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Some day I've got to expand my hardware repertoire beyond hose clamps. (Diva suggests those boltdown clamps one secures seatposts with.)

hose-clamp version of BadMotivator

BadMotivator is back, tearing up the road and sucking it down. Woooogh. I had a short ride on it during the last mission and I'm lost. Truly the sexiest of choppers. I've got it pretty bad for Catastrophe, but what's hot about that one is its ton of all-paramilitary-lookin' gear. This one, just the frame does it. And it's a hardware frame, all BMX stems and machined parts.

So I've started with green bike, got a tentative 2-BMX-stem-mediated fork worked out (that involves BMX bars as well, in there). What's in the head tube is a chunk of steer tube that's threaded at both ends. Two stems stick out of that - some normalish/7 one up to handlebars, a BMX one down to the BMX bars's truss bar. From the real grippable part of the BMX bars, there's another BMX stem down to the steer tube of the green bike's original fork. So, rake and such are extremely adjustable. Can't tighten the joints to as steady as a fork wants to be, so needs some redundancy forkage. Gotta decide between something parallel up the front from a second fork (to what?), or two somethings going up the sides from the fork blades to the bars.

oct2003 In other news, Nameless's ship Compliance now has a... stem... of exactly this design. In unrelated news, I'm less motivated.

a tallish Tall Bike

I found a black-painted 24"-wheels one-piece-crank mountain bike the other day, just what I was waiting for. (Yay, one-piece cranks - that don't so much prefer to unscrew themselves when you flip them...) This is well on its way to becoming the next-size-up tall bike from MoxieMoron. Mox is a dear, but slooow (little wheels, one low gear) - and it'd probably be easier to start over to get something with more gears and higher.

All the known-solution problems are finished - the bottom bracket and rear wheel are flipped, the front fork and wheel are downsized (20" front wheel from Arun, 20"-wheel front fork from this girl's Tyler kiddie bike).

It remains to attach handlebars and seat and a chain. Somehow...

Handlebars: Well, the steer tube is pathetically small, no good to take a stem. Probably go with MegaSeth's suggestion (that I only half took for MoxieMoron) of hose-clamping conduit to both blades of the front fork - each gets a stem, and some sort of straight bars go through.

ThreeSpeed aka DrMoreau reminded about scooter stems. They were on my mind before I'd trashpicked one, and now I have.

Seat post: Tricky. Gotta stay out of the way of the chain and cranks. Maybe part of the structure can be a front fork attached to the hub of the rear wheel - if I have any that can (be made to) reach wide enough.

Maybe the YellowBug BMX-stem-from-seatstay design would work.

Chain: I'm not sure there's a good place for derailers =/

For some reason, I find this one has a very military look so far.

BTW, this is on hold while I work on the Recombinant, since I suddenly built a 26"-wheels 3-speed tall bike, VWBeetle.

a better recumbent than recombinant

What about the same thing, but off a bmx bike, so the seat could actually come out of the seatpost?? Well, even if it couldn't, you're at least sitting on the top tube instead of in the step-through scoop-out.

an upright bike with underseat steering?