12,000 Miles Since 2005

I built my first motorized bike in 2005 after finding Golden Eagle in a Popular Mechanics article and talking to Denis and some of his customers. After 3 newspaper articles ran in nearby towns, I caught the bug and decided to spread the word via small town newspapers.

Using the no longer availabe 25 cc Zenoah/RedMax engine (I still have two Zenoahs, thinking they will be "collectors items" at 240-250 miles per gallon), my first long trip in early 2006 was to Amelia Island Florida and back, over 800 miles. That was a warmup for a 2,000 mile round trip to Denver in May 2006.

Those two trips are where I got my "12 Statelines Crossed" photos.

Picasa Web Albums - Paul - Statelines cr...

Since then, I've stayed under 1,000 miles, up Mt. Cheaha in 14 minutes in fall 2006 (400 miles touring that east Alabama area), round trip to Mobile in Jan. 2007 (700 miles in the roundabout route I took), and a Selma run when Obama and Clinton were there in March 2007 (another 500 miler).

Nowadays I take simple 3 day/500 mile ride-abouts exploring different areas in Alabama, no pressure to make time or miles, plenty of time to talk to folks. I've sold bikes in 16 counties surrounding my area, so usually I get together with a customer and they show me their local sights.

I'm running the Tanaka 33 cc on my red cruiser "Rocinante" now, getting around 160 miles per gallon, and when GEBE finally comes out with the Tanaka 28 cc with it's expected "over 200 mpg" , I'll do another 2-3,000 mile trip, hopefully making a loop up to Minnesota.

I've tried to tell the public about "how to win the oil war" via newspaper interviews, quit counting after 30 (some sort of Guiness World Record for most stories about the same idiot on the red bike), but at least with MBer's you don't have to explain the "freedom to move" aspect, when I did the Denver trip it was to prove you could see America for $10 a day, and that was back in the $2.50 a gallon days.

But it is the "stoopid" ideas that are the most fun to relate to fellow bike enthusiasts.

For instance, I left Denver at dawn, headed south to Colorado Springs, observing ominous clouds coming over Pikes Peak (more about those clouds later), then east ("next gas station 97 miles")....then south toward La Junta, where I arrived around 5 pm.

I always gassed up and got water before finding my camping spot, sun setting over my shoulder, I headed east toward Lamar.

There was a wildlife refuge on my state of Colorado map. midway to Lamar, that looked good for camping. It was about 2 miles off the highway, and when I pulled onto the 'flatter than a pancake' dirt road, I saw this HUGE prairie dog village on the left.

What the heck, I pulled off the road and start rousting the critters, and within a half mile I have about a hundred of them running out in front of me. At about 15-20 miles per hour, I'm having NO trouble dodging the holes, and I'm laughing and zig zagging all the way to the entrance of the refuge.

On the entrance sign is a big old picture of a rattlesnake and I says to myself "another 90 minutes till sundown, think I'll keep heading east"....but instead of going back on the dirt road, I proceed to see how many prairie dogs I can get stampeding on the way back out to the highway.

At least 500, I was rounding up the leftovers from my first pass thru, and riding this brown wave of barking, mad as tarnation varmits, I'm thinking to myself "Billy the Kid would have done THIS if a only horses legs weren't vulnerable." Some of them were chasing ME, I'm remembering the Ewoks.

So I figure I'm the first person to "do the prairie dog surf", give some wicked ideas to our compadres in the high chapperel.....

Nope, I've never rode on an Interstate. I've crossed over quite a few....

Usually I try and route waaaaaay around metro areas, but there usually are parallel US Highways that I use, or better yet, plain old curvy State roads going in my direction.

Route 66 is a famous US Highway, I was on US 36 through Kansas, which used to be the major road from Indianapolis to Sacramento. US 3 in the Oklahoma panhandle is a calunk calunk culunk concrete highway I used.

There is more history found on the back roads than on the sterile & boring Interstates.

The majority of my rides are on two lanes.

However, during my week stay in Denver my friend drove us through your neck of the woods, to a 2 night concert at State Bridge, on the Colorado River. And I noticed regular bicycles on the interstate from Denver through Vail.

Apparently from the Rockies westward, where sometimes Interstates are the only way through a mountain pass or across a long stretch of desert, bicycles are allowed as a necessity. (That's what I heard anyway, check your local regulations.)

East of the Rockies, no Interstate highway access, but who needs them?

No matter how I slice it/dice it, I average 25 mph day in day out.

