I was unable, recently, to resist having a try at riding a reverse steer bicycle. Not a unicycle I know, but still a fun thing to do. I am even making some progress with it, managing about 150 yards before falling off it yesterday.
It is a long time since I rode an ordinary conventional bicycle, but in those days, as a kid, I was able to ride along the street without holding on to the handlebars. On the reverse steer I find myself gripping the handlebars so tightly that my hands hurt. So I am still very reluctant (terrified?) to risk riding no-handed on the unrideable contraption.
So I wondered, is it possible to ride a reverse steer cycle hands off? Has anyone done it? I cannot see why, in theory, it should not be possible. The geometry is very similar.
PS: it is not advisible to get off such a bike, after an extended session, and immediately get into a car. There is a tendency to turn the wheel the wrong way. Corrected very quickly, but a little unnerving.
Whilst riding the RSB last week, I paused to allow a couple of young lads to pass me on the pavement. They said
“You were wobbling a fair bit there riding that, so we reckoned you were drunk.”
Which was quite amusing as both of them were themselves very drunk indeed. And which made letting them have a go even more fun.
You are able to ride a bike no handed because of the fork offset causes the handle bars to self centre. So as long as there is fork offset, you should be able to ride hands free.
So would riding it with no hands; that would defeat the purpose.
It sounds like a reverse-steer bike might be a good mental warm-up before learning to ride a reverse-pedaling 2-wheel unicycle. Same concept, where the reflex action causes an instant dismount.
However, if the bike rider is steering with the rear wheel, that would be the reverse of anything I understand about bike riding, and therefore I must love this person to be logically consistent.
I would love to try a rear steering bike. It’s a 9 on the retard scale of inventions, but that’s what would be fun.
Thanks for all the replies. Interesting to know that you CAN, as I suspected, ride one with hands off. ( Thanks Knoxuni). Not that it is something I want to do in order to cheat, it was merely an “out of interest” question.
I suspect that riding with crossed hands might make progress equally, or even more difficult. I have seen people try and fail, but they didn’t try for very long.
Someone also told me you could just hold the forks to steer. Maybe he could…
I am not exactly sure what was meant by “fork offset”, but I appreciate the probable physics that would be involved in it. I will have to look the detail up somewhere. Cheers for that raymanh.
Another interesting idea was the back wheel steering bicycle. Such things, if I am thinking along the same lines, do exist (and I would love to have one).
I once rode a frame which effectively had a unicycle as its rear end, the stem of the unicycle being able to rotate w.r.t. to the frame. The front end was a conventional handle bar and wheel arrangement. I think both ends rotated about vertical axes. Quite fun to ride, and possible even for a novice, but a device that would very much then choose its own direction. Easy enough to stay on it, but trying to make it go where you wanted was far more difficult. Don’t know what the bike was called, but I think it was French made, and had a chromed frame on it. I suppose I would have to say that it steered from both ends rather than just the rear. You could cheat with this one too, by simply doing a wheelie the device became a unicycle.
The “trail” would appear to be of critical importance to the self centering of the steering mechanism, with “fork offset” being an important contributory factor to that.
I wonder Rob, whether that is related to something I had noticed: to turn right I found that I had to first just flick the wheel slightly left (handlebars right!), before turning the wheel to the right. To initialise any turn I had to pre-load it with a minor turn the other way. I checked this counter-steering out on Google too and found that it applies to bicycles in general. It seems to be required in order to get the bike leaning in the correct direction to make a turn.
I guess it must apply to unicycling turns too, although I have not really noticed myself doing it.
Sounds like the ‘Super Trick Cycle’. It was the precursor to uni riding for me as a kid. I think Semcycle had a modern version on their site but I am not seeing it now. Great fun!
That’s true (although you do it subconsciously and only a tiny amount - apparently it’s more obvious on a heavy motorcycle), but I don’t think that’s why snaking helps with the reverse-steer bike. I reckon it’s just that you get into a rhythm of weaving side-to-side and it overrides the normal steering correction instinct a bit. It seemed to help me the few times I’ve had a go - doesn’t really work when you have to turn round though! Crossing hands did make it a bit easier as well, I’m not just making things up (have you ever tried to ride a normal bike with crossed hands? Very much like riding a reverse-steer bike).
