either and they never were flattering. A re-design of the seat, a nose-ectomy, can greatly allieviate the problem and improve comfort. Although interested in an academic sense, none of this is matters to the Phactor because long ago the self-imposed torture of the traditional seat, and an aging stiff neck, led him to be an early purchaser of a bikeE, a wonderfully designed, great riding, semi-recumbent bicycle. Not only is it comfortable because you actually sit on your buttocks, but rather than the force of pushing on a pedal lifting off your seat, on the bikeE it pushes your back against the seat wasting far less energy. And the much lower center of gravity and the ability to put both feet down flat makes it safer for us "middle-aged" guys. Unfortunately the company is defunct, bought out and shelved (?) so they are getting quite hard to find. So take note guys, an anatomically correct seat can keep everything in working order even if you can't get one of these.