Go Home! Folding Electric Recumbent Bicycle See All Photos
   

Unfortunatly, I only have a few photographs of this.

I do have cad drawings though. If you are thinking of building something similar, I'd be happy to mail you DXF's.

This bike was my follow up to my electrically powered Anthrotech trike. I wanted something which would fit in the trunk on a car - which meant it had to fold, was electrically assisted, two wheeled and fairly light.
    I designed a clever folding mechanism where the frame hinged in the middle and this also formed the pivot for rear suspension. The hinge was offset sugh that when folded, the front and back wheels are side by side but when unfolded, perfectly in line.

The design has under-seat steering and is fitted with a fibreglass seat supplied by Optima in the US.
    The main spar of the bike is telescopic. This is partly to make it fold smaller and partly to move the seat forwards and backwards to adjust for riders height. The rear suspension just consists of a rubber block attached to the rear swinging arms. When you sit on the bike, this presses on the underside of the telescopic tube effectively locking it in place.

The chain runs over a pair of pulleys with the same axis as the trailing arm hinge.

This arrangement means that the chain path length does not change much when folded or when the suspension moves. Works pretty well too.


    I had originally intended that the steering operate by pulling two brake cables which in turn pull either side of a 'T' bar on the head stock. This would mean the seat could move forwards and back without affecting the steering. As it turned out, the cables stretched too much even when tensioned and it was just impossible to ride!

The steering was changed to use a single telescopic push rod which you have to adjust at the same time as the telescopic tube - not the end of the world.

    The bike is powered by a Heinzmann electric hub motor supplied by a pair of 17Ah Hawger Genesis batteries via a 4QD Uni8 speed controller with a twist throttle. This gives me huge acceleration and a top speed of about 20mph....err...I mean....no more than 15mph....Officer!
    The under-seat steering, combined with the dodgy steering geometry makes it fairly hard to ride, but OK once you get the hang of it. It's low profile and resulting lack of drag gives it quite a lick of speed even without fairings.
    In the future, I would like to modify it to change the angle of the front forks a little to make the steering a little more stable and possibly move to an over seat, tiller style steering - kind of chopper like!
       
    Click Here to see all the photos of the build process.