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Shawn Raymond's Tandem Bike is Shorter Than Yours (Video)
This isn't a "both peddlers are equal" bike. The person sitting in the rear seat is in the "control" position. Because of the wide handlebars, he or she can reach around the person in the front seat to steer. The person in the front seat can't really do much except enjoy the ride, or maybe lean back and whisper a sweet nothing or two if the person in the back seat is someone the front-seater loves. The bike is called the UnaTandem (turn music off in the lower left corner of the page), and Shawn Raymond tried to get Kickstarter funding for it back in 2012 but only raised $1651, which was quite a ways short of his $70,000 goal. So, with Kickstarter in the rear view mirror, Shawn is trying to do his own crowdfunding. Will this work? Can he get enough people to buy into his idea of a tandem bike that gives you the old "riding on the handlebars" feeling to get his company off the ground? Can he use his own money (assuming he has enough) to build and sell his tandem bikes without bringing in outside investors at all? And then there's the price problem. Shawn says he's looking at a retail price in the $850 range. That may not seem like a lot to some, but you can buy 10 Walmart bikes for that much. Or four or five bikes from specialty bicycle or sporting goods stores. Despite the high price, some will undoubtedly buy these short tandem bikes and like them. But will enough people buy enough of them to make this a viable business? Shawn obviously thinks so. (Alternate Video Link)
Slow "news" day?
So, pretty safe to assume Roblimo and Shawn Raymond are buds?
It's too expensive for how goofy you're going to feel riding it. Also, small wheels may be strong, but they're going to need to be. Stuff that is a relatively minor obstacle for a larger wheel is going to outright stop this bicycle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
they also don't go over small obstacles as easily, maintain momentum less well (for the same reason), and are decidedly much more dorky on a tandem than full sized wheels.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
What a terrible excuse for a website.
I go there without javascript and they don't even show me a picture of the bike. I guess it is more important to them to have a pretty website than it is to maximize the number of customers. Not like they couldn't do both.
What a bunch of idiots. Why not make the text exactly the same colour as the background and have done with it? After all, all the other sites are doing it - it must be right!
The super-long rear seatpost will put incredible torque on the top tube joint and eventually break the frame.
Blame autocorrect?
you had me at #!
Put booster seats in the front of the car, and move all the driving mechanisms to the back seat. I'm SURE it will sell. ... I wouldn't buy one though.
Plus, the inventor says 'UUUUUHHHH' before almost every single word... as if his brain isn't working, and is very slow... uhhhh.... and he uuuhhhhhh, doesn't uuuuhhhh, know uuuuuhhhh, what the hell he is talking about.
No Thanks.
Irritatingly, laptops have speakers built in; worse, phones have to have speakers on. But I still like my desktop and the certainty I get from having a physical switch. I don't care what games you play to try to subvert my settings: I am not going to have to hunt down your noisy tab.
Wow, that bike looks really horrible to ride. My knees hurt just from watching the video. It looks like a collapsable commuter bike stretched out a bit.I really don't see the appeal.
Here linux is superior thanks to having the volume control as a separate panel applet, not a tiny icon hidden in the tray like Windows does. And the volume can be changed with the scroll wheel whether you open the slider or not.
I have an amp at near 100% volume and never touch it.
I never thought I'd ever see a guy being pleased because his was smaller!
That is all.
That's some claim - probably refers to it's small turning circle (why would I care?). But that incredible fork angle (looks about 45 deg) means that the front end will be falling as you steer from straight-ahead (assuming he has given the front wheel some caster) which means a gravitational tendency to steer away from the straight ahead, made worse by the relatively low gyroscopic stability of small wheels. Conventional fork geometry evolved the way it is for good reason, but I guess he had to compromise to get the rider's positions to where they are.
Still, as I guess these things will never get further than the seaside promenade or the pavement (US sidewalk) I suppose it does not matter
There are several home-built tandems with individual handlebars, like this one I saw in Amsterdam : https://rosnix.net/~per/album/...
Also this child seat for the Brompton folding bike works quite like the original post : http://documentally.com/2011/0...
Last but not least, the german Hase Pino semi-recumbent bike. The captain sit in the rear in an upright position, the stoker is seated in a comfy recumbent seat in the front. The bike is selling quite well in Germany. It's used like normal tandem bikes for couples going on vacation and errands together, but also for transportation of kids and people with various disabilities - the bike is very adaptable to various capabilities of the riders. http://hasebikes.com/84-1-Tand...
