Episode: 1282
Title: HPR1282: My Homemade Recumbent Bicycle
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1282/hpr1282.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:54:09

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Hey, it's John Culp, again, in Lafayette, Louisiana with another episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
In this one, I'm going to talk about what might be the most rewarding project I have ever
done in my life.
And that was to build my own recumbent bicycle using a couple of old bikes that had just
about been discarded.
And what prompted this was that I had for a while, this is back in 2011, 2012, I had been
purchasing old bicycles at Goodwill that were a good brand and in decent shape overall,
but needed some attention.
Like, they'd be very, very dirty, tires were flat, chains rusty, things like this, but
otherwise in decent shape.
And I could get them there for anywhere between $10 and $20.
For example, I got an excellent Trek Mountain Bike for $14.99 that was not rideable in
its current condition, but I spent maybe $20 or $30 on new parts like it needed new grip
shifters, so I bought some of those and then overhauled the hubs and the bottom bracket
and everything and turned it into an excellent bike.
And so I really liked buying these old bikes, fixing them up and either riding them or
giving them to people or selling them or whatnot.
But at a certain point, I just had enough of those and I wanted something else I could
do with these old bikes.
And I came across a website called, what is it, it's called Recycled Recomments.
And I will put a link to it in the show notes.
And at this website, there's a guy in Wisconsin, I think is in Wisconsin named Andrew Carson.
And on the site, he gives you instructions and detailed plans on how to take a couple
of donor bikes, what he calls donor bikes, these old discarded bikes, cut them up, reassembled
them well in certain spots and create a recumbent bicycle out of them.
And I thought that was maybe the coolest thing I had ever seen.
And so I decided that was my goal.
I was going to try to find some good donor bikes and build my own recumbent.
Now there was one significant barrier to my completion of this project and that was that
I had never done any kind of welding before.
So either I was going to have to learn how to do it or get somebody else to do it for
me.
I'll get more to that in just a little while.
But the goal was to build a recumbent bicycle.
I started a blog about this called johnsrecumbent.blogspot.com and actually I spelled recumbent
wrong in my URL.
So I'll put a link in the show notes for that as well where I document the product and
says and I'm looking at it right now and my very first post was called I want to build
a recumbent bike.
And this is dated February 21st, 2011.
And I'm kind of glad that I kept the thing around because I had forgotten exactly when
it was that I did this.
But it might be good to follow along with my photo gallery also as I go through this.
If you're really interested in seeing what I was working with and what I do to the stuff,
you can go to another link that I'll have in the show notes, picks.johnculp.net and
look at the gallery called recumbent bike project.
So the way I was finally able to get started with my recumbent bike was that I scored a
couple of donor bikes for free.
I was at the Salvation Army one day and when I was in the parking lot I saw a couple of
ladies pull up with a trailer full of stuff that they were donating to Salvation Army.
And among all that stuff was two bicycles and I asked are you about to donate those bikes
and she said yeah would you like to have them and I said I certainly would.
And so I got these two bikes for free.
Now they're not ideal for doing these recumbent projects but the kind you would really like
to get is old road bikes, like old ten speeds.
These were both hybrids.
One is a Raleigh hybrid, the other is a Nashiki hybrid.
But it looked like they would do okay for the project so I was glad to get them.
And in the first photo in the gallery you can see the two donor bikes right after I pulled
them out of the van and put them on the ground.
Not in rightable condition but the frames are in good shape and many of the parts were
also in good shape.
Now one of the first things to do of course was to disassemble the bikes and this was
not really a problem for me because I had been accumulating specialized tools for a while.
You know the kinds of tools you need to take off free wheels and bottom brackets and
all of that kind of stuff.
So I took the bikes apart and took inventory of what parts I could use.
There were usable parts on both bikes.
The crank set on one of the bikes was pretty heavy because it was the crank arms were made
of steel rather than aluminum so I decided not to use that crank set.
The brakes were okay on one of them so I used those brakes.
Although I did buy a new brake for the rear and I might talk more about that in a while.
So those are the two main bikes.
Now on these long wheelbase recommence like I was building the rear wheel is much larger
than the front wheel.
Normally the rear wheel is a 700c or maybe a 27 inch wheel and then on the front you'll
have a 20 inch wheel.
So I needed a 20 inch wheel as well and so I went a good wheel and I bought a cheap BMX
style bike, one of those next bikes that people get at Walmart for 50 or 60 bucks.
