grayrest

I've had the SatRDay for about 6 months. I went to a recumbent meetup two weeks ago and the general consensus is that it rides like a normal SWB recumbent. From riding a dozen other recumbents, I think it has a particularly low stall speed. I got it for cruising around the park and going on slower (<15mph) group rides or mass events. It's apparently the coolest bike ever to 9 year old boys, since I've had a number of them yell those exact words at me. I've done two metric centuries on it, the (super rainy) 5 boro bike tour, and a couple 50 mile rides. All of these were done at a pretty casual pace because...

The owner before me and the one before him didn't really take care of it and this was the only recumbent I'd ever ridden before doing the meetup so getting it fixed up has been an extended learning process. As an example, I went to re-true my front wheel after I had a spoke replaced on the back and found that both rims were fairly close to true but the tires had been ridden so far out of true that the wear pattern made them lumpy on a true wheel and I had to replace them. My biggest issue was that when I'd put a lot of power into the pedals the power would just disappear. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to do the meetup aside from wanting to ride everybody else's bike. After considerable discussion they figured out that the motion of the top chain around the mid-drive pulls the shaft upward. Since the rear triangle isn't clamped down this collapses the triangle and lifts the seat when I pedal hard enough. Solved it with a black heavy duty zip tie holding the back end together, which you can see in the unfolded picture. First ride with the zip-tie had me climbing Harlem Hill three gears higher than I'd been doing previously.

Now that I have the mechanical issues sorted, it's pretty nice for most things but I still don't like riding it in traffic. My remaining plans are to replace the cranks with ~10mm shorter ones and get a less hacky solution for clamping the rear end together.