Episode: 2869
Title: HPR2869: building a bike, following in John Kulp's footsteps
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2869/hpr2869.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:31:54

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This is HPR episode 2008-169 entitled Building a Bike, following in John Culp's footsteps.
It is posted by Brian in Ohio and in about 12 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is turning a couple of old bikes into a long wheelbase recumbent.
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Hello Hacker Public Radio Brian, I know how you're here.
I'm out from under my rock and I'm doing another episode for HPR.
And this time what I'm going to be talking about is actually I'm going to do a series here,
hopefully, chronicling the building of a bicycle.
I had a few reasons to want to do this and so the first one is I wanted to get back into bike riding.
I had never been a super serious bike rider but I had done some cycling with my daughter.
But she's moved out of the house married and living in Pittsburgh.
And so my riding buddy has abandoned me but I've always thought I like riding bikes and I'd like to get back into it.
And I thought about it and I really wanted to recumb it.
I've always wanted a recumbent bicycle.
But when you look at recumbent bikes, they can be expensive, commercially built ones.
And I'd actually had built a couple of bikes earlier in my life.
Wouldn't frame bicycles to be exact and they were recumbents.
But I actually built those more, I don't know, because I'm something of a contrary and they're a little bit different.
And they're supposed to be fast and I was into fast bikes at that time.
But now I'm older and hopefully a little wiser.
And I really wanted to use this transportation, go back and forth to the store and get some exercise.
And so I wanted a bike not for speed but for really utility.
And these things were always in the back of my mind.
And then one day, lo and behold, YouTube puts a suggestion, a suggested link.
And it's a show called The Late Back Bike Report.
And it's a monthly show about recumbent, a lot of trike talk.
But there's recumbents, recumbent bicycles also.
And I'm just scrolling through their episode list.
And lo and behold, I come across an episode where they interview A.D.
I'm going to get his name right here.
I think it's A.D. Carson.
Yeah, A.D. Carson.
And he has a website called Recycled Recumbents.
And it's all about how to make your own recumbent bicycle out of a couple of used bicycles.
Also, you know, looked around.
There's a site called With Silver Cumbents, is how I always search for it.
But I think it actually has a call.
Yeah, it's called With Silver Cumbents.com.
All these links will be in the show notes.
And they have a lot of mostly built for racing stuff.
But there's a lot of good, informative things about recumbent bicycles in general there.
There's also a website, another YouTube channel, CJ Hoyl.
He has a lot of, he's an urban bicycleer from Canada.
And he's got a lot of really cool recronicles long rides through the Canadian Great Lakes area.
And it's quite fun.
And he has a recumbent now.
He used to be a upright bike rider, but he rides a recumbent now.
And so I always liked his stuff kind of inspiring.
And then the one resource here in town where I live is Toledo Bikes.
Toledo Bikes is a nonprofit organization.
It's dedicated to the recovery of used bikes.
Recycling those bikes through our volunteer and educational efforts into the hands of others.
Toledo Bikes also helps to promote bicycling awareness through community outreach education and cycling events.
That's from their website.
There's a link too.
It's a great place.
It's got all kinds of material used bikes.
It's got all kinds of shop space.
You can use their tools and work on your bikes.
If you're really interested in what a bike co-op looks like,
it's about a five or six minute video there on their website.
And it tells you what they're all about.
So I knew that would be a place I could go to to get raw materials.
And then kind of just thought,
well, I'll check out Hacker Public Radio and see if there's anybody who's done any bike stuff.
And well, sure enough, there's episode 1282 is John Culp.
Everybody knows John Culp.
He built one of these bikes just like I thought.
And so now I was thinking, maybe I've listened to that episode a long time ago.
And it's always been in the back of my mind.
And maybe that's where I knew about this recycled recumbent thing to begin with.
But for whatever reason, I thought, well, I'll do my take on the project.
Just like John did his take.
And we'll see how my bike turns out.
And I wonder if he still rides that thing around there.
Now that he's super high up in the infrastructure of the university that he works at.
So the first episode, I'll just tell you a little bit about the beginning process,
which was to gather a couple of donor bikes.
And then just, I won't actually chronicle the stripping down of the bikes.
