mstateglfr 

My office sponsors our state's MS ride each year so employees are naturally pretty involved in it. The most popular route is 50mi that is all on a paved bike path and in '19, one of my co-workers decided to ride the 50mi then run the 50mi. So he started out in the middle of the night and rode it, then started running around when cyclists launched. There are trailside bars to stop at and a thunderstorm hit for a couple hours, so everyone was drinking inside a bar about 16mi into the ride when my coworker comes in soaked, drunk, and coughing. He had been smoking while running and had to stop because of the rain, so he took to drinking whatever liquor he had filled his camelback with. Shortly before he got to the bar the rain had stopped so he lit up again, hence some coughing.
It was easily one of the most impressive and confusing things Ive seen. The guy stopped in to have a drink(even with liquor on his back) and then headed back out for more running. I passed him probably 30min later with cigarette in his mouth.

Just a total wtf scenario.

downtube42

I've built and ridden three tallbikes, two sofa-bikes, one extreme and barely rideable chopper, one three-wheeled bike made by connecting two kiddie bikes together into a snake-line thing, I started building a recumbent once, but stopped after realizing I'd brazed something on backwards.

Some constructs I've seen other people ride have been quite inspiriting: floating things, musical things, multi-person things, enormous things.

Imagining, constructing, and building such creations is more about, well, imagining, constructing, and building as it is about bicycling. Bicycles are just a vehicle for creativity, pun intended.

Obeast

my next bike will definitely be an electric cargo bike. I have not used a car for 2 years now and an electric cargo bike will basically make my life much better. But they do cost a lot of money.

veganbikes

Not really that unconventional, irregular or insane. An electric cargo bike just makes a ton of sense if you have kids or are hauling cargo or are carless and need to make bigger trips. If I could justify owning a R+M Load I would gladly own one. I just simply don't need a cargo bike in my area.

kaos joe

Seen 2 years ago in Pinedale Wyoming. 2 different sized wheels, how impractical! It might still be for sale.

rydabent

No, recumbents are the new modern bikes that cause no pain. Time marches on you know. We no longer have steam engines, Model Ts and prop driven airliners.

Why cling to 1890 technology???

downtube42

I have had a recumbent in my arsenal for maybe 30 years, and upright bikes for another 25. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I'm not selling either anyone soon.

tomato coupe

Good question.

burnthesheep

Bicycles with so much electric motor on it being used all the time that it defeats the purpose of it being a bicycle to begin with. Just own a scooter at that point. I would advocate anyone who regularly commutes by bike or has serious health issues consider an e-bike, but I see a LOT of able bodied folks around that just use them as electric golf carts these days.

Shoulder shrug. Lot's of dough to spend just to scoot around. For $30 you can rent an electric golf cart, drink beer, and chase a little ball around the fields. I'd rather do that than push a button to cruise along on a $3000 "bike".

veganbikes

I think you are confusing throttled bikes and pedal assist e-bikes? E-bikes you have to pedal throttled machines are vastly different and should not be confused together even if they sometimes share some similarity.

Though I like the golf carting idea, it sounds fun, though I am not a beer drinker but maybe some nice whisky or whiskey or some hard cider or a good Pina Colada would be fun. Though forget the golf unless it is mini.

burnthesheep

Sorry. I didn't clarify. They appear to be kits for an existing "nice-ish" bike but the kit is a throttled kit. Or they bought a bicycle, with pedals on it, with a throttle setup from one of those cheezy Facebook places. So, it's a bicycle originally.......and the e-bike parts are throttle.

See it a lot around here on fat bikes. Like, nice fat bikes. They buy one of those throttle front wheel style getups where the battery is strapped in the triangle of the bike. Then race around on the throttle like a miniature electric dirt bike.

Our house backs up to a greenway, so we see "all kinds" of stuff back there. Runners, weird bikes, motorized dirt bikes being chased by cops who took motorcycles on the trail, fighting racoons, people walking their pet goat. Lol.

vane171

If you had two such bikes, you could put them side by side spread by a car width (to keep it road worthy ), weld connecting tubing between them, put some connection between the front wheels to synch their turning, to create pyramidal shaped four wheeled bike. Would be fun besides adding much welcomed stability to it.
I especially love that short tube welded in as a foot rest on the blue frame, top of the seat tube, to facilitate climb up... It all reminds one of those birds that can only get to fly by jumping off a cliff. And it even has brake lines installed, possibly there is even a fork steerer tube inside that head tube, amazing. Only the chain stabilizer spoils the Frankenstein creation.
BTW with CF bikes, you can't ever have this much fun.

One from cross country long distance races from deeper past - on my first one I stopped at a refreshing station some 20 km into the race and they were serving bread with thick lard topping and with some couple table spoons of salt spread on top of it. The lard besides its obvious function was there to hold the salt in place. And you flushed it down with a paper cup of hot tea saturated solution either with sugar or salt (the latter for those who thought eating the bread would delay them too much). With another 30 km to go, most of us downed it all without an eye blink, something you wouldn't expect yourself to be able to do prior to the race.

berner

Ma wearing a ballerinas tutu riding a bike.

downtube42

At Paris Brest Paris 2011, I saw an obvious homebuilt recumbent with one rather odd feature. A brace welded near the rear dropout angled out to side, turned forward, then angled back to attach toward the front. Sort of an outrigger. I presume he built the thing, then added the brace to eliminate flex. I don't know if he finished, but simply qualifying to be at the start is a feat.

Ironfish653

Imma leave this right here:


Credit: D H Nall @ Softride Bike Owners FBG

Unusual? Yup. Unorthodox? You betcha! But, damn If it doesn’t work!

ofajen

I just put some bar ends on my touring bars, but compared to this, it’s pretty tame. Works great, though!





Edit: I ended up taking the bar ends back off. This time of year, I have to flip the bike over and clean off mud splatter after every ride, and that doesn’t work nearly as well with the extra bars. Also, turns out the extra bars didn’t add nearly as much value as simply replacing the cloth tape with cushy gel tape.

Otto

rydabent

Another thing I have seen is videos of someone riding a 2 or 3 foot wide path on the side of a mountain, with a huge drop off on the outside. It looks like almost a death wish to me.

subgrade

I think I'll take that over riding a recumbent in city traffic.

sjanzeir

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for some kids to mount a small tire pump to the top tube, run a hose to an air horn mounted over the handlebars, and loudly blast their way through intersections. Those were the kids we knew better than to mess with.

SpeedyBlueBiker

Well here's my contribution.

SpeedyBlueBiker

SFC Rod

That's called a 1st Sergeant.

SFC Rod

That's called a 1st Sergeant.

rollagain

Never saw one IRL, but way back in, I think, the late 60s, early 70s, I saw a magazine ad for something called "the Franklin Bicycle" ... it was an upright configuration and had a mostly-conventional diamond frame, except that the top tube was lower, and bent up at the front to connect to the head tube, giving it a more forgiving standover height. What really set it apart was the front brake, which was a band brake. They'd had a custom rim extruded which had sort of a drum surface appended to one side of the rim, and a piece of (IIRC,) plastic pallet strapping tape forming the brake band around it. The ad raved about the superior stopping power of this. Being the sucker I was back then, I thought it was really cool, but the price was way out of my range then (thankfully).

Anybody else recall this thing?