Easy ride today. Got started late because of rain in the morning. A little breezy. Winds from the south 10 mph.

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http://app.strava.com/activities/86489710

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http://connect.garmin.com/activity/384740200

Beautiful ride today. 51.2 miles @ 18.4 mph. View from the top of a hill heading north on Ronald Reagan about 2 miles north of 29.

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http://app.strava.com/activities/86246017

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http://connect.garmin.com/activity/384262987

Just went for a relaxing spin today. Mounted the Contour+2 video camera on my helmet. Kind of an interesting perspective.

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Heading south on Williams (FM 2338) approaching the corner of Ronald Reagan I happened to have the camera on when a 1950s Porsche 356 pulls up to the intersection and makes a right hand turn to pace me for a little while. We stare at each others yellow vehicle admiringly.

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High speed coasting is a lot of fun with the F-40. Here I’m maintaining an easy 20 mph at a 100 bpm heart rate when I get to the downhill at Ronald Reagan and the back entrance to Sun City.

I stop peddling and just coast up to 36 mph.

A Prius starts to turn right pulling out in front of me. Once I take the lane they realize immediately how fast I am really going and quickly come to a stop.

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http://connect.garmin.com/activity/383755277

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http://app.strava.com/activities/86004008

Finally mounted the video camera to my helmet. Just a short, quick ride today to test it out.

Need to point it down just a tad.

Hopefully the weather will be good tomorrow for the Wac Wild West ride.

Easy ride today after two medium effort days of riding.

Saw the ICE Vortex trike again heading the other way. Since it was an easy ride I turned around and rode with the guy a little bit to gab. The rider is Brian P Buckmaster who lives in Sun City Georgetown TX. He just got the Vortex early September. Nice looking machine!

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http://connect.garmin.com/activity/381598929

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http://app.strava.com/activities/85063804

A FB friend of mine asked me today - ‘Is the F-40 meeting your expectations?’

Well, I had to think about it some.

I now have a total of 647 miles on the F-40 and another 236 miles with the fairing off as a P-38.

The total miles are a combination of training miles and four charity rides (two with each bike):

Date	Bike	Miles	Charity Ride
Aug 4	P-38	50	Tour de Jalapeno
Aug 17	F-40	60	Copperas Cove Classic
Aug 24	F-40	101	Hotter 'N Hell Hundred
Sept 21	P-38	66	Conquer the Coast

P-38

Of all the three 2-wheel recumbent’s I own (Optima Baron, Catrike Musashi and Lightning P-38) the P-38 is now my go to bike for easy, relaxed riding.

The one negative with the P-38 is you cannot have an aero-belly. Because of the closed riding position, any aero-belly will be bouncing off the tops of your legs as they rotate through the closest position while cycling. I have lost 10 pounds since getting the bike and now no longer seem to have this issue.

The Baron and Musashi are each probably slightly faster. The P-38 is more refined with a lot less quirks. I’ll probably end up selling the Baron and the Musashi.

I wasn’t really expecting to get a P-38 when purchasing the F-40. Regardless, the P-38 is an outstanding bike.

F-40

Although I have ~650 miles on the F-40 I still have not acclimated to the bike. Additionally, I still do not have the bike tuned correctly.

It probably took me about 1,000 miles to get the Musashi setup, tuned and myself acclimated. I was hoping that I could do it quicker on the F-40 because of my prior experience with both the Baron and Musashi. Alas, that turns out not to be the case - the F-40 is so much different that the other bikes that whole new skill sets and tuning are required.

Streamliner Expectations

Every hot, fit, young rider on a high-end time-trial bike sees the yellow fully faired streamliner as a target. You can, and will, go faster then them. The problem is that around the Austin TX area there are a lot of high end road bikes. You will be constantly challenged by uprights and riding pretty fast all of the time. This is definitely making me stronger. My average speeds and distances are improving. My legs ache all the time.

Acclimating to 30+ mph

Life above 25 mph is interesting. Life above 30 mph is frightening. I have not yet learned how to relax at greater then 25 mph. Above 30 mph I end up having a death-grip on the handle bars. I know this is probably a mental thing, but I really need to figure it out. Maybe I need to do upper body workouts to improve my arm strength.

The Wind

The wind turns out to be manageable. I don't yet have a complete reflex action to passing traffic.

Riding Easy and Relaxed

I have yet to manage a long distance (50+ miles) easy paced relaxed ride. The F-40 rides always seem to turn into races. A couple of times I have started out to do an easy 50 mile ride where I ride 25 miles out, have lunch, then ride 25 miles back. These have always turned into racing efforts.

The Magical Ride

With each bike there comes a ride where everything just clicks - and the ride is incredibly special. I've had a couple of training rides like this on the F-40.

Early one Saturday morning is was pretty cool temps and no wind. I captured an incredible Strava KOM averaging 26.6 mph for 5.2 miles beating several professional triathletes. It was a magical ride.

I have not yet had a charity ride that was magical. The first charity ride (Copperas Cove) had very bad road conditions and ~3,500 feet of climbing. The second charity ride (Hotter ‘N Hell Hundred) had the last 1.5 hours in temps over 105 degrees.

Overall Impressions

IT IS VERY FAST. I ride the brakes a lot.

The F-40 is a very demanding bike. In many ways it has exceeded my expectations. I have come to realize that my personal capabilities need to increase to meet the performance capabilities of the bike.

Another beautiful day for a ride. Hit three stoplights - 30 miles @ 20.5 mph.

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http://connect.garmin.com/activity/381207904

Nice ride on the F-40 streamliner this morning. I’d forgotten how fast this bike really is.

