old's'cool

You've heard of the ass-hatchet... that second bike features the ass-machete, when the sketchy weld mod fails. And possibly an end of the line for men as far as further offspring goes. Regarding the rotated drops, I always find intriguing the positive feedback aspect of heavy braking, combined with the rider's high center of gravity. Further Darwinian opportunity for foreshortening the family lineage, of chimps with tools.

DrIsotope

If your unfounded opinion were accurate, a person could train themselves to ride the backwards bike, then go back and forth between regular and backwards. But we can't. It is 100% learned skill, just as riding a bicycle in the conventional fashion is 100% learned skill. The way our brain works, you have to unlearn one to learn the other. It's not like being ambidextrous. Riding the backwards bike takes a completely different skillset than riding a conventional one. If it wasn't a matter of learning/unlearning, the son who figured it out significantly faster (due to having better neural plasticity) would have taken the same amount of time as the father.

unterhausen

I have thought about building one of those backwards bikes. It would be pretty interesting to try to ride one at least. When I get in trouble on a bike, I remind myself the bike knows how to stay up better than I do. Not sure if that would help in this case or not. We stay upright on a bike by keeping the contact points with the ground under our center of gravity -- on average. This is done by both steering and leaning.

The welding on this one is horrible, but it probably served its purpose.

CroMo Mike 

Regarding the bike in post #1 : Ride it no-hands. Don't look at the bars.

Regarding learned skills, etc. If you hang around guys who fly stunts (3-d) with RC model helicopters and airplanes, you realize that from the pilot's point of view, some of the controls become "reversed" when the aircraft is flying toward him, or upside down, or both. Yet they quickly, repeatedly and seamlessly change flight orientations and make the aircraft do amazing things. And sometimes crash suddenly when they get confused.

cudak888 

Very true - it's why R/C flight simulators exist. It's really different standing in one spot watching the plane, than following it as you would in a conventional flight sim.

-Kurt

riva

Right arm on the left side of the handlebars... left arm to the right bar. And you should be good to go.

conspiratemus1

Easy answer to that. On a balancing vehicle that can turn, the higher the centre of gravity, the easier it is to balance because the tipping rate is slower. It is much easier to balance a broomstick vertically on the tip of your finger than it is to balance a stubby pencil. You can't move your hand/finger fast enough to keep it under the c of g as the pencil tips. The broomstick is easy. You can see this with an experiment. You'll find the broomstick is even easier to balance if you attach a few heavy C-clamps to the very top, raising the c of g even further. Even if the clamps are mounted off-centre, so the broomstick doesn't balance vertically, it is still easy to balance the broomstick.
Circus acrobats know this trick.

Of course if you are sitting astride a high-wheeler, you will fall a lot farther if you do fall. Ouch.

old's'cool

I flew RC sailplanes BITD. Never had confusion about control sense... I just visualized myself in the aircraft. Only issue would be if a tumble, or obstruction of view by e.g. sunlight left the direction of the aircraft temporarily in doubt. However, its response to the controls quickly re-established the correct orientation. Sometimes these buggers would climb so high in a thermal, that not only was the orientation completely academic, due to the craft's being a mere speck in the sky, but it would exceed the range of the transmitter, and eventually tumble or otherwise errantly manoeuver its way back into range, but with ambiguous orientation, until control sense re-established which direction it was actually pointed.
There existed a slight risk of overstressing the structure, while re-establishing control sense on such occasions, but it never happened to me or anyone I knew.

conspiratemus1

The quest to build unrideable bicycles is long and arduous. Failure is always waiting to pounce. Each time someone successfully rides your unrideable bicycle you have to go back to the drawing board and design in new modes of unrideability. Remember back in the olden days when people claimed that the spinning wheels hold the bicycle up gyroscopically.?

clubman 

Guy in video tried that. Fail.

Cycle Tourist

I remember an episode of candid camera where a car was modified to steer backwards and a lady tried to get people to help her parallel park. No one could do it.
Bikes are even harder. Why climb mountains? Because they're there.

Lurch

We saw one like this at a fair in a small village in England once. The fair was a fund raiser for some cause and the bike made a good contribution as no one we saw could go more than a couple of feet before falling over. I have since come up with the theory that reversing or crossing my arms on the bars might work. It's a reasonable theory for an ignoramus to carry around.

riva

Two ignoramuses then.

Hell of an anti-theft measure if you can manage to get it down.