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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)
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.
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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.
I could see it being fun for kids in a neighborhood, but I have trouble taking it seriously otherwise.
True. But I'll bet those kids could find a much more fun way to spend $850.
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.
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).
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/
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.
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.
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.