Price? About 3000 Euro for the Pino. Probably out of range for people considering bikes a toy or something to hang on the rear of your RV / SUV. But quite OK for a vehicle that can meet a lot of your mobility needs. Bicycles can pretty successfully do much of the same city transportation done by cars (40-50% of all trips in Copenhagen and Netherlands are made by bike), and if you save on gas (or even more - many people don't bother getting a motor vehicle at all, actually) you can afford much better bikes than the walmart bike-like objects (yes, we have that in Europe too).
+1 Clicked link, got annoying loud music, instantly closed. F&#@ off with that, and take your funding request with you.
Shawn Raymond's Tandem Bike is Shorter Than Yours
How do you know? I could have an even shorter tandem. You don't know me. You don't know what I've got in my garage. Get off my lawn!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Hasn't Linux catch up with the 20th century? I can control app sound volume singularly since window vista. Browser is almost always on mute.
or do you still have to install a couple packages here and there and pray it was implemented in your specific desktop environment tray applet?
as smaller wheels may be stronger but you kinda need rotating mass to help stabilize, and move the pedal strike out of the picture. $850 is a great price for a well made tandem. It's overall a step above simply brazing together most of two standard diamond frames.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
No /. commenter will ever have the ability to use a tandem, regardless of whether they want to.
For multiple reasons.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yes, you can get a cheap as crap bike at Walmart for that price, but that's the bottom of the barrel bike from them. A sporting goods store is barely any better than a department store. I don't know what you consider a specialty bike store, but I'd expect that they carry Trek, Giant, and Raleigh. $850 is a mid level fitness Trek (FX 7.4 to be exact). Trek's only tandem is 1$200. Raleigh's is $930. Giant doesn't even have one. Heck, look here: http://www.mtbtandems.com/
The initial description of the bike intrigued me as I thought it was a better engineered more compact and efficient tandem bicycle, maybe something like the luge sled of bicycles. Instead after seeing the picture and being subjected to an awful website that autoplays music, I see it is nothing more than an expensive horrible Frankenstein's monsters of a bmx bike.
Peddlers are never equal. Whoever makes the most sales is best.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
God ya, start it up at FULL FUCKING VOLUME!
I really dig bikes! Road, Mountain, CC, tandem, whatever.. I will never buy this bike. In all honesty there's a reason he didn't make his goal because it's a stupid idea. This _might make it as a boardwalk exclusive as a rental for $5/hour. But that's about it.
Pulseaudio solved that, but was broken or misconfigured by distros early on, still can use too much CPU sometimes. But it works. What hasn't changed is half the nerds bitch about it when given the occasion.
You will miss GUI environment support in most cases if you go to a competing audio stack (OSSv4) but only a subset of nerds know about that one.
For the particular page I wasn't bothered because clicking on an easy to locate and big enough "pause" button was enough. I think that long term we'll need using a html5 audio/video blocker browser extension.
So is it better to pedal with your knees way out to the side, or have someone's knees constantly hitting your butt?
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
yuck.
So with the two riders so close to each other, if you hit a bump or have to stop suddenly, the rear rider's head may hit the back of the front rider's helmet.
If you're in the back, you might want to wear a mouth guard...
Phones have to have speakers on? No. They have vibrate and silent modes for a reason. And what phone are you using that doesn't have independent volume controls for ring tone and media?
It is very presumptuous to claim one has invented a "new" bicycle just by rehashing normal parts. Millions of amateur inventors in every country in the world have been doing the same thing for 100+ years. Fans of vintage bicycles will tend to say that 'Everything ride-able--and a lot more things not--has already been done; I just can't find the picture'.
Vintage tandem bicycles that allowed a smaller rider in front were typically called "kangaroo" tandems.
I don't remember anything *exactly* like this, but I know I've seen a few that were very similar except for the handlebar arrangement.... -and I don't consider myself to be that great of a fan of vintage cycling. The vintage examples I recall vaguely had a more-complicated arrangement, which leads me to suspect that simpler ones were probably tried.
That tandem is not home-built. Do your favorite image search for "onderwater tandem", you'll see a bunch of them.
Like EVERYBODY else, I'm not sure why this was posted in Slashdot... but maybe you'll give my three-person unicycle Kickstarter a mention? At the moment it is simply a concept drawing... I'm hoping to raise $5 million and would probably deliver a working production bike after I've exhausted the funds at my design facility in the Caribbean.
If U wanted a tandem with both riders watching the road, I'd rather go for a Pino from Hase bikes (http://hasebikes.com/95-1-Tandem-Pino-Allround.html). More expensive, but so much nicer and confortable!
