There are other guides to selection online and in print; this is my take on the subject.
Test rides are very important. Try out all the recumbents you can, even if you have to make a day trip or two to reach a dealer with demo bikes. The Easy Racers/Sun EZ-1 line, Bacchetta, and Rans are probably the three makes you'll see most often in stores these days. If a friend will let you try their 'bent, great. Asking to ride someone's personal bike is kind of a big deal if you don't know them well, of course. If you're really out in the hinterlands and can't get any test rides, you'll just have to do the best you can from research, and be ready to sell the bike used if you have to.
When test riding short wheelbase recumbents (SWB) be aware of an issue called heel interference or heel strike. On SWB recumbents, when making a really tight turn while pedaling, it's possible for the heel of your shoe on the inside pedal to bump into the front tire, which can result in a crash if you're not expecting it. This can only happen when making a very tight low-speed U-turn on a SWB recumbent (not LWB or CLWB). To avoid the problem, you simply stop pedaling briefly during such maneuvers.
I was worried about it before I got my Vision R40, but heel strike isn't a big problem in practice. In normal turns, even on rather tight bike-trail S-curves, the front wheel doesn't deflect enough for heel strike to happen. Some experimenting in a big parking lot would probably be a good idea, so you get a feel for how tight you can turn before you need to stop pedaling for a moment.
Handling of long wheelbase recumbents (LWB) can be a little tricky at low speeds, as when climbing steeply or perhaps early in the season. Steering response is inherently quicker on SWB and not as quick with longer wheelbases. It's not all that hard, just requires a bit more concentration than SWB.
You may have noticed I recommend studying up on recumbents before going for test rides. By all means do it that way if you possibly can, especially if you have to road-trip to get test rides. If you inform yourself about the available configurations first, your test ride experiences will likely mean more to you.
You don't have to become a bike mechanic to buy a recumbent. In particular, you don't need to know all the geeky technical details about this year's drive-train offerings from Sachs and Shimano and Campy. But you do need to recognize basic terms like cassette, chain wheel, crank, bottom bracket, and headset when you see or hear them.
If you ever decide to order a recumbent that's not stocked by anyone in your area, and you don't have bike mechanic skills yourself, you might want to go around and talk to mechanics at Local Bike Shops in your area, choose the one that seems most experienced and competent to you, and have your recumbent shipped to that bike shop for assembly. Shops that actually sell recumbents, if any, should probably be considered first for this sort of thing.
| SWB | Short wheelbase: about 33-45 inches, front wheel behind the pedals; probably the most adaptable type for different kinds of riding. Examples: ActionBent LiteSpeed & Jet Stream, Sun Speedster, Burley Hepcat & Django, Rans Rocket & V-Rex, Lightning. |
|---|---|
| MWB | Medium wheelbase: about 45-65 in. Examples: Haluzak Horizon, ActionBent MidRacer. |
| LWB | Long wheelbase: 65+ inches, front wheel ahead of the pedals. Examples: ActionBent MantaRay, Easy Racers, Burley Jett Creek & Koosah, Rans Stratus & Velocity^2, Longbikes/Ryan Slipstream. |
| CLWB | Compact long-wheelbase: 47-60 in. with a certain type of layout. Examples: Sun EZ-1, Bacchetta Café, Rans Tailwind, Cannondale Bent I/II, BiGHA, BikeE.* |
| Low-racer | Mostly European performance design: ASS, low very reclined seating position, high bottom bracket & pedals |
| High-racer | American performance design: ASS, two large 26-inch or 650c wheels, relatively high reclined seat, medium to high bottom bracket & pedals. The larger wheels are thought to increase stability. Examples: Rans Force 5, Bacchetta Strada, ActionBent HiRacer, Vision R60 Saber.* |
| Tandem | Two riders: "driver" and "stoker." There are upright & recumbent tandems. |
| USS | Under-seat steering: handlebar pivot is under the seat, more relaxed arm position. Examples: Longbikes/Ryan, Haluzak, Vision. |
| ASS | Above-seat steering: resembles upright bike handlebars more, easier to mount computer/headlight, some would say more aerodynamic tucked-in arm position. Some weenies prefer to say OSS for "over-seat steering." Examples: Burley, Easy Racers, Rans, Bacchetta, Lightning. |
| Tadpole trike | Two steered front wheels, like a car, one rear drive wheel, lower rider position than delta trikes. Examples: Trice, Greenspeed, WizWheelz, Sun EZ-Tadpole. |
| Delta trike | One steered front wheel, two rear wheels with one or both driven. Examples: Sun EZ-3, Penninger, Lightfoot. |
Different kinds of 'bents are often thought of as being naturally suited for certain kinds of riding.
Feel free to ignore the conventional wisdom if the urge strikes you. For instance, Rotator and the aluminum-frame Easy Racers Gold Rush are performance-oriented LWB bikes, and SWB recumbents get used for everything, including touring, cruising, and commuting.
One fundamental issue in the design of SWB recumbents is always how to provide for adjustment to fit riders with longer and shorter legs, which translates to the distance between the seat base and the bottom bracket and pedals.
The common early approach. This is a separate frame member ending in the bottom bracket, which typically slides inside the front of the rest of the frame, which has a slot and provision for bolts to clamp it around the sliding boom to fix it in position.