And I took the front wheel off of that because it was actually not a bad wheel, it was made
of aluminum and pretty sturdy and I overhauled it and it's all it worked fine after that.
I took the two donor bikes were of different sizes, one was 700c and the other was 27 inches
so I took the rear wheel off the 700c bike and that became my wheel set, the 700c and
the 20.
Now the next step after disassembly and getting my 20 inch wheel from another donor bike,
by the way I only had to pay $12 for the donor bike for the 20 inch wheel and so that was
actually cheaper to buy the whole bike and take the wheel off than it would have been
for me to order a wheel off of Amazon or something.
So the first cuts I made were to the Raleigh Hybrid.
I cut the rear triangle off of it and then started cutting the various pieces of the
frame apart in the way that Andrew Carson said you need to in his plans.
Now I got to say, making those first cuts through a bicycle frame with a hacksaw was really,
really satisfying.
There's something just awesome about cutting right through a frame.
When you look at a bicycle frame you don't necessarily think about how easily you could
cut it apart but it actually is not very hard to do.
So I cut the Raleigh apart in the appropriate spots then I cut the Nishiki apart in
other spots and then started kind of mocking up how the frame pieces were going to fit together.
The way this works with Andrew Carson's plans at easy recumbence is, sorry, recycled
recumbence is that you take advantage of the differing diameters of various pieces
of tubing on these bicycle frames and you cut them in strategic places and then reassemble
them by sliding one tube into another and then braze welding them together.
The diameters are such that normally these pieces of tube slide right in with a perfect
fit nice and tight and then you can do a simple braze weld which is melting some bronze
kind of stuff around the joint to hold it in place.
It's different from TIG or MIG welding.
So I started cutting things apart and I ran into a little problem not too far into the
process which was that the certain pieces of tubing I need, I didn't have enough of
a certain diameter but I was able to find, I was actually going to hack apart a little
bike that belonged to my daughter because my calipers told me that a certain piece of tubing
in that bike was the right size to make a piece that would join two other lengths together
by sliding inside each of them and then you'd braze weld around it but I was saved from
having to do that by finding in a neighbor's junk pile a really really old bike frame that
was completely rusted out and I cut out a piece of that and checked it with my calipers
and it said that it was about the right size but it didn't fit but then I decided well
it's really close so I started sanding away the rust that was on it and sanded all the
rust and paint off until it was just beautiful and shiny and silver and once I did that
it decreased the diameter just enough where it would slide right into those tubes where
I needed it to go.
One of the other early challenges I had was to make what's called a fishmouth joint which
is when you take a tube and have to cut well it looks like a fishmouth I've got a photo
of this up in the gallery and I was only working with a hacksaw, a file and sandpaper and
it took a good probably a whole evening to get the fishmouth joint where it would fit.
What has to happen is this vertical tube has to go up against a horizontal tube and kind
of wrap itself around it and then you braze the joint around that but I did a pretty
good job I think it fit okay and it was very satisfying when I was able to start sliding
these pieces together and seeing how they were going to fit.
I've got a series of photos that shows how the pieces go together and then how they
are stuck together just by friction and I take photos and you can gradually see how
the bike frame is going to fit together.
One of the next things to do was to start bending some frame pieces like I had to take
the rear triangle and bend it at a certain angle to get it to fit together the right
way and I experimented with a couple of jigs to make sure that I would do it in such
a way that was even on both sides of the triangle and would also bend at the right place and
turned out that I did not use the jig I had made but I instead used a rather large piece
of pipe that we found in the metal shop.
Speaking of the metal shop this is what really enabled me to do the project.
I happened to know somebody in the architecture and design department who was on faculty
there and who I knew was good at braze welding and I asked him if he would teach me how
to do it and he said sure he said either I'll just do the joints for you once you've got
all the pieces ready and show me how you want them or I can teach you how to do it yourself
and I said well maybe a little bit of both.
So I got to first of all thank the University College of the Arts for allowing me to have
access to the metal shop which is a spectacular metal shop.
It's got all the tools that you need.
It's got torches, it's got welding devices, a sand blaster and everything you need to
work with metals.
So I got my friend to help me and he did the first few joints for me and I was kind of
grateful for that because I was still kind of scared about holding a torch in my hand
but I did not want to have to rely on his availability for me to finish the project and so
I did get him to teach me how to do it and after the first three or four joints he let
me do them myself and I was I got to tell you it's one of the most satisfying things
I've ever done was making that first welding joint.
