Lawn to be wild
Advantages of electric trials bikes #35: John Westlake can ride round his garden on one… Balance practice
ot having been brought up on trials bikes, my skills are coarse and clunky. I’m best at the bits that require a hoof of throttle and lashings of mindless optimism. Put me in front of a log and I’ll make a serviceable attempt at bouncing over it. But tight turns? Finesse? No.
So when isolation madness set in and I decided to clear my tiny garden of parasols and sunbathers so that it could be used for a greater good, I wasn’t as excited as you’d imagine. I knew it would be dicult.
And so it proved. The Oset 24 Racing should of course have been the perfect tool, being so quiet at back garden speeds that I might as well have been on a bicycle – my neighbours later reported the only unsettling thing they heard all afternoon was some imaginative swearing. It’s also remarkably safe, even for an idiot, because you can adjust the top speed down to walking pace using a dial on top of the battery, so I knew that even if I cackhandedly opened the throttle while pointing at the patio doors, I’d probably have time to get off and open them before impact.
The problems arose because of the Oset’s lack of clutch. On a normal bike, I’d spend the whole of my trials course feathering the clutch, using it as a buffer between my lumpen right wrist and the rear tyre. You can sort of get that effect on the Oset by using the back brake (which is where the clutch lever should be) but I haven’t cracked it yet. It’s made harder by not knowing what the engine is doing – on a normal trials bike you can hear it, but on the Oset you only discover you’re giving it too much throttle when the motor overpowers the rear brake and you have a slow motion altercation with the honeysuckle.
NYou can improve your slow speed riding without starting an engine by improving your balance. Stu Day from trialsday.co.uk recommends this:
Put your favoured leg on the footrest and go up onto tip-toe on the other leg.
Turn bars to point away from tip-toe leg.
Lift your tip-toe leg off the ground, and balance using it as a counter balance. Keep hips and shoulders in line with bars. Repeat on other side.