This is a simple system to design and build, but it has some drawbacks. Torquing down the boom bolts hard tends to be only partially effective in keeping the boom in the desired position. The boom can rotate unexpectedly, probably when you are trying to start off, and you might suddenly find your pedals and chain rings sitting sideways or at an angle, until you fix it.
Those boom bolts having to be over-torqued tends to cause them to snap about the fourth or fifth time they are tightened, which obviously can be inconvenient if it happens on the road. Some riders carry spares.
When you change the adjustment of a sliding boom, you are also changing the distance between the chain rings and the cassette. That means you have to add or remove chain links to compensate, which is annoying. Of course all this is only necessary when you adjust the bike for a different rider.
In the sliding-boom design, the seat doesn't have to move with respect to the rest of the frame, which simplifies designing its attachment. The seat can even be attached at both ends, with the base bolted to the middle of the frame, and the seat back supported by thrust braces connecting to the rear-wheel part of the frame.
The other approach is to use a sliding seat and make the frame in one piece including the bottom bracket. The obvious plus is no sliding/rotating boom, and no overstressed boom bolts. A well-designed sliding-seat recumbent can be adjusted for a different rider in seconds, with no fiddling with chain links required.
On the minus side, you have to come up with some way for the seat to adjust fore and aft, and still be able to clamp solidly after adjustment, and thrust braces can be problematic. If your sliding base is the only point of attachment of the seat, that means it will be highly stressed and may tend to flex or squeak. Another potential minus is that moving a sliding seat changes the rider/bike center of gravity (CG) and weight distribution relative to the front and rear wheels, more so than sliding boom adjustments do. This tends to be more of an issue with riders on the tall/short ends of the fit range, of course.
As with anything else, results depend as much on quality of execution as on which system is used. Either system provides a certain range of adjustment. Some manufacturers further extend the fit range of a design by offering different sizes, either of the entire frame or in some cases just the sliding boom.
| Advantages | Disadvantages | |
|---|---|---|
| Sliding boom | Simple design Seat can be attached front and back |
Boom can rotate unexpectedly Overtorqued boom bolts can break Adjustment requires adding/removing chain links |
| Sliding seat | One-piece frame No chain-links hassle when adjusting |
Seat base design is a challenge, can squeak or flex Thrust braces can be problematic CG & weight distribution changes more |
Because the pedals are at the very front of a recumbent, and the drive wheel is, usually, still at the rear, recumbents always have a lot of chain.
I think the long chain tends to scare designers at mainstream bike manufacturers, which may be why they seem to go for mid-drives. A mid-drive design has two separate chains and three sets of cogs. The cranks drive a single smallish chain wheel up front, which connects via a short chain to a single cog coaxial with a set of three chain wheels, mounted in an extra bearing in the bottom middle of the bike, with a conventional front derailleur and chain rings. A second short chain connects those to a conventional cassette and rear derailleur at the rear axle. This provides great chain management but adds weight and cost.
Conventional recumbents with a single long chain often have one or more idlers which constrain and control the motion of the chain. Idlers are small wheels or cogs that the chain passes over or under on its way between the cranks and the cassette. Some idlers look like pulleys, some are more like the small cogs that are part of a normal rear derailleur. In some designs with highly stressed plastic idlers, the idlers wear rapidly enough that they have to be replaced yearly. I believe some pulley-style idlers are now being made from super-tough solid urethane plastic, like skate wheels, which probably helps lots.
The cheaper and maybe less elegant way to control chain motion is with chain tubes. These are just one or two lengths of plastic tubing attached to the frame; one or both sides of the chain pass through. Chain tubes have more bearing surface than idlers and perhaps less wear potential, but also tend to make more noise.
Idlers and chain tubes both tend to add noise and some small percentage of mechanical loss due to added friction.
Any bicycle chain has an upper power side (moving forward) and a lower return side (moving to the rear). The power side is under significant tension, because it is actually transferring your pedal power from the front chain wheels to the rear cassette. The only tension on the return side of the chain is that applied by the spring in the rear derailleur. Because of this difference in tension force, idlers or chain tubes on the power side of the chain make a lot more noise and difference than idlers or chain tubes on the return side.
It also makes a difference how much angle the chain makes as it passes over an idler or through a chain tube; the straighter the chain is, the less lateral force the idler or tube is applying to the chain and the less noise and loss there will be. Recumbent tadpole trikes that are built low for faster cornering necessarily have large idler angles, because the rider's kiester is down between the front and rear cogs, and the chain has to go around.
A peculiar effect called pogo can occur on suspension recumbents only. This typically comes up when the power side of the long recumbent chain ends up making a significant angle with the rear suspension swing-arm. Every time the rider pushes on a pedal, this causes the chain to pull against the swing-arm and make it flex more. As you watch the rider climb a hill, his head bobs up and down every time he pushes on the pedals, hence the name.
This not only looks goofy, but some of the rider's energy is being wasted on making the suspension flex. The way to avoid pogo is to pay attention in design to the relative geometry of the chain power side and the suspension.
Look at the bike when someone of average size is sitting on it with a foot on a pedal, holding the chain tight; this will also put the suspension in its loaded position. If the power side of the chain passes close to the axis of the suspension pivot, or at least the line of the chain power side is roughly parallel to the suspension-pivot/rear-axle line, then pogo is unlikely to be a problem, unless you are a purist. Or you could just ride it and see.
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