I'm on the road at sunrise, pour it on till around 1 pm when I start looking for the All U Can Eat lunch buffet, then play it by ear. Find a swimming hole, do a newspaper interview, visit Indian tribes (I stopped at 11 tribal offices in Oklahoma). Then I go as long as I want before looking for a spot to camp.

If I need to make up time, I ride to nearly sunset, but if I'm ahead of schedule, I tool around towns, check out museums, talk to the locals.

Neighbors time my bikes at 33-35 on straightaways, but I can consistently carve off 225-250 mile chunks of distance per day. The Florida trial run taught me a few tricks, but here are some of the main ones.

1. Foam grips- when I put an engine on a different model bike, with rubber grips, & do some break-in miles, I'm thankful for that Sun Retro-7 (which has the curviest handlebars all foam lined). Rubber or ribbed grips would rub me wrong, foam grips sells at bike shops for $5.

2. Thumb throttle- I have a heavy oval shaped piece of wire I can slip on the throttle as "cruise control", have both hands free to move around.

3. 12" saddle on a shock absorber seat post.

4. Dependable zip tied wheels, slime tubes/tuffy liners. My last flat was outside El Dorado, Arkansas, caused by the spoke ends rubbing through the little rubber gasket. (who knew??) I carry electric tape, made three rounds inside the wheel over the gasket, and now I do that on every bike I build.

5. NO ETHANOL ever.

fairracing,

I started noticing those bike paths around Vail, but the coolest thing was after we ate in Silverthorne, those buses with the bike carrying platforms on the front were parked nearby, and I went over and chatted.

It is SOOOO cheap to hop from one spot to another, and I counted 3 identical bus setups within a half hour.

jasonh said:

bama, when you say no ethanol, are you referring to the 10% blends that most places force you to use? I don't think I've seen non-blended gas for quite some time...

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Sure, the major name brands Shell, BP, Amoco etc. don't have ethanol.

I used to run only 91 octane, and when I hit Kansas I started to notice there was no such thing, 87 was all I was seeing.

But still I found the major brands. However they started getting rare to find as the distances stretched out between major towns, (lots of gas companies I never heard of), and I was having to ask all the time "does this have ethanol?" because the pumps didn't have stickers.

When I got to Norton, KS I saw a pump with 89 octane, I asked and was assured it didn't have corn. So I put it in my spares tanks.

I poured in the first spare in Oberlin, then hiccupped/vapor locked all the way to the next town 30 miles away. I pulled into a small engine shop and he told me to just pour it out, it was bad gas. He gave me enough to get to Saint Francis on the Colorado border.

Talking to farmers, they said they grew it but didn't use it in their pickups, they had private co-op credit card operated tanks with "the good stuff" or diesel.

UncleKudzu said:

are you the guy who was featured in the Birmingham News a few months back?

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Yes, I met the reporter at a bluegrass festival, that was the first article she ever had go national/international, it was run via AP in Australia I heard. Denis at GEBE read it in his local Ann Arbor paper.

The article seems to have disappeared from the archives, only thing I can find is some outfit called HighBeam reprinting part of it from a Syracuse paper:

SMILES FOR MILES; AT 250 MILES PER GALLON, YOU WOULD BE SMILING, TOO.(CNY)

From:
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)
Date:
June 15, 2007
More results for:
"paul crabtree" bicycle "smiles for miles" | Copyright information COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of The Herald Co. by the Gale Group, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.

Byline: Kim Bryan Newhouse News Service

Holly Pond, Ala. -- The high price of gasoline isn't keeping Paul Crabtree off the road.

He logs 220 miles on a good day and pays more for lunch than fuel.

That's because Crabtree's vehicle of choice gets 250 miles per gallon. It's a bicycle, but not an ordinary one.

Crabtree customizes bicycles by mounting two-cycle Golden Eagle engines atop the rear wheels. The 11-pound motor boosts his bike's speed from a typical 10 mph to 35 mph.

"This is all you need," Crabtree said of his $250 Sun seven-speed. "I started with a $100 Wal-Mart bike in August of 2005. It took 24 hours to install the engine. Now it takes me two."
...

Read all of this article with a FREE trial

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thatsdax said:

Only 3000 miles.. Not even break in yet... lol.. I am up to around 135mpg WOT and I can cruise 33mph at 9000 feet. No kidding.. Not quite 12,000 miles yet, but not bad for 5 months or so. It is not unusual for me to ride over 70 miles in a single ride. With a stop for gas since the tank is only a 1 liter tank good for 44 miles or so. Enjoy the ride..

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Here's a coincidence- Before I bought the first engine, I had called 2 GEBE customers, both out west, and they both said "wait till you get 1,000 miles on the engine, that's when you'll feel a surge".

