When you refer to trail do you usually use the Mechanical Trail or just Trail measurement? I never know which one to use.
I’m guessing that the mechanical trail is the bare rim trail, and the actual trail accounts for the height of the tire? (If I set the tire width to 0, the trail reduces to 2 mm more than the mechanical trail (which may be a case of “no, that tire has thickness” when faced with a ridiculously tiny width.)
Nope
“Mechanical Trail” is an imaginary line square from the steering axis to the contact patch, where the normal “Trail” measurement is measured on the ground
“Mechanical Trail” goes along with “Rear Trail” (same but rear wheel) and can explain a lot of bicycle handling characteristics in a theoretically pure way that nobody’s really used in public yet
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Squirrel or Fred (or anyone with a frame-mounted rack):
I am guessing one advantage is load stability while parked on a 2-legged kickstand, correct? That’s always been my biggest gripe with fork-mounted racks and heavy loads.
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Even if the load appears off to the side of the front wheel during turning, how would this require counterbalancing? The axis of rotation of the bike for balance purposes is the line between the front and rear contact patch, and a frame mounted rack moves less relative to this line (almost none, none at all if the fork had zero trail) than a fork mounted rack does.
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In other words, the load doesn’t have to be balanced relative to the plane of the front wheel; it has to be balanced relative to the line between the contact patches
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you and your normal-length clown-bike go pretty normally around a tight corner
your load that’s cantilevered out off your frame is going around a different larger corner with a slightly eccentric radius that eventually converges
making the load “not turn” doesn’t disconnect it from the steering, it just fucks with it differently
if you don’t fix the wheel flop in the steering geometry, cycletruck racks can actually handle worse, the old schwinn design was a real handful
luckily the same “low trail” tricks work for both
With cycletrucks frequently designers try to ‘fix’ them by getting the front wheel under the rack, which by itself only makes it easier to overload without sitting on it. While increased wheelbase alone is very helpful, if they also slacked it out a lot and increased the wheel flop they created a monster.
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Mechanical trail is the true measurement of the “leverage arm”. Regular trail is that arm projected to the ground. Since it’s a projection, over a large range of head angles it won’t represent the true value correctly. However, under the narrow range of head tube angles using one number versus the other in comparisons results in an insignificant error.
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Yeah, I’ve been really impressed with how well the 2-legged kickstands work with a heavy load. I’ve only had it almost tip over once when I was loading an extremely heavy messenger backpack full of canned goods and la croix on one side of the basket. Overall my Elephant has more trouble with tipping over while stationary / wall-leaning than my Cycletruck does.
I think a frame mounted load is less scary to a layperson buying a Raleigh.
Two weird things to note when considering frame-mounted load for layperson:
- Headlight attached to rack platform doesn’t point where you want it to go as you enter a turn but beam does stay more level through the turn. (vs asymmetrical beam going askew but generally pointed in the right direction on regular bikes)
- Never being able to see your front tire and basket not moving with handlebar feels really weird at first. Blind faith that the wheel is still attached to the bicycle.
get second phone, facetime front wheel
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Have these bikes been posted?
So good and better in person.
It has road pedals on there, but they do have matching sworks7 mtb shoes in the same fashion. I was waiting to see when the regular shoe was going to drop, but couldn’t wait any longer to get new shoes.
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Spec is killing it with paint schemes lately.
As long as the stem length works this is pretty dope. Matching bar tape would make it better.
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This is a pretty great paint scheme. Kind of a toned down version of one I was planning on doing. And may still do because BLOW IT OUT.
Another low-trail, dynamo’d & fendered off-the-shelf bike option for around 2 bongs. Doesn’t look too bad:
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Pass
A cool historical relic, but little else.
The color scheme is cool. And everything about is it cool. I do not want to ride it.
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