There's something just so awesome about working with hot metal and making something new
out of various pieces.
So you can see pictures of some of the joints that we did and that he did and if you go
through the photos of Andy working in the metal shop you can see the bike frame start
to take shape.
There's a great picture of us right about to bend the rear triangle applying heat to
the two sides of it until it got glowing red hot and then I just pushed it down to bend
it to the right shape and let's say one of the challenges in doing this kind of things
is making sure that the alignment is correct when you weld the pieces together.
If the frame is out of alignment then it's not going to ride correctly so that that
was probably the hardest part of the frame assembly was making sure that the alignment
was right before applying those welds.
So after the welds are done I brought the pieces home and I've got some pictures of
me or of the frame sitting in my yard and I'm starting to fit the various pieces other
pieces of the bike onto it to see how they're going to work and I was glad to find that
I would not have to put new brake bosses on the rear triangle that the existing brake
mount would work just fine for a rear mounted caliper brake or what I eventually got was
a V brake and that was great.
So then the next thing to do is to start making the pieces for the seat.
Now the seat it was made out of, simply out of half inch conduit that I got from the
hardware store, the seat frame was, the side pieces of the seat were half inch conduit
and the support pieces were three quarter inch conduit and I actually bought myself a conduit
bending tool to shape the pieces, what you had to do was I had to print out on several
sheets of paper and tape them together the outline of the shape of the side pieces
and then gradually bend them until it fit that shape and once I had one of them done
then I used that one to shape the other side of the seat frame and that turned out really
pretty well.
I've got a picture here of the wheel set into the rear triangle bent with a brake on
there, mounted in there just to see whether the brake pads are going to strike the
rim properly and it looks all looks good there.
Yep, there's a nice close up of a V brake with a brake pad set in there striking the
rim just right.
I was very glad to be able to use the brake bosses that were already installed.
In the front I did have to put a new piece across because the fork in the front was made
for a 27 inch or 700 C size wheel and so the brakes would definitely not hit the rims
on a 20 inch wheel up front and so I had to put a horizontal bar across between the two
sides of the fork to mount the front brake on and I've got a picture of that.
Those were actually my very first welds that I did by myself was to put that little piece
of half inch conduit in there as the front brake mounting point.
I also welded the two rails that go along the bottom of the frame to the vertical tube
and at that point the frame construction was mostly done.
The next part that I did was to come up with a way to support the seat.
Andrew Carson has in his plans a nice way to build a seat support but it involved more
welding and I was not having as much access to the metal shop as I really needed to do
this.
It was only open maybe six hours a week total and only maybe two of those hours were
convenient for me and so I wanted to come up with a solution for the seat support that
would not involve welding or at least not very much welding and so I took another junky
bicycle that I had found in a ditch and cut the rear triangle apart on that and then
cut the chain stays off of it and used that as the main portion of the rear seat support.
It's hard to understand what I'm talking about unless you see the seat that I'm trying
to deal with and the pieces so it's definitely recommended to look at the photos here but I
have a series of photos showing how the piece looks and there's one photo here where
I have clamped one of the seat rails in place on the frame and then put the cut apart
chain stays or sorry seat stays on there showing how I thought I might be able to attach
it and I took the parts of another bike seat that I had my cruiser bike got stolen a
few years ago and I had replaced the seat on it but I still had the old seat and it had
a couple of pieces on there that I thought I could use to create my rear seat support
on this recumbent bike and so I've got pictures of those pieces going together and the final
contraption is one of the parts of the bike that I'm most proud of that I came up with this
design myself out of a bunch of parts I just had lying around and it really really worked well.
