Last of my Wooden Recumbent Frames

In its 2017 Heyday

Unique steerer assembly

After the.....

Initial rescue from outside

This sticker came from my time as an engineer at an electric motor manufacturer

Graham with the lock.

Aged timber frame

 

Sorting frame kit pieces.

About 10 years ago I completed an industrial design master's degree at Monash University. As part of this, I made several plywood wooden leaning trikes. And after my master's I wasn't satisfied with the seat design and made one more version for a timber design competition and Fringe Furniture 31.  I kept that trike intact but it was stored outside. About a year ago I tried to rescue it but I found the glue in the frame had let go and the frame was extremely wobbly. I cleaned it up, took it inside and there it stayed until a few months ago I got motivated to move it on. 

My friend Graham (he is a carpenter who works on wooden boats) agreed to take it, and before delivering it to him, I packaged up the bike and a complete NC routed kit for making a timber frame for this style of bike. 

A few days ago, M and I delivered the bike and Graham was very pleased. It turns out we just did a swap, Graham makes timber locks from scrap timber and he gave me that in exchange for the bike. 

I'll stay in touch with Graham and will hopefully see a version of this wooden bike on the road again. The learning from these frames helped me design better timber tailboxes which I still design and use. I doubt that I'll ever make another one of these, but you can, as the entire design is on Thingiverse here.

Regards Steve Nurse 

The Peugeot Project

Mornington Orange has a larger frame and 

a working front derailleur whose basic design goes back to 1962 (book pic is from "The Dancing Chain")

Geelong pink and messy spare bedroom

Additional "checkered" brake cable outer protects the chain side chainstay and matches some of the stickers. As detailed in this exhaustive blog entry, chainstay protection is a thing, it is sometimes done with stickers but why not Do It With Already Made Stuff  and do a better job in the process.

Textacolur on the brakes makes the lettering stand out on Geelong Pink.

Geelong Blue .....

is still a bit ragged around the edges. 

There seems to be endless discussions of Peugeot bikes here and in other places, including mention of SF10's and Australian made frames. Having not read anything to the contrary, I think SF10 stands for "Stands For 10 Gears".

 

Hi

Although most of my bike riding is on recumbents, I occasionally develop a soft spot for road bikes and folders, and am now in the middle (muddle?) of one such craze, this time for Peugeot Mixte bikes. I am actively involved in recumbent design, building and promotion but consider myself a tourist or "interested outsider" in mainstream bike design. That's not such a horrible thing - a lot of other people could be so involved in bicycles that they don't see the forest for the trees.

 I've documented fixing mixtes and their load carrying before and have thought for a while that the older Peugeot mixtes looked good, but only really dove in when I responded to a Geelong Marketplace ad for 4 Peugeots (some in bits) . And a week or so later (today) I bought Mornington Orange.  

I'm happy with the purchases, 3 of the 5 bikes I've built are rideable and my next small project will be to add load carrying to Geelong Pink. One frame (Geelong Red) was in a really bad state and I sent it to Mottainai Cycles for a respray. That will take a few months, meanwhile there's quite a bit of other stuff to get on with. The last frame has all the associated bits renewed but completely separated from the frame. It is a Peugeot folder.

Meanwhile, just to check I'm on track for the load carrying on Geelong pink, I took some photos of bicycle load carrying and the general scene at a local festival. They are shown below. There is a "sitting on Milkcrates" photo there, refer to my last post . 

I plan to go on blogging about the Peugeots! 

Update March 27: I dug out my 1973 book which has the Peugeot Mixte frame sizes in it, and have compared them to the 2 mixte frame sizes I have. Also, after watching a youtube video have bought a makeshift cotter pin removal tool. Maybe I should just have bought the right thing .Will report more later anyway. Some pics below.

 

Load Carrying on the Watsonia

 

Load carrying from wood, timber, 3d printed parts.

Minq recumbent chair

Crate can be removed without tools

With Cushion in place

Next to conventional basket

Milk crate as chair. (Sitting on the cushion, you can't see much of it)

Minq recumbent in Bicycle mode

Milk crates with cushions at Alphington market.

Single speed milk crate bike (not colour coordination!) at Piedemontes, in

the nearby suburb of North Fitzroy.

(A 21st century bike basket)

After my last post about this bike, I did little bits of work on it, changing the tyres, and removing the load carrying and chain guarding contraptions. The plastic chain guard was pretty brittle and deciduous anyway, and fell apart with even the slightest touch. For a while, that's the way it stayed, but I was slowly gathering ideas for putting load carrying back on it. Having had homemade contraptions on it originally sort of gave me permission, I wasn't doing anything particularly foreign to that bicycle.

A visit to a local farmer's market inspired me - here were milk crates being used as chairs as I had seen before and even written about in my book. And me and lots of other people have used milk crates as load carrying. How about a built-in chair on a bicycle? Turns out this has been done before on the 20 year old and short lived Minq recumbent. I managed to find an article about it in Velovision 23 from 2006.

