Thursday, July 29, 2010
look ma no hands
wow, this one totally snuck up on me. When I started riding a bike here in Reykjavík, I started trying to ride no-hands, like we always used to do when we were kids. So that's about 2 years ago I started trying, and it was really hard. But, riding home from the swimming pool the other night at about 3am (night-swimming, yay!), I realised I was talking to my friend and I was just riding along no handed, without even realising it! Woo-hoo! How great when a long-term project like that finally bears fruit! :D
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Riding without hands is always harder on a bike with rock-hard, thin tyres. Most people grew up riding BMX bikes (or equivalent wide tyre bikes) which are pretty easy to balance.
Weird as it might be, I've actually taught a few people how to ride without hands.
The trick is to balance and steer with your hips. If you push one pedal to the bottom and hold your thigh on that leg as close as you can to the seat column, you can keep pretty good control of the bike by wiggling your hips slightly. It gets a little harder when you need to pedal (especially uphill) but the principle remains the same.
Bike stability has got far less to do with the width of the tyres than it has to do with the geometry of the front forks.
There is the angle of the steering axis to the ground. This angle affects the distance from the coincidence of the steering axis / ground to the actual contact patch (X). This moment will tend to make the bike less stable.
There's also the distance from the steering axis to the wheel axis. Obviously the wheel axis has to be above the steering axis so that when you turn the handlebars the distance X gets shorter - and so that when the forks are rotated you literally lift the front end of the bike upwards by some small amount. This moment will make the bike more stable. Obviously it's important that this second moment be bigger than the first.
That rotation means there will be a neutral position in the middle t to which the bike will naturally fall as long as that condition is met and that the degree to which it will fall depends on the geometry.
The steeper the axis the stiffer the frame (stiffer = more power to the ground) but the twitchier the steering.
Mountain bikes and less serious 'racers' have a much less steep angle than proper road bikes. Tania would find it tricky (and a bit scary) to ride my bike like that.
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