But I'll give you a couple of tips there.
And then that'll be about it for now until the actual cutting up and putting together starts.
So as far as the raw material, I want to, like I said,
Toledo bikes in downtown Toledo, Ohio.
And I went upstairs in their big bike room and searched for about half an hour
looking through all these different frames.
And I picked out two Nishiki bikes.
And I followed the plans advice.
They were not too super light, not too super beat up, not too anything special.
So the one bike is a much larger frame than the other.
I'm not sure what the wheel sizes are, but I'm not very tall.
So the first bike would fit me.
If I was going to ride it, it would be like the bike I would pick to ride.
And the other one was way too tall.
And that's sort of what the plans call out for.
I should say something about the plans.
The plans on the website recycled recumbent are,
John Culp says they're detailed.
I'd say they're just, they're pretty good.
There's a lot of information there.
And I would recommend that if you thought about doing this to really look at that website
and look through all the links and the pictures, he gives an outline.
And he shows some how-tos, but I think there's a lot of,
a lot of liberty and latitude that you can take to build whatever kind of bike you want.
I'm trying to, I'm building the Mach 1 or Easy Clone,
the very first bike that he recommends building.
He says it's the easiest one to build, so that's for me.
And those are the plans I'm using.
And that's why I picked out the two Nishiki bikes that I did.
The other reason that I picked those frames particularly was that the rear derailleur,
which is the derailleur is the device that changes gears on the cassette, on the back wheel.
And those rear derailleur's come in kind of two varieties.
One variety actually hooks on by the, out to the, near the axle of the bike,
and kind of has a hanger that goes off.
And then there's other ones that are where it has a separate bolt to bolt into the frame.
So it's separate from the, from the wheel, completely separate from the wheel.
And both of those Nishiki frames had that set up.
And I kind of like those, I think they're a little bit better.
And yeah, I think you can find better, I could be completely wrong about this.
But I think you can find better derailleur's for that bolt on with that kind of hanger
than the ones that slip onto the axle.
So after I went down there, looked around, I got both of these frames.
And it was under, I think it was like $40, maybe $41 to get the two frames.
And took them home, and I stripped the bikes down.
I stripped many of bikes if you've never done it before.
There's, I'd go, recommend going to CDO oil.
It has a lot of bike repair, bike repair tutorials.
And you can learn a lot about tearing down bikes.
One thing that I, one little tip is the, when you're taking off the bottom bracket
where the cranks where you have the pedals, the drive side, I think it's a drive side,
but it's one of the sides of the thing has left hand thread.
So those, if you're doing something like this on a bike, even if you're not building a recomba
but you're taking that thing apart, be careful that you don't try to counter-clockwise,
take something off that's really clockwise to take it off.
Just otherwise you might either damage or just be frustrating.
You don't think you can't get it off.
So I stripped both bikes took a couple hours and I saved all the parts,
except for things like cables and the grips that had to cut off and things like that.
But basically I saved everything because who knows if I might need it later or not.
For now I'll just, I just saved everything I ended up with a couple of sets of wheels
and a couple of things of everything else, basically.
And I'll save all those parts until I'm done with the project.
And then when I'm done with whatever's left over at the end, I'll just take a two-litle bikes and they'll either reuse any of the stuff that's good
or they'll recycle it or, yeah, they'll either do one of those two things.
That's what will happen with all those leftover parts.
And so that was the draw. The, the gold was the two-barre frames.
I've got pictures in the show notes for all these things.
Two strip bare frames ready to be cut up and then reassembled, re-created into a long wheelbase recumbent bike.
That'll be, I'll start, that'll be the next episode. I'll talk about cutting up the tubing and that.
I haven't finished this project so this is not done.
I hope to do episodes as I can to, as I build this and then see how it goes.
Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope you got something out of it.
And if you ever have thought about building a recumbent bike, this is one way to go.
For sure, recycled recumbent, a lot of info there. And give it a try. I'm giving it a try.
If you have any questions again, you can email me or if you have any ideas or if you've built one of these yourself already
and you've been hiding out there, throw up some pictures of your, talk about how you did it and let everybody else know.
Bikes are cool. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye for now.
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