Quote:
Originally Posted by Electictracer
Ken, I’m very interested in your outriggers you mentioned. You said they were manually powered and fell with gravity? How, or did they, lock in place.
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The outriggers were operated by two foot pedals, each about the size of a large car brake pedal. (Braking was by hand.) Springs held them retracted. When deployed, the outrigger wheels were about 36" apart at the ground contact points. Each outrigger was about 12" long, and the inboard mounting pivots points were about 18" apart. The pivots were angled so that as the outriggers were deployed, they swung downward and outward, eventually ending up at something like 45 degrees down from horizontal and perpendicular to the scooter's centerline.
Casters allowed the outer ends of the outriggers to move along the ground in an arc as they applied force to the ground. In the phase when one outrigger was moving to correct a lean, that outrigger might have moved about 4" forward to move down by about 1" or so. But the pedal, in this phase, was moving about 1" or 2." Overall, the outrigger tip moved through about 18", and the pedal moved through about 6". However, the linkage was arranged so that the really poor leverage (high foot force vs low outrigger force) was before ground (or near ground) contact. Much of the time, things worked well, but sometimes, an outrigger would be too far back to apply enough leverage, and the bike would fall over.
For parking, the outriggers were held out by a car handbrake lever and cable. In that case, they were always deployed equally, so the bike would lean with the pavement.
The three wheel idea was becoming more appealing for several reasons, so I didn't work on the outrigger design enough to decide if manual control would really be a good method for balancing the stationary (or near stationary) bike vertically with respect to gravity. Real legs certainly work well enough... but getting outriggers to tuck in neatly imposes some challenges. With a real leg, in a fraction of a second, you can have your foot well out from centerline to brace a falling bike, you can step around a pothole or bump in the road, etc.
Power operation would be an advantage, I think, to have both quick response and adequate force.