Atomic Zombie Extreme Machines

Atomic Zombie Extreme Machines are making a small business out of the homebuilt enthusiast, offering various books and plans for garage experimenters. Their gallery of project bikes is very cool. Bicycle Builder's Bonanaza looks very good., offering a number of really good bike plans.

Homebuilt Recumbent Bikes

Steve's Recumbent Bicycle Projects is a great web site for homebuilt recumbent bikes, some of them make largely out of wood.

Cyclecide Bikes are Way Cool

While listening to a Bikescapes podcast I learned about Cyclecide: "The heavy pedal bike rodeo." Not sure what all the troop does, but they certainly have some utterly unique bikes.

best

Robert

Xtracycle Sport Utility Bicycle (SUB)

On Green Street today Rick and I saw this Xtracycle, essentially a kit or bike you can buy that extends the wheel base by fixing an extension where the rear wheel would be. This creates a cool, heavy hauler that can add saddles and such to allow for carrying all manner of equipment. Pretty cool. This bike is also a single gear.

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Robert

Prof. Gary Cziko with 1969 Peugeot PX10

This is Prof. Gary Cziko from UIUC with his Peugeot PX10, now a fixed-gear with wheels from freeze-thaw, on a bike he once rode from NY to Oregon. Gary is multitalented to say the least: a very active academic who also plays jazz, cycles, runs community internet radio for language learning, and on and on.

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Robert

1 of a Kind at UIUC

Pretty amazing home-made recumbent I saw on the UIUC campus. I'd like to get some video of this bike actually rolling down the road--need to see it to believe it. very cool

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Robert 

Mecca for Folk Bikes

Ok, I'm learning as I go and am just getting started, but it seems that the mecca for folk bikes just might be the Louisiana Bike Festival, which celebrates novelty, homebuilt, vintage and custom bicycles, as is wonderfully evident by John Preble's "Horsigator." I know where I'll be next June!

Schwinn with Plastic Soap Jug

This is a great old bike and a great mystery--at least to me. Ok, forgive my possible ignorance, but what the heck does the blue plastic soap jug offer the typical cyclist? In terms of just style, the blue jug is strangely appealing. Perhaps someone on the Internet can offer a hint as to practical value, or I'll just ask the person who rides this Schwinn next time I see him or her at the bike rack.

University of Illinois

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Robert

Folk Bikes: Our Mission

Our mission here at folk bikes is to document with photographs and text those bikes that are no longer boring and indistinguishable from 100s and 1000s of other identical, mass produced bikes. These are bikes that are unique due to the effects of aging, rarity, customization, or applied folk art. We call these bikes "folk bikes" borrowing from the use of the term folk, as in folk art, to suggest the role of individual folk (people and not companies and corporations) who personalize and change mass-produced bicycles. Similarly, a 30-year-old stock Schwinn that is weathered and dented and now utterly unique due to the ravages of time, is also welcome, representitive of the role of nature in "customizing" a bike so that it becomes a unique object. We are not bike snobs and any little thing can make a bike unique, even a mass-produced Schwinn or contemporary mountain bike. Thus, we strive to find those bikes that embody the odd, the unique, the weathered, and the creatively bastardized. Please help us by submiting your own local discoveries to r-baird@uiuc.edu.

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Robert

to start us off, one of my own rides, a Schwinn Le Tour, with Prairie Farms milk cart held on with plastic ties