The best riders of these machines though just ride them normally, so no real need to “cheat” if you’ve got enough time with it to practice.
You can try on a fixed-gear bike, either by riding it backwards or sitting backwards on it (which is quite far from ergonomical). I found it really difficult to do on my old artistic bike, which has a very short wheelbase. I’m sure that contributes to the problem, with very twitchy steering. I used to practice riding it backward in a big empty parking lot that had a light pole in the center. During my weeks of learning, no matter where I started, I always ended up headed for that pole in less than 30 seconds. I think there’s some sort of psychology lesson there.
Experts on the artistic bike can cruise all around on it facing backwards, then pop it into a wheelie and do spins, plus all sorts of other wrong-looking and super-difficult positions/combinations.
And unicycles, in case you never noticed. Mostly you don’t, but if you practice quick turns, such as in racing the IUF Obstacle Course, you notice the countersteer is necessary to quickly change directions. In fact, if you do it too quickly between cones #8 and 9 on the course, when you go from a hard right lean to a hard left one, you can literally pop yourself off the seat! You also need it for fast MUni on singletrack, or uni-basketball or hockey.
Counter-steer is an especially important technique in riding motorcycles. You push on the right handlebar to turn right. Sounds counter-intuitive, which I guess is why it’s called that. To see a great movie example of this, watch the big freeway chase scene in Matrix Revolutions. Without counter-steering, that bike would end up inside someone’s engine compartment! (Actually, half or more of the cars in some of those scenes are pure CGI)
Latest news: I can now ride the RSB for more or less as long as I want, without falling off. I have not totally got the hang of steering, but can keep it within about a yard or so, left or right of a straight line. Just need to tidy up those straight lines, and so get the required constant corrections a little more minor.
So I can now maybe start to relax my tight handgrip and work towards trying to take my hands off completely.
Quite pleased with my progress so far, although it has been slowed because the bike’s owner took it to the B.J.C. this last weekend.
This is quite interesting to me because I saw a chap in Covent Garden raking in money by charging people to ride his reverse steer bike, with the promise of 20 quid if they managed to ride a few metres to a stop line.
Nobody succeeded. He was giving everyone “advice” on how to ride successfully - and poking fun at people who didn’t follow it as an added incentive. I was pretty sure that the advice (go slowly, don’t pedal just freewheel downhill) was actually countering the things that normally make a bicycle self-balance, thereby making them more likely to fall off.
I’d like to ride the bike successfully next time I go there and reclaim a bit of that money - I’m inclined to try the crossing-hands-over trick if people think that helps! I’d try riding hands-free but I don’t think there’d be enough space to get up to speed, although I have practiced “freemounting” a bike directly into no-hands riding in the past.
I don’t think it’s the best way to do it (it’s better to practice until you can do it normally if you have access to a RS bike) but on the few times I’ve played with one it seemed to help a bit. I used to mess about trying to ride a normal bike with crossed hands and it feels quite a bit like reverse steering. It used to be a common joke when I was at school to fool somebody into riding their bike that way - you would “prove” it was easy by riding your own bike with crossed hands (actually not quite touching the bars, so in fact riding no-handed), then the victim would invariably crash. Very amusing it was…
The most success I’ve had with RS bikes is by snaking side-to-side rather than trying to ride straight. But the best way would be to borrow a bike and practice if you know somebody who’s got one.
I don’t personally recommend the crossed arms technique. All those who have tried it seem to revert very soon to riding more conventionally.
Riding slowly does reduce the self balancing of the bike, BUT, at my skill levels, riding slowly makes it easier to correct errors and straighten the route. At speed the mistakes have effect far too fast for my liking ( and the bike has no brakes to help). Slow is good.
I have found that to freewheel for short spells ( a fraction of a pedal revolution) can help get out of an impending doom situation. Downhill, with no brakes on an RSB is a definite no-no, speed control quickly disappears.