So there was only one I think there was only one bit of welding I had to do with my rear
seat support and that was to cut a piece of one inch bike tubing in half lengthwise so that it
was like a a trough or something and then weld that into one of the parts on this old bike seat
piece so that it would receive the the crossbar on the seat and I could attach it to that half
the half split pipe I guess you would call it with some hose clamps so I got pictures of all
this stuff there's a picture here of the horizontal seat support thing clamped onto this
improvised support with a zip tie just to kind of see how it's going to go together
and then I've got pictures of the seat support piece with the half the half tube welded on there
after I did those welds that was the first time I got to use the sandblaster also I had to you
have to get rid of all the chrome and paint and really clean it up well before you do a weld
if you want it to hold so I got to use the sandblaster for that and then I've got a picture here
of the seat support in place using hose clamps to hold the the rear seat now this looks like it
has skipped a couple of steps my photos might not be going in order here I've got another picture
where my bike frame is supported by a little red keto seat like a child seat showing how the wheels
will fit into the frame and showing how the seat support for the the front part of the seat clamps
on there with hose clamps and it uses two split pipes that are turned sideways and welded together
and then it shows how the seat frame will be attached to the bike
and let's see then I've got a picture of the seat frame all welded together in my kitchen this
is another one that I did all the welding joints myself I was really happy with how that came out
hardest part of that was getting the pieces to stay in place long enough to get the weld done
you have to use various clamps and vices creatively to get things to stay stay put long enough
to do the weld and okay so the hardest part of the project probably was a part that I didn't
necessarily even think about when beginning the project and that was to sew the fabric onto the
seat frame the way the seat is made is it uses half inch conduit on the side rails and then three
quarter inch conduit across to support the side rails and then on that you have to sew some kind
of cloth and people do various things injury Carson on his website has lots of photos of various
ways people have come up with to do the seats but I went with his recommended way which was to
purchase some fiber text cloth from a sale supply company I bought one or two yards of it and it
was maybe fifteen or twenty dollars I don't know it's a synthetic cloth that is porous it you know
it has lots of holes in it and it's very very strong and so what I had to do was wrap that around
the frame and then sew it as tight as I could using fishing line as thread and that was really hard
by the time I was done with one half of it my hands were killing me and I had to wait till the next day
to do the other half but it turned out really well and I've got a great picture of it sitting
up against the cabinet in my kitchen I was really really proud of how the seat came out as well that
was pretty hard the sewing part was really hard my mom probably could have done that a lot easier than
I could but it was hard for me so by the time the seat is done it's really the whole project is
nearly done I've got a picture here of the bike almost completely assembled it's got pedals
wheels seat and the what it's missing is handlebars I was waiting for my handlebars to arrive that was
one thing that I ordered from a bicycle store was some great big ape hanger handlebars there were
a couple of options when doing handlebars on a bike like this one is to make them yourself Andrew
Carson has some detailed plans on how to make your own handlebars out of conduit but I decided I
would not going to fool with that I just wanted to order some big long ape hangers and so I did
those were maybe 25 bucks or something and they they were fine I guess I think in retrospect I
might try to do something a little more sophisticated like an under seat steering system where the
handlebars go under the seat and they turn the front wheel by way of a linkage system a long rod
goes up and attaches to the fork up front and then when you turn the handlebars in the back it turns
the wheel up front but that's that was more complication than I think I was ready for at the time
one other problem I had with the frame that I can see when I'm looking at this photo is that I
was not able to increase the rake on the fork the rake is the degree to which the bottom of the
fork kind of bends out away from vertical the rake was not very severe on this and Andrew in his
plan says you really need to increase the rake by like three or four inches and get it
where it's poking way out forward this what this does is it helps with steering it it makes it
work a little better and I was not able to do that because as soon as I tried to increase the
rake on that fork it just started buckling like the the metal was not going to take it I was going
to destroy the fork if I tried to rake it anymore so I just I just cooled it I decided I would not
push it any further and thought well one day if I find another fork that would be suitable I will
use that and give it the proper rake and just swap out the parts but I've I've never done that I
haven't bothered it's turned out that I like the bicycle just fine the way it is and here's a
picture of me with the bike all assembled except for no pedals and I look awfully proud I'm sitting
on the seat for the first time and seeing how it feels it's a very very comfortable seat
then one of the next photos is must be after one of the very first times I rode the bike because
I have it locked up to the to the bike rack outside my office at school which is really half a mile
from my house and I've got the original stem in there holding the handlebars that stem had
problems it was not the right diameter and I had to use shims to to get the handlebars to stay on
that was a problem that I decided to address by finding a different stem and I did that by just
taking my calipers with me to Goodwill where they've got lots of little kids bikes and I just
measured each stem until I found one that had the proper diameter and bought the bike for five
