Transcending the Pedicar: The EcoVia, Part 2

Human Powered Commuter Vehicle Criteria

1.       Weather Protection

2.       Statically Stable

3.       Reasonable Cruise Speed

4.       Cargo Carrying Capacity

5.       No Wider than a Bicycle

6.       Same Height as an Auto

7.       Comfortable posture and ease of entry

8.       Two-wheel drive

9.       Car-type Wheels

10.   Electric Assist for Hills

Part 1 of the EcoVia design post can be found below.

http://lefthandedcyclist.blogspot.com/2012/08/ecovia-healthy-electric-hybrid-vehicle.html

The EcoVia 2.1 was well on the way to becoming a vehicle that satisfied the HPCV criteria. Unfortunately I did not feel it satisfied #7. I did not consider the riding posture as comfortable as it needed to be. The bottom bracket was higher than the seat and it needed to be below the seat, at least four inches below if possible.

EcoVia 2.2

I had fallen victim to “the recumbent design problem” where the pedals wanted to be where the front wheel was. (Refer to “Recumbents and Convergent Evolution” below.)

http://lefthandedcyclist.blogspot.com/2012/03/recumbents-and-convergent-evolution.html

  

For reasons of leaning functionality the wheel layout was fixed at one front and two rear wheels, with the front wheel steering. I wanted a compact package, so having the cranks behind the front wheel was rejected. So too was putting the cranks before the front wheel because of the skittish handling that came along with that location.

My first thought was to squash the pedal path, thus lowering the upper position of the pedal without causing interference with the wheel in the lower position. In his article “The Development of Modern Recumbent Bicycles”, Dave Wilson presents three sketches of mechanisms that produce elongated pedal paths.

 The simplest of these is known as a crank-rocker (actually crank, connecting rod and rocker) mechanism in kinematics and historically as a treadle mechanism. It can be made very rigid, since there is only one link between the pedals and the frame. It also has a fixed range of motion with built in decelerations and accelerations at the ends of the stroke. The literature seems to suggest that this type of reciprocating motion produces more power than levers pulling chains over one-way clutches. Recall the latter approach was used in the Pedicar. (Refer to “Pedicar Technology”, below.)

After rotary cranks, the treadle drive may be the most often used method of converting leg motion into rotary motion.  It predates cranks being used to propel velocipedes. It was used in the first attempts to build a safety bicycle and it is used in most children’s pedal cars. My favorite period picture of a treadle driven bicycle is Oscar Egg’s recumbent form the 1930’s. Egg had set the hour record several times on a conventional bicycle and he competed with Francois Faure in recumbent record attempts.

My implantation of the treadle mechanism for the EV2.2 was a bit different from previous embodiments. I fabricated a pedal that would allow connections to both sides of the pedal’s axle. The second connection was formed by brazing a bolt to the pedal’s steel dustcap. The pedal mounting was reversed with the normal thread being mounted outboard of the pedal. The rocker link was connected to this thread. The other end of the rocker was supported by a pair of Igus bushings, which, in turn, were held by a tube that was brazed to a rectangular frame that surrounded the front wheel. This frame did dual duty, since it also contained the pivots that would hold the front tilting faring. As result of the outboard location of the rocker links, they did not interfere with the front-wheel's ability to turn. The other, inboard end of the pedal was attached to a bent connecting rod whose other end was attached to a conventional crankset with the arms shortened. The connecting rod was bent to clear the top of the tire. The entire mechanism was very compact and it positioned the rider’s feet in a low and very comfortable position.

As successful as the packaging turned out to be, the performance was anything but. You see, I had overlooked one critical fact. Almost all the historical uses of treadle drives were on bicycles with fixed gears. The motion of the vehicle carried the pedals over the dead spots at the ends of travel. Problems with the dead spots became painfully obvious when attempting to climb even the most gradual of hills. As a bicycle moves progressively slower when the rider climbs increasing grades, the rider must apply the propulsive torque over a greater portion of the pedal stroke. (An explanation of this will come in a future post on why bicycles climb steep hills so poorly.) With the treadle mechanism, the rider can only apply a torque through the middle of the stroke. Pedal forces required to produce torque near the end of stroke become enormous and forward motion is lost.

