Winter Surf Ride on Vuong Leaning Trike

The trike with the seat removed and handlebars tipped, necessary to.......

make it fit inside our Kia Rio to get to the start.

All set up and ready to go at Werribee.  Andrew in foreground.

Hi

Every few months I go on an Audax ride and it takes a bit of training and organisation to get bikes and body up to speed for riding them.  A few weeks ago I started eyeing off the Winter Surf 200k ride which I had done before.  On that occasion a huge storm front came through and I finished the ride, but not on the proscribed route.

For this ride, I did some training, riding some extra distance on top of my 30k round trip commute.  This included some laps of the boulevarde in Kew, and I copped one tack puncture during the process.

The trike (used the same frame as on Winter Surf 2 years ago but everything else has changed including the wheel count!) got a chain lube, spare tube check, speedometer from K-mart, extra lights, a water bottle and water bottle mount.

The trike fitted almost holus bolus into our small car for the trip to the ride start in Werribee.  The ever-cheerful Helen Lew Ton was there to greet me at the start and all six of us set off at 8am.

The ride to Geelong was all flat and for the first part I was in the middle of the bunch, but I succumbed to a wee problem, having to stop more times than everyone else due to drinking too much milk at the start.

Everyone else must have stopped for smoko or something and despite a puncture near the Geelong racecourse  I saw Helen and some of the others just out of Geelong.  They overtook me by Torquay.

There were steep hills around Bells Beach.  My trike isn't the best on uphills anyway and my tactic for dealing with them was to walk up them briskly.  Not very good Audax riding but the best I could do.

Got into Airey's Inlet at 2pm, had my card signed and was off with the others who'd got in a bit earlier.  On to Moriac and my first real break.  Andrew pulled in after me, suffering from a "hunger flat" and needing calories just to keep going.  Also by this time, I had worked out how to reset the "distance" feature on the speedo and was becoming moderately competent at daytime navigation using the cue sheet.

A few k's down the road and Andrew's guts are complaining, he's bent over his bike not feeling too good and I press on.  Within 10 or 15k, he's with me again though, stomach troubles all cleared up.  We finished the ride together, and I leaned heavily on him for GPS navigation.  Nighttime mapping with a speedo and cue sheet needs a head torch and I didn't have one.

So anyway, steady and easy does it, we pulled back into Werribee well after dark at 8:30pm.  Helen had got in about an hour earlier.

Some lessons were learned, lighting for  Audax needs to be taken seriously including recharging or replacing batteries on all lights.  Having a head torch and cue sheet holder are necessary if you want to read a cue sheet after dark.  Better still, I should contemplate getting one of those GPS.  Thingies.  The more training the less you suffer on the ride as well.

And the trike just worked.  I had already done about 900k of commuting and general riding on it so I guess that was enough to break it in.  For the record I have done a prevoius (November 2013) long ride on a Vuong trike, not as hilly though.

Thanks to Helen, Andrew and Audax for the organising, camaraderie and assistance.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Custom Forks and Steerer

Cutom 24" forks, left hand side.  The 2 small holes in the dropout are for a fairing mount. The other side dropout has the derailleur mount as well.

Steerer with cables running inside.  Robert W. helped me with the welding.

The trike

Hi

Last week I went on a Sunday ride led by Alan Ball on some bike tracks quite near to our house which I've never been on.  I took the opportunity of photographing some of the new bike parts made in the last few weeks.  Thanks for leading the ride Alan, very pleasant and good fun.

Regards

Steve Nurse

16" Wheels

One I prepared earlier, 16" wheels on current Vuong trike

Homemade bearing removal tool: the slotted part expands when the tapered part is screwed in to the bearing or its crush tube.

Apropos of not very much, this is part of an ex-Hallmark Jetset bike I used as "tooling"

This is all the stuff stripped from a Trisled 16" wheel, bearing, crush bar, outer sleeve.

Pressing the replacement bearing back in using my (very much unplugged!) drill press.  The bearing needs to be pressed in using the outer race.

Finished!  This is the wheel with a 15mm custom shaft fitted, and ready to be fitted to a pedal to make a Vuong trike wheelset.

Hi

I'm still building Vuong trikes and need to get parts for them, unfortuately being a very early adopter means many of them need to be custom or highly modified.  Back wheels included!

The 16" wheels I've been using have been good and I wanted to get some more, but the last set needed seperate purchases of hubs, rims and a quite expensive spoking service, not to mention tyres, tube and rim tape.  This time I've simplified things a bit but there's still a bit to do.  I bought WHF-16-32DB wheels from Trisled after finding that the bearings were 6804's, 32 od x 20 id.  My axles are 15mm OD, so swapping bearings for 6002's would seem to be able to fix things.  And in the end this worked.  Custom wheels made to suit would be a bit cheaper with no need for bearing sleeve, spacer or even disc brake mount.

I have some plans for some improved aerodynamic wheel covers for these wheels, and will post on that when the time comes.

A Shopping Trip

While on a shopping trip to Sydney Road I chatted to Darryl who I bump into every now and then.....

 and a lady I didn't know about the trike.

The trike storage compartment.

Hi

I haven't done any long rides lately but am doing about 30k most weekdays and the occasional week end ride.  Sydney Road is a popular shopping strip only a few k away on the bike track, and there's an Aldi and an open-Sunday op-shop there, so I'll sometimes ride over there to blow away some cobwebs.  The trike shown is my current daily driver  and is gradually being improved: it started off being a trike as Ilean mk2 but it has a longer history as a recumbent bike.  The latest changes have been to fit a custom steerer which the brake and gear cables run through and new forks with a bosses for front fairing mounts.  Might even build a front fairing for it one day!