Diane, Alan and Eric
Alan and Eric are working on making cost effective, partially recycled environmentally friendly transport and frequently join the weekly rides...but lets here from them...
We started in recumbents with a fully recycled arc-welded bent after seeing similar on a critcal mass ride. Ours was rather heavy and got limited use.
A visit to the 2004 OZHPV Broadford Challenge was inspiring and we caught the trike bug, mostly after a ride on Jon's exciting home-built trike. Project 2 germinated. Riding the bikes at the challenge was fun and the HPV community generous, friendly and knowledgeable. Taking fright at the cost of commercial trikes and especially since we weren't sure if the excitement would be short-lived, within a month we'd designed and thrown together an arc-welded almost fully recycled trike for less than $250 "just to see if we really liked it". Well, we did like it, a LOT. Somebody somewhere described riding a trike as like a riding a billycart on steroids and they are right. They are pure fun, and so controllable and so comfortable you feel so so absolutely guilty next to riders on wedgies. The trike has held together surprisingly well and required only a couple of re-welds given it's rushed construction, abuse like doing BMX track jumps, and hacking to accommodate suspension when Alan did his back working on his now shelved upright bike.
Eric rather reluctantly but graciously allowed Alan to use the trike after his back injury, and it's been great therapy. We needed another bike and sharing ideas on the weekly Be-Spon rides gave us a lot of choice. Eric decided on a low racer based around an exhaust pipe frame ($25 bent) and a seat from a one-sixth segment of a large plastic drum. Eric gets up a decent speed on it despite the drive chain still needing some work.
A replacement for the first trike is slowly developing, hopefully an easily folded version.
Here are some links to construciton notes about my second trike and the low racer .