Hen and Chickens

This cargo carrying penny farthing pentacycle, 'Hen and chickens', was the featured bike in a VeloVision story that was forwarded to me by a reader, Ross. The Canberra Bicycle Museum in Australia closed last year and this old bike is one of nearly 150 that are still to be sold. On the museum website you can find an older pdf catalog of bikes for sale (an updated one is due to be posted soon). Contact oldbikesincanberra (at) gmail.com if you are interested in any of the bikes.

Another reader, Nick, pointed out one of the bikes that looks pretty familiar. This 1984 trick bike, with its unicycle style direct rear drive, is very similar to the minimalist bike design that you saw here not long ago. As Nick said in his email, “What's old is new again.”

I may not get a chance to post again this week, so I am going to pass along a few more links while I am at it:

Ron of Cozy Beehive points us to this video of Mike Burrows discussing his latest designs. Another interesting Beehive post recently pointed out that 60% of cycling hour records were due to engineering. Click through to the Science News article that is cited; it is pretty interesting.

The Matra MS1 is an “Electric Bicycle Hybrid” from France. This is one of those designs that begs the question, is it an e-bike or a moped?

Speaking of e-bikes, the SANYO eneloop synergetic hybrid bicycle was honored with the 2010 CES Best of Innovations award for Eco-Design and Sustainable Technology.

TreeHugger mentioned the Pardo, a prone position human powered machine of some sort. I am not sure I want to trade my bicycles in for one of these, but it does look like it would be fun to try out.

Also at TreeHugger was a mention of the Feetz Tribike, a nice folding design for transporting kids or cargo.

I recently noticed the Pteranodon mountain bike concept by JinSeok Song on Coroflot.

MTB by 198 recently interviewed mountain bike pioneer, Joe Breeze. It is interesting to read his responses about the industry and mountain bikes today.

Cool Hunting shared some nice pictures from the Oregon Handmade Bicycle Show not too long ago.

Finally, I will mention that I just uploaded pictures of the Batavus BuB prototype urban bike that I was trying out for a couple of weeks. Look for a write up on that soon.