I had an old Bullseye elliptical sprocket with a 1.56:1 ratio. I thought I could use it to modify the sinusoidal pedal velocity to improve hill climbing. Mounted in one orientation it would slow the pedals in the middle of the stroke and speed them up near the end.  This is the orientation I expected to improve performance but to no avail. Rotating the elliptical sprocket 90deg also showed no improvement, and I concluded that the round sprocket gave the best performance, which was still woefully inadequate. Oddly enough, however, the cable-clutch system used on the Pedicar, while lacking in power output due to limited pedaling cadence, did work well on steep hills because the output torque was constant except at the extreme ends of pedal travel.  While this approach would have solved the hill climbing problem, its limited power output would have restricted the speed of the vehicle. So much for unconventional drives…

EcoVia 2.3

I realized that if the bottom bracket was almost touching the tire, I could drop the bottom bracket height from 26” to 20”. If I kept the bottom bracket close to the steering axis and spaced the crank arm as far apart as I could, I might have enough front wheel lock to have a viable solution. I bought the widest triple-crank bottom-bracket axle I could find. I coupled this crank to an intermediate crank (left over from the treadle drive) on the left side and tensioned that chain with a spring-loaded chain tensioner. The right side of the intermediate-crank carried triple chainrings.

The acid test was riding the two miles to the library. The overlapped-crank drive passed with flying colors, the only crank/tire interference occurring during very tight, slow turns.

 In addition to lowering the bottom bracket, I changed the lower mounting position of the shock to raise the seat and I moved the seat back forward by adding an extra bend near the top. The result, while not being as ideal as the Avatar 2000, was a great improvement, enough to make the EV2.3 comfortable to ride.

All of the EcoVias used caliper brakes on all three wheels. Per tradition, the left lever actuates the front brake. The right lever actuates both rear brakes through a linkage that balances the forces applied to each rear brake. The travel of the right lever was increased to produce the greater cable motion required to actuate two brakes.

The middle cable from the brake lever is attached to a toggle linkage. The ends of the toggle linkage are attached to brake links that pull cables attached to the individual brakes. As the toggle flattens out, the forces on the brake links increase. If one caliper clamps the rim first, its brake link stops moving and the toggle motion continues to move the other brake link until its caliper clamps the rim. This balancing mechanism would be unnecessary if hydraulic disk brakes were used. Unfortunately there is no room for the disk rotor on the cantilevered hubs.

Now, actuation of the rear brakes had an unexpected consequence.  During leaning, each wheel rotates slightly with respect to its wheel beam. Since braking prevents this rotation, the act of braking the rear wheels inhibits leaning.  So during an emergency braking maneuver, when leaning is undesirable, it is automatically prevented. 

Below is a picture of the suspension-shock attachment locations, the wheel-beam-reverser linkage and the disk brake sector used as the lean-lock mechanism. The vehicle is in its upright position.

Below are two pictures of the vehicle leaned over.

Below is a detail of the seat. The lever on the rider’s left engages the motor. The lever on the rider’s right engages the lean lock.

Electric Hill Assist

The electric hill assist uses a geared Astroflight cobalt motor that drives one of the rear tires through a 2”dia. aluminum puck. The puck is brought into contact with the tire by pulling upon the motor engagement lever, above. The gear ratio of the motor is 2.7:1. At 24v, the motor can put out 675W at 3430rpm at the motor rotor. The results in a vehicle speed of 7.6mph for a vehicle payload of 300# climbing a 15% grade. The speed should top out about 15mph on flat terrain. The batteries and motor controller are not incorporated at this point.

Faring

The faring frame is made up of a ½”dia. tubular steel loop and ½ x1/8”aluminum strips bolted to the loop and pop riveted to each other. ¼ x 1/8 ” aluminum strips are pop riveted to the wider strips. A polycarb windscreen is pop riveted to the ½” strips and a foam nosecone made up of laminated insulating foam is bolted to the front of the loop. At this point the faring frame remains uncovered. I am soliciting suggestions for a heat-shrinkable material to cover the frame. 

 The faring tips forward to allow for the rider to get into the vehicle.

The rider sits at about the same height as the driver of a typical minivan.

When the faring frame is covered, the total weight of the EcoVia will be about 100#. 60# is for the tricycle proper, 20# is for the motor and batteries and 20# is for the faring and mounting framework.

I consider the EcoVia 2.3 a proof-of-concept vehicle. All the features that comprise the design work, but features were added piecewise instead of being integrated as in a production vehicle, or even a prototype. So, before discussing how the EcoVia transcends the Pedicar, I would like to paint a word picture of what a productized version of the EcoVia would be like.