30 miles @ 21.4 mph.

Had a hard time getting motivated to ride this morning. Finally decided to just go for an easy ride. Just a few minutes into it I realized again just how fast the F-40 really is.

Time to push is a little bit and have some fun.

Looks like I’ll have this Strava KOM for awhile.

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http://connect.garmin.com/activity/380723174

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http://app.strava.com/activities/84620738

I’ve experimented with several ways to remove the fairing from the F-40 turning it into a P-38. These are my latest thoughts.

Taking the fairing off only requires about 10 minutes. Of course if you also take lots of pictures it can take a lot longer.

Start out with the spandex fully zipped up:

Next we are going to just peel the spandex off starting from the front and then proceed towards the back.

First un-velcro the two front sides:

Unzip the bottom section:

Now unvelcro and peel back the top spandex from the front fairing:

Keep gently peeling back the spandex until it is laying on the ground under the rear wheel.

Unvelcro the spandex from the tail frame bottom:

Put the spandex somewhere out of the way. Now the two things left to remove are the front fairing and the rear tail frame.

Tools you are going to need to take the fairing off:

The front fairing is held on by two tie-wraps and the right side strut. The left side strut is spring-loaded attached so that you can enter and exit the F-40 easier.

Disconnect the right side strut from the front fairing and snip the two tie-wraps at the bottom of the bottom-bracket.

You are now ready to remove the front fairing. Never pull or push on the fairing itself. Only pull and push on the inside tubing structure. When removing the fairing I lay on the ground and brace my elbow against the front fork stem so that I wiggle/push the inside tubing with both hands. Gently wiggle off the front fairing.

When I put the front fairing on I make sure to grease the rubber damper. When removing the fairing I make sure to remove the rubber damper from the front of the bike and store it inside the fairing.

With the front fairing off the only thing left if the rear tail frame which is held on at 6 attachment points:

• 1 on each side where the side struts attach
• 2 at the top of the seat
• 1 on each side at the dropouts

Remove the two side struts.

I keep the nuts and bolts attached to the struts so that I can find them again later when I want to put the fairing back on.

The right side strut has my feed bags attached. When riding I just reach down with my right hand and fish around in the bag for stuff. The other bag is for my cell phone so that I can easily reach it to take pictures.

Now remove the other 4 nut/bolts to take the rear tail frame off.

1 on the left dropout	2 at the top of the seat	1 on the right dropout

I also remove the rack top bag because I use a seat back bag when riding the P-38

We now have a P-38

I move my stuff from the F-40 rack top bag to the P-38 seat back bag.

• tool pouch
• tubes
• sun screen

Put the seat bag on the back of the P-38

Of course when I went to go for a ride I remembered that I also needed to:

• put a flashing light on the back of the seat back bag
• put a rear-view mirror on the handle bars

One of the things you read about the F-40 in high wind environments is the technique of sticking your elbow out on the windward side.

Performing this technique requires that first the bike adjusted correctly.

Before purchasing my F-40 I asked many questions on BROL (BentRiderOnline.com) about correct positioning of hands, feet, boom, etc. and I got answers all over the map.

Looking at pictures of P-38 and F-40 setups on the web I again saw different hand/arm positions.

Basically, the question is: “Should the arms be straight like on a stick bike, or should the arms have a 90 degree angle bend at the elbow?”

The web pictures of the P-38 were split about 50/50 between straight and bent. The very vast majority (like 99%) of the F-40 pictures showed the arm bent underneath the spandex cover.

When I initially started riding my F-40 without the cover (ie a P-38) I leaned the seat back as much as possible to improve aerodynamics - this caused my arms to be straight.

Here is a picture of the initial P-38 arm position.

Putting the fairing on the P-38 to turn it into an F-40 turned out to be an issue with having the seat so reclined. Basically, in order to get the tail frame to attach to the back of the seat while also being horizontally aligned with the stays and rear derailleur required me to adjust the seat angle to the most upright position possible. If the seat is reclined at all the rear deraileur bangs into the tail frame when changing through specific gear combinations.

Here is a picture of the seat in the most upright position on the F-40. Notice that the arm position now has the elbow bent at 90 degrees (like 99% of all other pictures of F-40s on the web).

This 90 degree elbow angle turns out to be a requirement when implementing the wind gust negating maneuver of sticking your elbow out on the windward side.

Lets say that the wind is coming from your left when riding. Then the front quarter windward view looks like this:

In this position when a wind gust hits the bike the spandex stretches inwards creating a shallow bowl, thereby capturing as much wind as possible, maximizing the effects of the gust, causing the wind to significantly shove the bike to the right.

After some riding you will begin to anticipate when a gust is potentially going to happen. Breaks in houses, breaks in trees, valley at bottom of a hill, when a guard rail ends, etc., etc.. It is important when first learning to ride the F-40 that you keep the speed down below 20 mph so that you can learn to anticipate the gusts without getting blown significantly around the road in the process.

When you think a gust is going to happen rotate your elbow from the pointing down position to the sticking out to the side position - like this:

This actually does two things: 1) stops the spandex from being able to stretch inwards, and 2) causes a low pressure (venturi) effect on the windward side which helps the bike negate the coming gust.

There does not seem to be a penalty to just having your elbow stick out for no reason (outside of your arm getting tired). A lot of times if I know a gust is coming, but I not sure from which direction, I’ll stick out both elbows.

Here is another side view of the elbow sticking out - you can see the position of the elbow but it is really hard in this view to understand how far the elbow is really sticking out (ie as far as you possibly can).

The F-40 really is a different bike. I have ridden it in winds of 22 mph gusting to 28 - it is doable but very intense.