Amazingly weird results when people draw a "bicycle" from memory

“The bike of choice for athletes with hemorrhoids”

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I find it interesting that the chainstays are omitted in the vast majority of these bikes. Perhaps these little tubes are rendered invisible by the presence of the chain.

The very concept that a bike frame is made of two triangles also seems to be lost on all these people. Curious indeed.

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I sometimes use the bike-drawing exercise as a warm-up for design sketching sessions with people who aren’t used to drawing stuff in public. It’s a great mix of drawing challenge and hilarious ice-breaking.

One thing I think that Oliver Sachs once pointed out is that if you give the task of drawing a bike to a child under the age of seven, the chances of them drawing it with somebody riding on it are far higher than an adult doing that. By the time our brains mature, we’re thinking more about the function of objects than their gestalt existence.

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Looks painful, from a dudes point of view.

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You think these are fun, you should see the ones by schizophrenics on LSD.

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That would be a procumbent.

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After looking at all those failed depictions, I’m actually having trouble visualizing a correct bike in my head.

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Start out with two triangles fused along one side, and work from there?

A lot of those renders don’t have two triangles. Usually just one or none.

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You see? Didn’t draw anyone in them didyuh?

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Yes but where I live, a bicycle is defined in the transport regulations as a vehicle with an engine of less then 200 watts, regardless of how many wheels it has. So a unicycle is also a bicycle.

That would be a procumbent bike I suppose. At least it puts the cranks close to the driven wheels.

A trained cyclist can produce about 400 watts of mechanical power for an hour or more, but adults of good average fitness average between 50 and 150 watts for an hour of vigorous exercise.
(from Human power - Wikipedia)

So, if your average person (a biochemical machine that can perform mechanical work; so, an engine) is driving it, it’s a bicycle, but if a trained cyclist is driving it, it’s not?

Odd regulations.

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It’s an interesting project, and fun to read about, though most of the resulting designs seem either 1) unworkable (or actually bound to fail from an engineering perspective), or 2) Hideously ugly (yes, I know, de gustibus etc) But that first bike from Anni56 is utterly awesome looking. It has a strong art deco feel to me, and while it’s structurally weaker than a typical bike design, it looks like it would hold up well enough under moderately frequent non-intense usage.

Sadly, though, it also looks like you have to be about 7 feet tall to use it and would still need to be “seated” almost horizontally - a typical street bike has a seat well forward of the rear axle and handlebars approximately above or slightly behind the front axle. In this case a minor redesign bringing the handlebars back would still retain the same aesthetic (IMO) and it might actually be rideable

I thought these were the ones by schizophrenics on LSD.

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I have no idea if it is better, but I definitely want one just because it just looks fun.

The ability to control a bicycle, and the ability to apply power to it do tend to scale in parallel. You need to practice to accomplish both. Any idiot can buy a motorized bicycle and I have seen a few people do damage to themselves through a mismatch between ability and power.

Having said that, I wonder if the regulations cover electric motors, which are of course less of a heat engine than the human body.

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