·         11-36 tooth, 10-speed cassettes are readily available. (The EV2.3 uses a 12-32 tooth, eight speed cassette.) Attaching one of these to the central driveshaft and using a single chainring would make an intermediate bottom bracket and secondary crankset unnecessary for flat terrain and would greatly simplify the drivetrain. For hills, the motor drive would provide the extra climbing ability. (Sram now makes a 10-42t, 11 cog cassette, but at a cost of almost eight times the 11-36 model, it is not a cost-effective alternative.)  Instead of using bar-end-shift levers at the ends of the handlebars, a twist grip or a trigger shifter could be used. Elimination of the bar ends would allow the width of the faring to be decreased at least by three inches.

·         Recall that the frame is made up of two pieces. The upper frame is a seat tube which is supported by a pivot at the fork end and a shock absorber at the rear. The lower frame is a 2”dia. tube that supports the fork, pedals, driveshaft, wheel beams and banking linkage. Much of the lower frame was carried over from the rear-steering EV1. If the lower frame is redesigned, it can be made significantly lighter. The weight of the rider is supported by the seat-tube pivot in front and the shock in the rear. The seat pivot loads go almost directly into the front tire through the fork. The shock loads go almost directly to the rear wheels through the wheel-beam-reverser linkage. So the lower frame does not carry these loads. The lower frame holds the head tube stationary, reacts the chain forces between the cranks and the driveshaft and fixes the lower shock mount and the reverser –pivot with respect to the drive-shaft tube. These loads are small enough that a space frame made up of thin-wall ½”dia. tubing can be substituted for the 2”dia. tube in the current version. This should significantly reduce the weight, since three, ½”dia-.028wall steel tubes weigh .45#/ft, while one, 2”dia-.065 wall tube weighs 1.4#/ft. The seat  tube could be dipped in the middle to aid in step over when getting onto vehicle.

Refer to the sketch below.

The second major change to the lower frame is to support the wheel beams directly on the drive shaft using ball bearings instead of using an intermediate tube and bushings. The over all goal is to try and reduce the weight of the tricycle proper to about 50#.

·         Currently the motor drives only one rear wheel through a puck. To take advantage of the dual-wheel drive, the motor must be coupled directly to the driveshaft. This can be accomplished by mounting a large diameter gear on the driveshaft and driving it with a small gear on the motor. The motor can be pivoted out of the way to disengage the gears. A ratchet could be used on the motor gear so the motor could stay in continuous engagement, but then the ability to drive the vehicle in reverse using the motor would be lost.

·         Currently, the faring pivots on a frame mounted ahead of the front wheel. If the faring was to pivot at the back of the vehicle, above the storage rack, the front frame could be eliminated and the weight of the faring reduced. The goal is to reduce the faring weight to 15#. This approach also opens up the area around the front wheel to make swapping out the wheel in the event of a flat tire easy.

·         The overall weight goal for the tricycle, the faring and the motor drive is #85. Since much of the weight for the motor drive is in the batteries, a weight reduction in this feature is unlikely

·         The EcoVia would be sold as a base tricycle, with the motor drive and the faring as individual options. This would allow the cost of the base tricycle to be minimized.

So how would a production EcoVia compare with the Pedicar?

1.       The pedal drive would be more efficient.
2.       Because of the compact and streamlined faring , the EV could attain higher speeds.

3.       Because of the ability to lean into turns, the EV could corner at these higher speeds without the danger of tipping over.

4.       The EV would weigh about 2/3 of the Pedicar.

5.       The rider posture of the EV would not be as comfortable as the Pedicar, nor would the entry and exit be as easy.

Improvements in four out of five categories makes the EcoVia a clear improvement over the Pedicar.

So the concept is proven. What needs to happen now is to find an agency with the resources and interest to take the EcoVia into production. Possibly a reader of this blog?

