Several people have pointed me to this bamboo trike that has the general look of a 1970s basket weaving class gone awry.

Sez Inhabitat.com:

Designed by Monash University student Alexander Vittouris, the Ajiro utilizes a production process that removes emissions instead of releasing them into the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s because the bamboo structure of this vehicle is grown straight out of the ground into a preformed mold. Vittouris envisions fields of bamboo gardens growing these human powered bicycles, which need only small modifications once mature to hit the streets.

I’m skeptical. For starters the thing steers with the back wheels using those levers that seem to pop up between the rider’s thighs, and pedals like a bigwheel. This eco-bigwheel seems designed for viral blog posts, not for riding. Sure it won a design contest, but I’m gonna remain a skeptic until we see some photos or a video of it actually being ridden and steered. (Or until he comes out with a smaller version that acknowledges its fundamental bigwheel-ness and calls it a children’s toy!)

Today is Seattle’s bike to work day, and it’s a gorgeous sunny Friday. Seemed like the perfect day to try weaving my tallbike through downtown traffic and up the hills of my 9 mile commute!

I just ran across this great little segment shot by Make Live about the freak bikes built by William Thomas Porter at Porter Cycles. Check out that flywheel dragster!

Here’s another video from the same shop.

See more freak bikes on Bikejuju here.

Perhaps you’ve seen hints about it in various posts, but for some reason I have not yet gotten around to a full post about building this tall bike last year in my friend Shawn’s shop.

Well, the full details will have to wait a little longer, but here’s the bike. It’s two tons of fun to ride – like being up on a horse. It has regular mountain bike geometry – a head tube angle of about 73 degrees – and a seven speed cassette.

The extended wheelbase avoids a common tallbike issue, where the rider is awkwardly far back above the back wheel, giving tallbikes a tendency to wheelie. If I were making it again there are several things I’d design differently, but those thoughts can wait for another post when I delve more deeply into the whole construction process. For now, just a simple portrait of the most fun bike in my stable.

Found here.
Previous freak bike entries on Bikejuju.

My first Burning Man is over, I’m no longer a “virgin,” the Man has burned, and suddenly after five magical days in Black Rock City with 50,000 other burners, I find myself back in the “default world” sitting at my desk trying to make sense of it all. I say that as if something like Burning Man can be untangled and made sense of, but part of the joy of the event is that it makes no sense and every kind of sense at the same time. It’s a manifold place, full of exuberant contradictions and surprises and discoveries and congruent incongruities at every turn. (And now the whole enormous city is just plain gone for another year!)

I took my new tallbike to Burning Man (more on the tallbike soon), and my camera. And I expected to do a little riding and a lot of photographing, wandering around to document the many wonderful varieties of bicycles and pedal-driven vehicles on the playa (as well as the art, and the people, and the scene).

This is Ellen from Vancouver on her wonderfully whimsical pencil bike. I rode around with her twice.

I had seen photos of this camel tallbike from Burning Man 2009 and loved seeing it gallop past in person.

But Burning Man really is about participating, not observing. That’s not just a trite saying, it’s a deep part of the community’s DNA. And so although I did go out and take photographs a few times, it really was much more gratifying to just ride around, participate, interact, and leave the camera at home instead of sticking it in peoples’ faces. Despite the many Burning Man photos on the internet, cameras are surprisingly few and far between in Black Rock City.

And much more than I ever expected, I found the playa a deeply satisfying place to ride just for the sheer joy of riding. There were huge open spaces, there were great art installations spaced widely apart at perfect biking distances, the air was constantly filled with beats to keep me energized, and there were other riders everywhere, dressed outlandishly, or skimpily, or not at all, and pedaling magnificent machines.

Truly everyone had a bike. Cars are forbidden–it is a pedestrian and cycling city–and the distances between neighborhoods, or art pieces, or theme camps, are measured in miles. The place is enormous.

Center Camp has bike racks all the way around, jammed with bikes night and day.

Granted the conditions were sometimes less than optimal. Black Rock City is located three miles out into a dry lake bed, and we had occasional 40 mile-per-hour winds, so by the end of the week my bike was caked in dust, my bottom bracket was creaking, and every bike in our camp was starting to need various kinds of tender lovin’. I had at least two rides through full-on dust whiteouts, rides made possible (and even fun!) only by clear goggles and a good dust mask.

One memorable dust storm ride took place at midnight, racing across the open playa following a camp-mate who was dressed as a rocketeer and waving a blue lightsaber, as he disappeared and reappeared ahead on his trike in the darkness and swirling dust, heading for a circus tent dance club called Ashram Galactica, which was showing Lawrence of Arabia on a huge outdoor video screen by the dusty dance floor. You just can’t make stuff like that up!

I began my summer in Belize, with three days on car-free Caye Caulker, where bikes are the best way to get around the hot, sandy streets. And I ended my summer the same way, in car-free Black Rock City, where thousands of bikes roam the playa, decorated and lit and gathering dust as they convey their fantastically clad riders to the next adventure. It was truly an amazing and transformative time. Burning Man, it turns out, is a cycling event as much as it is anything else. I hope to ride with you there next year!

A few more photos are on Flickr.

A special shout out to my uber-groovy camp-mates from It’s Your Burnday camp, and thanks to Isaac for the bikes-in-dust photos.

Previous Bikejuju posts: about Burning Man 2009 bikes, and anticipating Burning Man 2010.

Ok, it’s a relatively simple idea but I fell for it. I have to admit that I think this is pretty cool. “Precious” is a Specialized bike that has been outfitted with sensors that feed to a live web interface. The website shows the grade the bike is climbing or descending, the cardinal direction the bike is heading, and more. (Check the site during the day; during the night the bike, and the sensors, are still.)