I was thinking of a complicated timber-based seat cushion but something quite simple worked instead, I just cut down the foam inside a cushion I had spare to make it fit in the milk crate. The night before I did most of the work on the load carrying I fossicked for suitable timber and a bracket in the shed, and was able to find them. Overall I'm very pleased with the result. The cushion should benefit the load carrying, keeping it suspended and less prone to damage, and could also carry some pets - maybe a willing and extroverted cat or a smallish dog. 

I've put in a pic of a standard bike basket next to the removable-without-tools and customisable and doesn't rust and is-also-a-chair milk crate.

Just a note tacked on! This post hinges around the secondary uses of objects and even institutions.  I  encountered this first when reading "Design the Manmade Object" by design guru Nigel Cross from 1976. (I had a copy of it once but lost it somehow woohoo I found it on a UB stick and am printing it now) and it has stuck with me ever since. The Minq recumbent isn't just a bicycle, it's a chair as well. And the Watsonia load carrying has already moved on from its design purpose of being a milk crate, and now it isn't just load carrying either, its a chair as well. These are secondary uses for the objects.

I was visiting the Alphington Farmer's market on a bit of a research mission -  our bike shed Wecycle had been destined to move from a very public position in Batman Park to a more hidden and less public shed near the market. This could have changed Wecycle's focus, and removed a secondary role of Wecycle (primary role is to "recycle unwanted bikes and re-home them with people who need them") which is selling bikes to the public and providing low cost solutions to bike problems.

Anyway all these thoughts were just about out of my head when I heard a very up to date reference to secondary uses via an interview with Elissa Wardrop, an Australian online marketing whizz working for Ikea in Sweden. She was behind successful ( = viral = free ) online advertising for an Ikea plush toy. One of the toys was being used by a baby Orangutan in Japan and the story goes on from there. I relistened to the story (at about the 24 minute mark here ) and as a result of that found Elissa's article including secondary uses called "How to Sell a Spoon" . So I'm not just making it up or quoting something from the mid 1970's, its a thing. 

Regards Stephen (good on theory of marketing not so much on practice) Nurse

 

 

 

  

Watsonia Bike / Gipps Street Ramp

 

Top of Gipps St ramp, 2025

Ramp, 2025

Steps 2005 - 

a hard slog!

Ramp and Watsonia

Positron gears!

As found

Ice cream lid or similar as chain guard. This proved to be highly deciduous and didn't last long.

Front carrier arrangement

Super aero shelf brackets!

 

 

Note: this was pasted early 2026 about events mid December 2025.

Hi

Late last year I had been working hard at home on some presentations, and hadn’t gone outside the front gate for most of the day. An evening walk was just the thing to cheer me up, and on the way I found an abandoned old bike I quite liked which was a bonus. The bike was a Watsonia stepthrough and looking at it closely, it had some interesting cobbled together features which I quite liked. Recumbent riders aren’t the only ones to bike hack!

One hack was the basket supports, made from steel shelf parts. Certainly very aero, but when you consider the basket as well as its supports it’s not so aero! The other was the chainguard which is an old ice-cream-tub lid or similar. As well the bike had Shimano Positron gears, a system more than 40 years old that uses a push / pull cable instead of the pull and spring return which has become standard. But this example works fine! I ended up taking this one home although I already have way too many bikes and want to sell some.

There are a few Watsonia bikes listed on the net and they seem to come from Watsonia Cycles, a shop which David J is nostalgic about in his blog. Also a Watsonia track bike is revered for its style.

                 Normally it would have taken weeks to get round to fixing this one as I have a queue of bikes to finish. But I felt like getting out and about on something new, and was able to measure up and find a seat post, find a seat, and pump up the tyres all before going to a caf for my regular breakfast meetup with my friend Simon. After the caf, I rode off to inspect the latest and greatest bike infrastructure in our area, the Gipps Street cycling ramp. Despite the age, steel rims, the rear brake not working, lack of maintenance and manky tyres, the Watsonia bike went well. 

The new bike path is quite a revelation for me. To head south along bike paths used to involve a full-stop-and-bike-lift up 2 flights of stairs, and along roads involved riding along and turning right from busy Johnson St. Now it’s easy and safe to use the bike path to head south. The path is gently sloping and wide, and I have now ridden it twice, once to actually get somewhere. I was in some of the early protests about the old steps and local bike activists Yarrabug have written about the history of the new steps here.

                 Now I plan to pass on the Watsonia bike as is but with new 27” tyres and the rear brake fixed. If I upgraded the steel wheels for 700C aluminium ones (the sizes are quite close) I think I could stuff up the Positron gears and nice gear ratios - I’d like to move back to n-1 bicycles fairly soon. See you out there on the Gipps Street ramp!