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| Ian posing on his homebuilt recumbent lowracer. |
Homemade recumbent project in England
BY IAN W. SWINDELLS (SWIZZ69)
I'm sitting to write this a day after being paid a huge compliment. A friend upon seeing the bike for the first time exclaimed, "Wow!" and asked, "Isn't that what they call..." furiously searching for an appropriate descriptive, "...a C5?" And this, just a week after taking part in a discussion of that very machine on the Atomic Zombie Forum!
An insult to many quite possibly and whilst the lowracer may be one wheel, an electric motor and a sleek body shell short of a real Sinclair C5, having been a 9-year-fan of Sir Clive's creation back in 1984, to now have built my own recumbent cycle and have it even loosely compared...well, you get the picture.
I'd been toying with the possibility of owning a recumbent for a good chunk of the last decade after finding Velo Vision magazine. A chance online discovery of modern velomobiles led me to a Dutch company who sold the Alleweder velomobile in kit form along with plans for a 20/26 'bent.
Searching further online for bike plans led to Atomic Zombie's website and whilst none of the bikes at the time suited, the notion that people were building their own kept me interested. Every return visit to the site revealed a new model and when the Warrior was released, Atomic Zombie really had me hooked. Here was a serious bit of kit!
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