Recumbent bicycles What's a recumbent? How to choose a recumbent Outfitting a recumbent General recumbent links Manufacturer sites Picture gallery Dealers on the Web Transport solutions Bike gadgets Comfort factors on 'bents

The content in these pages began with my research before I bought my first recumbent. I decided to add them to my site, keep them current, and add to them as appropriate. They're the most-visited part of my site, followed by my Excel pages.

In the local area, North Division Bike Shop (10503 N Division St, Spokane WA), Argonne Cycle (3215 N Argonne Rd, Spokane WA) and Mountain View Cyclery (9521 N Government Way, Hayden ID) all sell the Sun EZ-1 value-price line, designed by Easy Racers and produced in Taiwan. We used to have dealers here that sold other makes. Local dealers have reported steady sales of recumbents over recent seasons.

Some interesting new bicycle technology that might make it into recumbents eventually:

Dynamic Bicycles http://www.dynamicbicycles.com/

Shaft drive bicycles, with Shimano components including a 7 or 8-speed internal rear hub and twist-grip or RapidFire trigger shifters. All components are sealed, and you can shift while stopped. Internal hub shifting seems to be on the rise for chain-drive recumbents also.

LandRider http://www.landriderbikes.com/

Bikes with automatic shifting; you may have seen TV promotion for these.

I think the Shimano shaft drive technology may be the future of cycling, upright and recumbent. I'm maybe not quite as excited about automatic shift, but no doubt some people will want it.

Thinking about doing shaft drive on recumbents gets interesting. At first glance, it would seem to require a sliding-seat frame design, rather than a sliding boom, so that the distance from the bottom bracket to the rear hub is fixed. Dynamic Bicycle doesn't appear to offer any bikes with rear suspension. Shaft drive with rear suspension should be possible on uprights if the rear suspension pivot can be made concentric with the bottom bracket.

From an HPV Glossary that used to be on the IHPVA home page:
Poseur Pass—This is what happens when a recumbent rider (generally with fairing) encounters one or more upright road bike riders dressed like racers. The recumbent rider briefly conserves their power and then when they are about 500 metres behind the upright rider they go into an all out sprint. Just as they are about to pass the uprights, they stop sprinting, hold their breath, and say something like "Hi, nice day." When the recumbent rider's rear view mirror indicates they are out of range, the recumbent rider will then go back to pedaling at normal speed (until encountering the next paceline).

In 1997 when I began this Web resource about recumbents, there were a lot fewer outfits building them, in fewer countries. We still don't have any recumbents from old-school mainstream bike brands, although Trek and Cannondale tried and failed, I think mostly from lack of commitment and not being very smart about it. We do have Sun and ActionBent recumbents being mass-produced in Taiwan. We also now have crank-forward bikes from Rans and others, which are sort of halfway between recumbents and uprights in rider position and design philosophy. Many people think crank-forward bikes should be classed as recumbents, and if you like them I think that's great, but I don't buy it. To me, crank-forward bikes seem like unusual uprights, so I don't cover them here.

top

My bike dealers pages often show bike shops that seem to offer Sun as their only recumbents in a separate popup window by state, thus giving a bit more emphasis to bike shops that offer at least one other recumbent brand. This is because any bike shop that wants to sell Sun recumbents can, and typically about half the bike shops in any given town do. At some point I may stop listing Sun-only bike shops entirely.