Part 3 can be found below.

http://lefthandedcyclist.blogspot.com/2015/03/transcending-pedicar-ecovia-part-3_14.html

Hephaestus    

Transending the Pedicar: the EcoVia, Part 1

For those devoted students of Bob Bundschuh's Pedicar, the title of this post may seem presumptous. After all, the Pedicar is a high-water mark in the production of a practical human-powered commuter vehicle. However,we know a lot more about human power than in 1973, when the top speed of a rider sprinting on a bicycle was about 45mph and the first edition of "Bicycling Science" was a year in the future. So the Pedicar's linear transmission was based on a lack of understanding of human-power generation and the speed potential of this type of vehicle was underestimated by about half. There is significant potential to improve a Pedicar-type vehicle's performance and still meet the design criteria below.

Human Powered Commuter Vehicle Criteria

1.       Weather Protection

2.       Statically Stable

3.       Reasonable Cruise Speed

4.       Cargo Carrying Capacity

5.       No Wider than a Bicycle

6.       Same Height as an Auto

7.       Comfortable posture and ease of entry

8.       Two-wheel drive

9.       Car-type Wheels

10.   Electric Assist for Hills

It should be no surprise that when I compiled the HPCV list above, I had quite a bit of time invested in building a proof-of-concept vehicle that I felt would satisfy these criteria. Early on, the vehicle was christened the EcoVia.

The broad approach was a banking-recumbent tricycle with two-wheel drive.

Four functions had to be distributed among the wheels. These are steering, driving, banking and braking. Each wheel had its own caliper brake, so braking did not affect the distribution of the other functions. Driving and steering the same wheels required the complexity of some type of constant-velocity coupling, so steering and driving were separated. From this decision, since two wheels were driven, the single wheel did the steering. The two driven wheels did the banking. To eliminate the interference between the cranks and the steered wheel the steered wheel was placed in the rear, resulting in a rear-steering tricycle.

EcoVia 1.4

Below are several sketches of the expected body shape for the enclosed vehicle. 

Now, rear-steering tricycles have inherent stability issues. (Refer to “Bucky and the Urbee”, below). These issues were exacerbated by the requirement that the vehicle lean into the turns.

Recall that vehicle lean in a stable turn is an inverse function of the steering angle and a direct function of the square of the speed. (Refer to “The Drymer and Varna Lean Forward”, below). Now for a HPCV, without any electronic banking control, there are three approaches to control leaning. The best and simplest approach, for tricycles that are inherently stable, is free leaning, where the vehicle balances like a bicycle and leans accordingly. Rear-steering trikes are not inherently stable so this approach was not attempted. One of the remaining approaches is to control steering and leaning separately. This can be ergonomically challenging in addition to requiring twice the typical steering hardware.  The remaining approach is to link steering and leaning to one control. This, while simpler than the former, usually results in too much lean at higher speeds and not enough lean at lower speeds. The approach I used was a combination of these methods. More specific details a bit later…

The heart of the dual-drive leaning design is the use of a dual-function central driveshaft made up of three concentric tube assemblies.

A chain from the cranks turns the drive shaft proper, which is made from a thick-walled, 1” dia. tube. The free-hub body is brazed directly to the drive shaft without a ratchet. On each outboard end of the drive shaft, a 16t freewheel is attached. The left side used a convention right-handed freewheel and the right side used a 16t Southpaw freewheel. This freewheel had a reversed ratchet and a left-handed thread to prevent it from unscrewing during driving. Second and third chains connect the freewheels to 14t fixed gears on the drive wheels. The fixed gears were glued to the hubs using red Loctite, again to prevent the cog on the right wheel from unscrewing during driving. All three wheels, and the spare, have cogs glued on them so the wheels are interchangeable. The wheels are built up from Bullseye hubs running on 12mm Allen bolts as axles and use 20” dia. rims. I am using 1.5” wide tires.

Driving the paired wheels through a ratchet for each wheel allows for differential rotation of the wheels during turning while providing a posi-traction effect which preserves traction on slippery surfaces. The Pedicar used a similar approach, and, as a result, was able to climb steep grades on snow covered roads.

The drive shaft is supported by four ball-ball bearings that are in turn supported by two segments of 1.5” dia. tubing. These segments are attached to the 2” diameter tube that makes up the spine of the frame.

Two 1.75” dia. tubes fit over the 1.5” tubes and are supported by four IGUS bushings. Each 1.75” tube has a 13” long, 1.5” dia. tube brazed to it at an angle slightly less than 90 deg. On the other end of this tube a small tube with a 12mm bore is brazed parallel to the 1.75” tube. The small tube accepts the axle for the hub and a nut secures the axle in place.

