Checking out the route

Me, Chris and that bastard Tim went for a ride to check out the route we'll be taking to the festival. (Fantastic photography from Chris here...)



It's fairly flat, but looking at even a shallow gradient and just imagining the effort at pulling that load is quite scary. I don't reckon my knees are up for this.

Only one bike

OK, lets chuck out the idea of cycling side by side. Welding bikes together is a blag. And if we have individual rigs all the constraint issues go away. So lets have two separate rigs, each carrying half the total weight.

Here's the concept:


This simulates the horse thing a bit better, and has way fewer problems with disassembly... the clever part is that it uses the poles as the chasis for the trailer. A way better use of resources.

Just got off the phone with Bodge after chatting about the idea of a sofa bed of nails. Haaaha!! Ahhhhh... 'appy daze.

The Bet

Hahahaa! Whilst out on the piss last night with Tim, Chris and Chucky, I explained the grand idea. Tim said that it couldn't be done. Twat! So I told him to put his money where his mouth was and we shook on it. The bet was for (after deliberating over bikes, jackets and money) a Shoei helmet.

It's on.

Bicycle made for two

Here's one idea:



The bikes would need to be braced, and steering linked but it would be a pretty comfortable way of doing it. I like the idea of cycleing side by side. A standard tandem bikes would mean staring at Andy's sweaty ass all the way to Yeovil which would be a disaster.

It will probably suffer from over constraint I think. But the biggest problem here we've realised is design for disassembly. There's a lot of hardware here, and it need to be stored in Andy's garage for most of the year, so this ain't gonna cut it.

I don't get it...

We need to design and make a trailer to pull a tipi using only pedal power. This blog explains the problem, with updates on what's been going down recently.

Me and AK and lots of others (in here) made a tipi a few years back for sittin in, and until recently we've always pulled it around with a car. But tipis and cars don't really go together. They're from completely seperate eras - it's like imagining dinosaurs co-existing with us humans (which would be over really quickly, according to those in the know: we'd either get shredded by a T-rex or accidentally trodden on by a big old Brontesaurus. But that's not the point, and tipi's don't eat people anyway).

So if we can't use a car, how else can we move it? Well the Indians used their horses and strapped the poles on to create a travois:


We're fresh out of horses, so we're going to use bikes instead. Here's the rest of the challenge:

- We've got no money
- We haven't got any bikes either
- The load includes 12 x 20 ft long poles, 60kgs of canvas and festival kit!!
- The fist gig (to the Sunrise festival in Yeovil) will be an 88 mile round trip
- AK's got an OCD, and Ed's got cooties.

Here's the tipi:


Here's the route:


Here's AK:


And here's Ed:


We need to design some kind of trailer to pull the load. As far as we know, nobody's done this before so everything below is a result of genius ideas had at the pub, and from stuff robbed out of skips or kindly donated by your good selves... we're always on the scrounge, so anything you have to donate would be "super"!

{Blogs read from the bottom up, so if you're interested in reading from the start of the thread, scroll up froim here}