In addition, in a tally reminiscent of scientist Michael Fay’s Megtransect expedition across the Congo basin, the website is tallying roadkills, honking cars, flat tires, and other vital cycling statistics in real time. And building on the temperature, humidity, grade, and map data, Precious has also been programmed to tweet various witty and relevant remarks as @yesiamprecious. (The bike currently has twice as many Twitter followers as its rider – that’s gotta smart!). I thought immediately of HAL, Wired drew a parallel to Knight Rider. You get the idea.

No Direction Home

The bike is being ridden by a woman named Janeen McCrae or “the noodleator” as a fundraiser for the Livestrong foundation, and she is also tweeting/blogging the trip at a website called No Direction Known. She had a rough day today, climbing hills in Kentucky, and I have mad respect for her, cycling solo across the country for a good cause. Her blog entries are honest, funny, and well written (though I do wish her RSS feed contained photos).

The sensor-laden bike aspect of this project is somewhat reminiscent of the Yahoo Purple Pedals bikes, which were loaded with GPS and Flickr-connected cameras, and lent to various riders as a Yahoo promotion. (Tech details on the Yahoo bikes) While those bikes had many interesting adventures, the one I remember best is the creative rider who took his, in the pre-election period, on a very carefully planned ride around Manhattan, so that the “dot every sixty seconds” automatic Yahoo map application would spell out “Obama.”

Precious was built by the interactive firm BreakfastNY, and thinking of the Yahoo project begs the question why Precious does not integrate any kind of camera. I guess some task has to be left to the rider in addition to sweating up the hills in the heat.  In any case, the country she is currently rolling through is beautiful and challenging, and her efforts deserve our support. She’s only trying to raise one dollar per mile, or $4262, which to be honest seems like a pretty low goal for a solo cross country ride, and it must be feeling especially low as those miles drag on during this section of the ride, climbing hills in the Kentucky heat. So I pitched in for a couple dozen miles tomorrow, and you should to.

Ride strong, Janeen! Say hello when you reach Seattle!

“Keep the day true with thy good juju” is rule number eight on the Tour de Fat website, and with rules like that, and a bike parade, and crazy freak bikes to ride, and bands, and beer, how could we stay away?!

Tour de Fat is a one day festival put on by the good folks at New Belgium Brewing company; this is the fourth year they are “meandering and pandering through 13 western cities spreading the good word about the positive societal offerings of the bicycle.” Last year our family was on the road promoting Lyanda’s book during Tour de Fat’s Seattle stop, and I was super sorry to miss it, so I vowed to go this year. Even better, it was an opportunity for a public unveiling of my newly-finished tallbike. But more on that in a future post. There was one (only one!) other tallbike rider there, and he came all the way from Colorado, so let’s give him the limelight.

Tour de Fat Seattle is held at Gasworks Park, and starts with a bike parade. The only mishap of the day was arriving for the announced 10 AM start time only to discover it had been changed to 11 AM, but the extra hour gave us an opportunity to grab coffee with Julian from Totcycle, and David and Beth of My Little Nomads. Then at 11 AM the party started! We rolled out of Gasworks Park as a long, costumed, happy, and extremely slow-moving parade.

After a brief stop at the Fremont Troll, we rolled back to Gasworks Park, where there were vendors, nonprofit booths, a giant beer garden and entertainment stages, and a corral of crazy freak bikes.

My daughter and I spent over an hour trying all the bikes, amongst a happy swirl of other bike daredevils, with much laughter and friendly exhortation and the occasional mishap. The bikes came in literally all shapes, sizes, and configurations, from the mildly odd to the completely un-rideable. It was a blast!

Tour de Fat continues on from here:

• August 14 – Portland, Waterfront Park
• August 21 – Boise, Anne Morrison Park
• September 4 – Fort Collins, Mothership
• September 11 – Denver, City Park
• September 25 – San Francisco, Lindley Meadows in Golden Gate Park
• October 2 – San Diego, Balboa Park
• October 9 – Tempe, Tempe Town Park
• October 23 – Los Angeles, L.A. Historic Park
• October 30 – Austin, Fiesta Gardens

Here’s a slideshow of all my photos from the day (they can also be found full-size on Flickr under a CC license free for the taking).

Here’s a video of the whole Tour de Fat ride rolling past after the stop at the troll (with me rolling past on the second tallbike at about 2:27):

I’ve spent a very pleasurable few minutes perusing the imaginative creations of Palo Alto’s Tom Kabat. There’s something I love about his philosophy, which he sums up as, “Bike design and execution are actually very forgiving if your expectations are low enough.”

He uses a unique CAD system to rough in the geometry of some of his bikes – in his case CAD stands for “cardboard assisted design.”

I’m particularly fond of this office chair bike, which he says was “built special for Bike To Work Day!”

See lots more of his creations on his website.

Previous Bikejuju freak bike posts.

PS: A special freak bike Friday shout out to Team JetStream, who rode Oregon’s 100-mile Reach the Beach charity ride on tall bikes.

I didn’t make it to this year’s Maker Faire, which is too bad because it looks like tons of fun, including lots of incredible bike-based maker madness.

Rock the Bike was there with their pedal-powered stage.

The original scraper bike team was there from Oakland. Cyclecide had their pedal-powered carnival rides.

Also there were the semi-famous bike-based vehicles: “Two-Penny”

And the Hennepin Crawler:

Maybe I’ll make it next year! (Meanwhile, the second annual Maker Faire Africa has been re-scheduled to August 28-29, 2010 at University of Nairobi. I actually need to go to Nairobi before September for work… gonna ponder that one!)

CC Flickr still photos by the ever-awesome Richard Masoner.