The Florida engine was about the fifth one I had built, and when I got back, I sold that engine to a friend. So the Denver engine was pretty new when I left Alabama.

Right out of Manhattan, KS, which was around that 1,000 mile mark, I really felt the surge. I also caught a tailwind , and rode it as far west as I could before sunset. I was having a blast, amber waves of grain, buffalo and antelope playing and all that.

The next day, on a last minute change of plan, I headed into Red Cloud, Nebraska, home of Willa Cather, a favorite pioneer author. I saw the museum, bought cool postcards, did a newspaper interview, asked a bunch of questions about everything I was noticing, from the height of the wheat to the size of the tractors. I was getting the lowdown.

Just as I crossed the Republic River, re-entering Kansas, I met the prairie headwind, unlike any I had felt previously. With miles and miles and miles of massive hog parlors and maybe 50 trucks filled with "hog produced fertilizer byproduct" passing me, making the experience doubly fragrant.

That tailwind I had experienced yesterday had a big bad brother, the 40 mile per hour headwind. Trying to outguess which way that wind was going to surprise me with became a game I played until I got south of Elk City, OK. They have hundreds of names for the prairie wind, but mostly I was calling it "dammit". I knew why the roads were so litter free, cuz those wind gusts blew it all up to the Dakotas.

Anyway, right after the hog perfume stretch of road is when I got the bad ethanol.

I HAD noticed there were no more dead armadillos on the road, but between the prairie wind, the vapor locking, and the roller coaster ride on Hwy 36, I'm just a "confused dude from out east" by the time I got to Denver. (A solid week of friendly folks buying me "Fat Tire" and other local exotic brews didn't help).

I had found Shell in Denver, BP in Colorado Springs....but I'm blaming the 87 octane and that store clerk in Norton who sold me the bad ethanol, because that real "surge" I had felt seemed to be missing. My spark plug was clean as a whistle, my air cleaner was good....

2 1/2 days out of Denver, coming straight south after riding thru the Oklahoma panhandle, heading to Shattuck, there are 3 long downhill steps. Before going down the first one, I stopped to take a picture because there, in the distance, were "real trees", not the scrub I had been seeing for over a week.

When I come off that second long slope, the engine makes a high pitched "wheeeeeeeeeee" sound, I'm going so fast that I let off the throttle, thinking "uh oh, drive shaft replacement time".

BUT it was the ALTITUDE CHANGE.

This whole time, from the Republic River crossing, spending a week with new friends and their friendly bartenders in Denver and State Bridge Lodge, and heading back, I NEVER PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER about that missing "surge".

But when I got back under 3,000 feet altitude, I was flying, and just like clockwork, I'm back in the land of roadkill armadillos.

I had been boycotting the internet for 5 years, so when I finally hooked back on-line in August 2006, started communicating with other MBer's, I understand you High Altitude folks can make a permanent "intake modification" and/or "fuel mixture adjustment" to maximize performance.

For "city slicker" tourists, just passing through, when the dead 'dillos disappear, when two or three beers seems to have an extra "kick", throw away all that sea-level mindset, quit worrying about the temporary engine quirks, and just enjoy the ride.

UncleKudzu said:

i've heard nothing but good things about the GEBE arrangements like yours. what do you think about the frame-mounted setups so popular in the forum?

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I've got frame mounting down to an art.

I keep extra mounts, spoke rings, belts and straps on hand, so when my engines arrived yesterday at 3 pm, a Schwinn Jaguar for a guy in Garden City was all ready to bolt on the engine, put on the throttle and kill switch, and by 3:30 I was putting it through some "break-in" paces. As soon as the sun rises I'll put another 2 tanks of fuel through the engine and he can pick it up this afternoon.

Same thing on the Pink Ladies Sun Retro 7 after that, slip on the engine, run a few tanks of fuel through, varying the throttle speed, and its good to go.

My belt on Rocinante must have 3,000 miles on it, hardly a sign of wear.

I've accumulated enough tools and equipment, (the bike work stand, air compressor, grinder, drimel, etc.)...and little "helpers" like 4 plastic spacers to center the spoke ring and a 357 millimeter long piece of wood to get the space between axle/motor mount exact, so that Jaguar is rolling perfectly, belt centered just right.

Nowadays, the only adjustments I may have to do is add/subtract an axle washer to fine tune the install.

But unless a person concentrates FIRST on making the rear wheel/tire/tube combo as "pothole-proof and flat-resistant" as possible, he never will get the reliability of mind.