These tubular wheel beams can rotate around the drive shaft raising and lowering the wheels with respect to the frame. Having one wheel raise and the other one lower causes the vehicle to lean. When leaning, all three wheels remain parallel, and, as a result, during a balanced turn, the loads on all three wheels are radial as they are for a bicycle. A three-link reverser linkage using spherical bearings connects the wheel beams together so they move in opposition.

Below are pictures of the EcoVia 1.1. The seat has yet to be constructed and the cranks are absent.

Below is a photo of the EcoVia 1.4 before it was painted and I began road testing. The numbering indicates it was the fourth iteration of the lean-control mechanism. Comparing the pictures above with the picture below gives an indication of all the modifications that were necessary to make the vehicle rideable. I will skip many details concerning minor aspects of the vehicle's construction for reasons that will become clear later. However, I will discuss the details of the lean-control mechanism because, at the time, I thought it was an innovative approach.

The steering handles were located on either side of the rider. They were capable of two motions. They could be moved forward and back and in so doing rotate the wheel beams down and up respectively, resulting in the vehicle leaning. They could also be moved from side to side for steering. What was novel was that the leaning motion of the handles was coupled to the steering motion through a device I called a Push-Me Pull-You, PMPY. Essentially it was a linkage using two springs that would exert a spring force when it was compressed or extended from a neutral position. So, for a given lean position of the levers, the interconnect linkage would move the steering to a specific location. Through changing the connection point on a coupler linkage, this location of the steering could be adjusted.  This steering location corresponded to the neutral position of the PMPY. But this steering position could be overridden by moving the levers laterally, and the PMPY would return them to its neutral position when they were released. As a result, the spring-neutral position for the steering was not always straight ahead but would move according with the lean angle. 

The approach when riding the EV1.4 was to adjust vehicle lean to initiate the vehicle to turn. At low speeds, correction to the steering was usually minor or unnecessary. I was happy with the performance and took several four-mile-round trips to the library parking lot to practice turns on Sunday mornings. Low speed testing being considered a success, I began moderate speed testing, say faster than 10mph. While riding along straight road about 15mph, one of the front wheels hit a pot hole. The next thing I knew I was upside down in the ditch. Since the steering and banking were interconnected, the wheel drop associated with the pot hole caused a steering perturbation. The steering went into an unstable oscillation and the vehicle flipped. I pushed the vehicle back home. One advantage of rear-wheel steering is the vehicle is easy to push and steer at the same time. It was little comfort, and I avowed to never ride the EV1.4 again. I felt lucky I didn’t break anything on my person.  My son, Kyle, had crashed an earlier iteration of the EV1. At the time I wrote it off to his lack of familiarity with the riding technique. Instead it was merely an early warning that the rear-steering approach was seriously flawed.

In “Bucky and the Urbee” I discuss the difficulty in defending against accusations that the inherent instability of the rear-steerer was responsible for the accident that the claimant just had. I also refer indirectly to my experience with the EV1.4.  So, in retrospect, the abandonment of this approach was inevitable. 

EcoVia 2.1 

The EV1.4 was dead and there was nothing to do but take the hacksaw to it and make it a front-wheel steer -two-rear-wheel-drive trike. There were three factors that made me optimistic about this approach. I could reuse all of the wheel-drive hardware and much of the frame. I would need a new reversed seat and need to move the bottom bracket above the steering fork. (It didn’t turn out to be quite that simple as I had hoped.) With front-wheel steering the vehicle would be as stable as a typical recumbent bicycle, so I could use free leaning and not actively have to control the leaning.  And I had seen a video of the Munzo Tilting Trike which had a similar configuration of rear trailing wheel beams. It seemed to free lean just fine.

 To insure that the EV2.1 would lean as much like a bicycle as possible, I kept the wheel beams horizontal when the vehicle was upright and the links for the reverser linkage were vertical and horizontal. I felt this would insurt that the vehicle would lean about a point between the two wheels at ground level. This approach appears to have paid off. On the first coast down my slightly-sloping driveway, I thought the friction in the linkages was preventing the vehicle from leaning. I was wrong! The EV2.1's leaning was so natural that without looking behind me I couldn’t tell that I wasn’t on a bike.

