Thanks for the advice, one minute I'm about to pull the trigger, the next minute, no. The SM is s/h btw, I'm not THAT foolish! I've looked ( at pics) of a lot, but for me it's the SM , Azub six, that seems to press my suppressed 'adventure button'. It just looks right to me
To be fair, that's
exactly what I did.
Can you pedal slower on a bent, uphill, I mean can you grind up hill in slow motion, or must you spin?
You can't shift your bodyweight to compensate for the grinding like you do on an upright, so a higher gear raises your stall speed. By spinning, you keep the pedalling frequency from resonating with the wobble frequency, or something.
Given thousands of miles of practice, I can winch myself up hills at about 2mph. CBA to do the maths, but cadence in the low 50s I suppose (I tend to be concentrating on other things).
Since you've got something solid to push against without using weedy arm muscles or influencing the steering, you can grind much harder on a 'bent. Which - while occasionally useful for very short steep climbs, emergency shit-I'm-in-the-wrong-gear-and-there's-a-car-coming manoeuvres, unsticking bottom brackets and sprinting for the finish line at races - is a great way to accelerate drivetrain wear and b0rk your knees if you make a habit of it.
Also some pics / videos show folks with leg completely extended to the pedals, so that the leg is flat, and some with quite a bend. What difference does it make?
Seems to be a personal preference thing. I find I ankle more on the Streetmachine than on my uprights, and - interestingly - the Baron (which has a much higher BB wrt the seat). Crank length is another factor - many recumbentists prefer shorter cranks.
Anyone got any ( lots please) of pics of their SM (in action or not). . What is a good avg distance unloaded on a SM. I assume it's too heavy for audax type stuff. or is it?
100km rides are fine. I've done a few 200s on mine, but its suitability for Audax is limited to the lack of contact-point issues (which IMHO counts for a lot), its high reliability (being built like a tank and there isn't too much recumbent-specific weird stuff to go wrong
[1]) and that you don't get splattered in wet weather the way you do on lower recumbents. Obviously a lot of this depends on the engine, and you can rig things in its favour with a flat route and tyres that are a bit faster-rolling than you'd normally fit on a tourer. I don't think the suspension is a particularly bad thing in this context - when correctly adjusted it's not sproingy like a mountain bike, or a pointless energy-sink like on a Brompton, and it goes a long way towards making crap roads tolerable at speed (particularly when loaded - all the luggage is suspended load). But it does add an awful lot of weight to the design.
If you're riding in a group with people on uprights (solos that is, tandems have similar dynamics to 'bents and are your friend) expect to work harder up the hills and waste momentum down them. Riding at your own pace will be markedly more efficient.
*scrabbles for a recent photo*
[1] Water getting into the gear/brake cables can be an issue with USS, but you'd have to be pretty unlucky for that to be a problem during an audax. Expect to replace the cable outers much more frequently than on an upright. I've had good results with sticking bags over the controls whenever I park it outdoors in wet weather.