dollars and took out the stem and used it and then just recycled the rest of the bike
and here are some photos photo number 91 out of 111 is one of the first photos of the whole bike
already to go with the um yes I have the front derailleur there and the rear derailleur
all hooked up and I've got a little pouch on the back to hold my keys and stuff one of the things
I found out riding a recumbent bike is stuff really falls out of your pockets because you're
sitting back in an unacustom way and when you're peddling stuff tends to fall out of your pockets
so I had to put a little pouch on there to put my keys and wallet and stuff in when I'm riding
so once I got the bike all together and learned how to ride it that was a trick too by the way
recumbents have a very low center of gravity and it's a really different experience
trying to ride a recumbent it's hard to start out like my brother was just here visiting a couple
of weeks ago and I showed him the recumbent he had not seen it I built the thing two years ago but
he had never seen it before and he sat down and tried to ride it and he really came close to
crashing three or four times before he just gave up and said I can't do it it's really hard to start
out but once you get used to it there's really nothing like it it's so comfortable and it's such a
fun ride you almost feel like you're driving a race car or something all of the problems I used to
have with riding bikes for any distance like my rear end hurting my wrists hurting my neck hurting
all of those pains went away because you're sitting in an upright position like you're in an easy
chair and it's just so comfortable so I learned how to ride the bike by taking it over to the
university and riding all around the sidewalks at night when no one was there and going into the
parking lot and practicing turns tighter and tighter turns left and right and I really fell in love
with the bike and so once I knew the bike was going to work great and I wanted to keep it and ride
it for a long time it was time to decide what to do about the finish in these pictures 91 through 95
or so the bike is all done but it's still just you can see the welds you can see where I've sanded
off paint and it's just not finished at all so I decided to find a place that would powder coat it
for me found a place here in town that does powder coating and they gave me what in retrospect seems
like a pretty good deal I think I paid a hundred and twenty dollars for them to powder coat the
frame and they did it in a lovely fire engine lime green kind of color they had just powder coated
a fire engine and they had some powder left over and asked if I wanted to use that and I said
that sounds great so they they did it for me it only took them a couple of days I had to completely
disassemble every piece from the bike of course which was kind of a bummer after having so
much fun riding it for a week I was loathed to give that up but it's worth it in the long run
got a picture here of the frame all powder coated in yellow and it looks terrific and then I reassembled
the bike and it looks even better all assembled with its new shiny coat of paint
after sending a few pictures of the bike to Andrew Carson he was very kind enough to send me
one of his recycled recumbent head badges and I've got a photo number 104 out of 111 shows the
head badge on the front of the bike and it looks great on there so the the finishing touch for
the bike then was to give it a name and put some proper decaling on it and I found a place called
bikenames.com that would print me a vinyl die what do they call it vinyl die cut decals
I I looked into printing these out myself but I couldn't find anywhere that handled the stock
for them and so I decided just to pay seven or eight dollars to have this place do it for me and
it was definitely worth the money picture number 106 out of 111 shows the decal that I got and it's
beautiful it looks really professional and it sticks on there great and I called it the green
machine which was I think appropriate on a couple of levels on one it was a project in recycling
taking a couple of bicycles that were being discarded by someone and turning them into something new
and of course the fact that it's human powered makes it a green machine also and it's kind of a
lime green color so that also makes it green one of the last things I did to the bike was to
attach a rack to it a bike was great but I could not carry anything it's not like a regular bicycle
where you can put on a backpack because your back is right against the seat so you can't wear a
backpack when you're riding this bike and I found that while I could ride just fine I couldn't
carry anything except for whatever would fit in this little bitty pouch and so I needed a rack and
I found a steel rack that I'd taken off some other goodwill bike a long time ago and I cut off
the front part of the rack you can see a series of photos here where I show this I cut off the
front part and then attached it to the what did I attach it to some part of the frame I guess I
can't remember oh yeah I attached it to the old brake mount from the seat support and I used
hose clamps to do that and the bottom part of the rack will just attach to where there are
screws there down by the rear axle and that works great so now I can put a I've got these
penny-air kind of bags that I can mount on either side and carry quite a lot of stuff
and that's that's about it I think it was an amazingly satisfying project and something that
it's it really paid off huge dividends it allowed me to ride my bike a lot more than I used to
because it got rid of all the pain I used to have I just to hate riding any more than about two or
three miles because my wrists would hurt so much from leaning on them and my neck would hurt from
looking up at the road because I was all hunched over the front and it's just so much more comfortable
it's really fun it's a great conversation piece because it's a unique item and writing around
knowing that I built it myself it just feels great it's one of those projects that for a hacker
is amazing check out the photos I've got a couple of videos on YouTube also that I will probably
put links to in the show notes and um maybe it'll inspire you to take on a similar project of
your own hope you enjoyed that my recycled recumbent bicycle talk to you later
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