The EV1.4 had spring suspension on all three wheels and for the drive wheels the springs were in series with the lean control levers. With the EV2.1, I wanted to insure that any suspension effects did not influence the leaning. To accomplish this, I made the frame structure two pieces. The main frame supported the drive-shaft wheel-beam-pivot assembly, the support for the wheel-beam-reverser linkage and the front fork. Since it no longer needed to be suspended, I went back to a two bladed fork. However, to maintain the interchangeability of the wheels, I used a through-axle approach, similar to that used on mountain bikes. One blade of the fork had a 12mm clearance hole and the other blade had a 12mm nut.  The seat, the handlebars (mounted below the seat) and the rear rack were clamped to a horizontal tube. They could be slid along that tube to adjust for rider-leg length. The horizontal tube could pivot about a point near the bottom bracket, similar to a Softride suspension. However, on the Softride suspension mounted on an upright bicycle, the pedal forces are in the same direction as the beam motion, so the pedaling forces excite the suspension. On the EV2.1, the pedal forces pass close to the pivot and these forces are orthogonal to the beam’s motion. The spring supporting the beam is located behind the seat and it extends from the top of the seat to the main frame, attaching near the support for the reverser linkage. The spring is quite compliant . The static deflection at the seat is about 4in. The natural frequency of the suspension can be determined by the formula Fn=(10/SD), with SD being the static deflection at the center of gravity for the suspended mass. The  calculated natural frequency of the suspension is about 1.6Hz., or 47rpm pedaling cadence. If the rider pedals above about 60 rpm, the suspension is not excited. 

Below is a pic of the suspension-beam pivot near the bottom bracket and steering head.

The EV2.1

There was one expected and one unexpected advantage to the front-steering approach. The expected advantage was that the free-leaning drastically reduced the mechanical hardware needed to steer and lean. The unexpected advantage was that the vehicle package became much more compact. The beam holding the crank and the beam holding the fork in the EV1.4 stick out in opposite directions. With the EV2.1, they became one beam sharing the crank-support and fork-support functions, thus shortening the overall vehicle length substantially.

Since the handling was everything I had hoped for, I set about to make some minor improvements.

I added a lean lock that consisted of a section of a disk brake rotor bolted to the horizontal arm of the wheel-beam-reverser linkage. I got this idea from the Munzo trike. To activate the caliper, I used a down-tube shift lever with a tube slipped over it to extend its length. This was attached to the side of the seat. I originally expected to use the lean-lock only for parking purposes. (The front brake lever has a locking feature as well to act as a parking brake.) However, at low speeds it became very convenient to lock the leaning. One forgets how much effort can be associated with balancing a recumbent when going slowly.

I enlarged the rear-storage rack so it would hold a plastic milk crate.

I added fenders and I added a frame around the front wheel to support a faring that would tilt forward to enter and exit the vehicle. I got the whole thing painted so I could ride it to church for the annual Earth Day observence.  I began to work on the faring.

 I rode it to the library several times to drop off books and to the local Safeway, but I realized that I didn’t like how it felt pedaling it. Yes I was out of practice riding recumbents, but even so, the bottom bracket felt too high, resulting in my knees coming  too close to my chest when pedaling and the seat was leaned back farther than I expected. I was getting more suspension compression than I had designed the seat’s back angle for.

I put the faring on hold and pulled out the hack saw again.

End of Part 1. Parts 2 & 3 can be found below.

http://lefthandedcyclist.blogspot.com/2012/09/transcending-pedicar-ecovia-part-2.html

http://lefthandedcyclist.blogspot.com/2015/03/transcending-pedicar-ecovia-part-3_14.html

Channeling Velocio: Paul de Vivie, the Original Dirt-Roadie

Paul de Vivie, who wrote under the nom de plume of Velocio, is the patron-saint of cyclotouring. In addition, anyone who rides a derailleur bicycle owes him a huge debt of gratitude for his tireless efforts to develop and refine this method of shifting. He started his life of cycling riding a high-wheel bicycle at the age of 28 and ended it riding a multi-speed safety bicycle. His untimely death, at the age of 77, occurred after being struck by a streetcar while walking across a street.

Living in Saint Etienne, a very mountainous area of France, Velocio was disposed to taking very long rides. He was in a perfect location to devote his life to developing  the then-non-existent sport of bicycle touring and refining the bicycle for long distance use, especially in the area of multiple gears.

Velocio contributed to cycling in at least four major areas.