There's way too many people who think that big wheels have a stabilizing effect. They don't. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... .
They do suck more at potholes, but they are also much stronger (as wheels) though the load carrying capacity of the tire is reduced (i.e, a 29x2.35 *tire* can carry more weight than a 20x2.35 tire).
$850 would be an aggressive price for a small run bike. I know what I am talking about here, I own a small run bike (a cargo bike), it's larger, but the frame alone was $1000 retail, and they're pretty much all like that. Most niche market bikes cost more than $1000, and while this one has not so much tubing, it has just as many welds, and it pays the tandem tax (more drive train, second seat, and lots of parts are extra beefy for the increased power and load -- I also own a tandem.)
I share the concerns about the fork angle, but you'd really want to ride one to figure out if it works or not.
The stoker not able to see the road is a problem for some stokers, so I think this is an interesting thing. I wouldn't buy it without riding it first.
TLDR version: "Big Box Store" bikes are not a metric for what a bicycle "costs", and cheap bicycles have high operating expenditures. Why not spend more on capital expenditures (the purchase), take less trips to the bike store for repairs, and have a nicer bicycle to boot?
BBSBs are the bane of every bike mechanic, because 1)their owners have extremely unrealistic expectations in terms of cost of labor and parts (ie: "I paid $75 for this thing, you want $50 to replace this whosamahwhasis?") 2)the components are almost never standard (so parts are not normally stocked, or may not even be available) 3)Everything, and I mean everything, is as cheap as can be, and falls apart, so they're 'frequent fliers.' The cables and housings are weak and made of poor, incompatible metals so they stretch making proper adjustment difficult, and corrode the second water even comes near them. The bearings are poorly sealed (ditto on water) and substandard (so they fail quickly.)
I know shops that pretty much point-blank refuse to even work on such bikes. Just the overhead of all the extra time explaining to the customer why they have to pay "so much" sometimes puts a shop into the red on that particular transaction.
The bicycle industry is full of competition. There are three major component manufacturers, dozens of frame builders, and more than three major distributors of parts and bikes in the US. In my city I can name about twelve bicycle shops within a 4 mile radius of me, and each one of them stocks at least half a dozen brands. If you think the bike industry is a "ripoff", then by all means, start your own component, framebuilding, distributor, or retail business and "do everyone else in."
The problem is that bicycles are considered toys, and as such: people pump $60 of gas into the tank of their car that they're paying $400/month for a loan plus at least $100/month to insure....and then go to the local bike store and whine and bitch and moan about the price tag on a $400 bicycle that will last them years of commuting...
Please help metamoderate.
It's a terribly ugly bike - and seems it would be awkward to ride. I have no idea how this made it to Slashdot (seems to be a recurring theme). Please stop using this to drum up funds for some dudes crappy ideas who already failed horribly on kickstarter, years ago..because their product sucks.
As a "real" tandem person (see here), I must say this thing looks like a toy to me. Of course, it is also far less expensive than the bikes made by serious tandem bike companies, who often make bikes with derailer and brake systems that alone cost as much as this monstrosity.
We've had our tandem going 60-70mph (down mountain roads). There's no way I would trust this thing for such riding. Maybe it is OK for some gentle cruises, but that's it. And furthermore, there's a far better design for front-stoker visibility.
For a front-passenger bike, try a Bilenky ViewPoint: http://www.bilenky.com/viewpnt... or a Hase Pino http://hasebikes.com/148-1-tan...
I'm a fan of foldable bikes. Think: Dahon and/or Bike Friday. They solve one of the biggest problems with bikes in conjunction with an automotive culture: getting "stuck" with a bike that you rode to work but won't be driving home with.
So, I've spent a lot of time on a 16" wheel on a Dahon Stowaway with performance tires, and a finely tuned internal 3-speed hub that made it into a surprisingly fast speed demon. I loved it - it was fast, casual, and convenient. Sadly, it was stolen.
The small, 16" wheels are surprisingly effective on commuter bike! No, you don't go off road on 16" wheels - but ask yourself: do you really do that much anyway?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My wireless keyboard has a audio mute button and a rocker switch for volume control. Most laptops have dedicated function key-pairs for mute and volume control.
Even the video footage of the bike demo had me reaching for my keyboard volume button.
~~
This is terrible and stupid.
Why the hell is this on Slashdot?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I should say, in part because of the size of the contact patch. There's also something there to do with the angle of the wheel where it meets the obstacle. The old school wheelchair wheels on my utility cart have solid tires, the contact patch isn't just narrow but short as well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, nice to learn :-)