Most significantly, he inspired countless others to take up the sport of cycling, both through example and through his writings in his magazine Le Cycliste. He wrote about how cycling enhanced the senses by describing the beauty he experienced on his rides. Averaging over 12000 miles a year and routinely taking rides in excess of 400 miles at a time, detractors accused Velocio of being a pedaling automaton, oblivious to his surroundings. But regarding one early morning excursion as the sun was coming up he writes “A shaft of gold pierced the sky and came to rest on a snowy peak, which, moments before, had been caressed by soft moonlight”. Clearly, he was very attuned to the world through which he pedaled.  In his magazine he also discussed cycling technique and debated proper equipment.

He developed cycle touring into a discipline that allowed riders to achieve optimal performance and maximum enjoyment on their excursions. His seven rules for the long distance cyclist are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.

Through research and experiment he refined the bicycle for long-distance riding. He is most famous for being a zealous advocate for multiple gears, but he also experimented with different tire diameters and widths in an effort to balance comfort with performance. Two of his specific contributions made the modern derailleur possible. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that the chain needed to be parallel to the cogs and chainrings to drive properly, Velocio found that the chain could be slightly angled to the sprockets and still transmit power efficiently. His second contribution was to insert a linkage into the rear derailleur to reverse its action. Pulling the shift cable in previous derailleurs caused the chain to move from the larger to the smaller sprockets, essentially downhill, the easier of the two directions. A spring was used to reverse the chain motion causing it to climb up hill. Velocio’s reversing linkage allowed the chain to be pulled uphill, synchronizing the greater input force with the greater requirement. The spring to reverse the motion was aided by the chain going downhill, and, as a result, could have its required force
reduced.





Velocio also experimented with lever-drive bicycles. Starting in 1904, he rode a Svea for several seasons, about 1/4 of his time on the bicycle. Bicycles like the Svea, with lever drives connected to over-running clutches, reportedly work very well for steep climbs and this is probably why he found one useful. Below is one of his own lever-drive designs. Depending on where you placed you foot on the treadles, you could vary the effective gear ratio of the drive. A cable connected from one treadle to the other insured that the non-driving treadle moved up while the driving treadle moved down.

 

And lastly, and maybe most significant for current times, Velocio demonstrated that older athletes could still perform at high levels. On the first Velocio Day in 1922, where 163 cyclists converged on Saint Etienne to honor de Vivie and race up the Col du Grand Bois, he won the 60-70 year old age class! Velocio advised “Every cyclist between 20 and 60 in good health can ride 130 miles in a day with 600 feet of climbing, provided he eats properly and has the proper bicycle”. Keep in mind too that these cyclists would be riding on dirt roads and not rolling along at the speeds we associate with paved roads.

Now a person can buy a bicycle for many reasons. They need it as a means of transportation. They want it for exercise. They want it as an object de arte. They want it to explore their surroundings under their own power.

As a freshman in college, I wanted a new bicycle because I was fascinated by the minimalist beauty of a true racing bike. After reading R. John Way’s cycling books and marveling at Daniel Rebour’s component illustrations, I learned a new word, Compagnolo.  This was several years before the bike boom hit in the early 1970’s. So amid cries of “You are a grown man and you are buying a bicycle?”, I forsook my old Schwinn Varsity for a very-Spartan, all-white Raleigh Professional. The speed was intoxicating. I raced trucks across the viaducts spanning Milwaukee’s industrial valley but carried the bike across streets because I was afraid of glass puncturing the sew-up tires.

After the novelty of the technology and the speed wore off, I was still experiencing the excitement of exploring under my own power. In Milwaukee, riding east to the lake and then up along Lakeshore Drive past Doctor’s park and points north or going southwest to Lake Geneva, the smooth roads that never seemed to end made it difficult to turn around and head home. So many roads to explore…

In Madison the biking was even better. A mile from campus and into the arboretum took you for a quick trip to Paoli. You could pedal up to Devils Lake and a ride on the little Merrimac ferry or ride over to the Elroy-Sparta Trail through Amish country.  With the plethora of little farm roads crisscrossing southern Wisconsin, it was always easy to find a road that was good for bicycling but was light on auto traffic. And there was the bike racing during the summers…

I admit when I arrived in Seattle after graduate school, I was disappointed with the cycle touring in the surrounding area. The roads the cyclists used were much more scenic than those of Wisconsin, but there weren’t as many and, if they went any distance, you found yourself sharing them with cars. 

I got used to things but I was no longer bike racing and got bored with the weekend touring. For a change I decided to pluck down a king’s ransom for a recumbent bicycle, an Avatar 2000. I expected great gains in my speed and was very disappointed when I found out I was significantly slower than an upright bicycle, and that was on the flats! What it did provide, however, was unexpected comfort. After about five hours on the upright, things got uncomfortable and I rode an Exxon Graftek frame which attenuated a lot of the road vibration. With the Avatar, no numb crotch, no numb hands, no tired back. So I started taking longer rides and my bicycle exploring had a renaissance.  I rode that Avatar for 22 years and logged more miles on it than any other bicycle I owned. And each time I took out the upright for a ride, the lack of comfort brought me back to the recumbent.

My son Kyle got into bicycling on his own and from a different direction. There is a rather elaborate dirt-trail system near our house (Now the Paradise Valley Conservation Area) that he and his friends rode since he was in junior high school. When he went up to Western to study Industrial Design, there was a strong mountain-biking community on campus and so he continued to refine his technical mountain biking skills. We had a family bike that happened to be a mountain bike and I used it when I went up to Bellingham to ride Mount Galbraith with him. I crashed twice in the first 100 yards and walked through much of the technical sections of the park. I just couldn’t see why someone would want to ride slowly on dirt when you could go fast on pavement, and a lot of the mountain bikers around me didn’t look all that fit. He did take me on a very scenic but unexpectedly steep climb that I ended up walking the last 100 yards.  Despite all this, it was nice seeing cycling from his perspective, even if it wasn’t for me.

Several years passed and I was going to give Galbraith another try. I popped the knobbies on the family bike and took it out for a spin on a Labor-Day morning. Several mountain bikers road past my house and I decided to follow them (Unbeknownst to me at the time, they were coming from the trail system my son and his friends frequented). They turned on to a trail that I had ridden past many times on my road bike but had never ridden on myself. The trail headed east and up a long hill that was steep enough to still be in the shadows. As I reached the crest and rode into the sunshine, I was facing a beautiful view of the Cascade Mountains. I had never seen this area before and it was in my own back yard. A mountain bike would let me explore new trails and I wouldn’t be sharing them with cars. I stopped to remove some layers after the exertion of the climb and subsequently lost track of the other cyclists, but it didn’t matter. I was hooked and I needed to find out where the trail I was on led.

This was an epiphany for me. I knew now that there was more to mountain biking than the technical riding my son practiced. If you took a road cyclist and put him on a mountain bike he could still do exploring and point-to-point riding. I became what I would later christen a “dirt-roadie”.

And with that I knew that western Washington was a very good place to be a dirt-roadie. Between forest service roads, logging roads and abandoned railroad right-of-ways, like Ironhorse State Park, there were many opportunities to go exploring on dirt.

One of the rides I would take was on private forest land (now closed to cyclists). After five miles of climbing switchback logging roads in my lowest gears, I arrived at pristine alpine lake. Since there were amost no cars to be seen on this ride, it was easy to imagine being back in time 100 years and riding the alpine regions of France like Velocio. Roads where multiple gearing and a cushioned ride were indispensible.

My favorite rides are along the abandoned Milwaukee Road railroad line through the Ironhorse State Park. I love the history associated with the railroad and riding through the tunnels along the route makes the rides unique. Using this route, with a few paved-road connectors, I can ride from home to the Columbia River. As a dirt-roadie, you have got to love western Washington.   

Credit for my exposure to Velocio in my formative cycling years goes to an article by Clifford Graves in his May 1965 article for Bicycling Magazine, which was later compiled in the book “The Best of Bicycling”. Frank J. Burto’s book “The Dancing Chain” gives an excellent history of the development of the derailleur and Velocio’s contributions to that development. (Thanks Jerry for turning me on to this one!)

Oh, and Velocio’s seven rules for cyclotouring…

1.       Keep you rests short an infrequent to maintain    your rhythm.

2.       Eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty.

3.       Never ride to the point of exhaustion where you can’t eat or sleep.

4.       Cover up before you are cold and peel off before you are hot.

5.       Don’t drink alcohol, smoke or eat meat on tour.

6.       Never force the pace, especially in the early part of a ride.

7.       Never ride just for the sake vain glory.

To quote Clifford Graves, "Velocio-the cyclists of the world salute you".

Hephaestus