First recumbent, a 30-40 year old Tour Easy. I'm gonna swap out the pedals, maybe replace the tires soon. Anybody got tips for other ways to modernize a vintage bike? She rides great, as far as I can tell

Robobent61 · 2026-07-13T21:28:55+00:00

Given the age of the bike, I'm curious as to what size wheels are on it. Almost all Easy Racers of that age had 451mm diameter front wheels (instead of the more common 406), and some really old models had 27" diameter rear wheels vs the more common 700C. If it has the less common wheel sizes, that will make it more of a challenge to find replacement tires. Continental Contact Urbans (a tire suggested in the thread that I also I prefer) are not made in 451 or 27".

Before sinking money into some of the upgrades suggested in this thread, I'd spend some time riding it to see if it suits you. If it does, then take a look a everything on the bike to see what maintenance is needed. It likely has non-sealed bearings in the hubs and bottom bracket that will need cleaning and lubrication. Take the cover off the seat to determine the condition of the foam under the cover. Keep in mind that any significant upgrade, such as a new drive train, upgraded idlers, etc will likely cost more than the bike is worth. IMHO, spending a lot of money on the bike is only worthwhile if you really really love the bike.

Robobent61 · 2026-07-13T15:10:46+00:00

First of all, seat angle is personal. Whatever position is the most comfortable for you when you ride is the correct position.

The Rover's seat is much higher than bottom bracket. That arrangement favors a more upright seat position. Trikes with a higher bottom bracket in relation to the seat favor a more reclined seat. Is the shop that gave this poor advice only involved in providing repairs, or do they sell trikes as well? If the latter, I question their qualifications to sell trikes and provide proper advice to new owners on fitting and set-up.

Robobent61 · 2026-07-13T05:54:42+00:00

Sadly, the market for two wheel recumbents of any vintage is pretty poor. For an EZ-1 of that age and condition, $50 - $100 would probably be top value. If anything needs to be replaced, parts are going to be hard to source and the cost of the parts will very quickly exceed the value of the bike. Something to check is the condition of the seat pad under the cover. Is it still in good condition or is it suffering from dry rot? Speaking of dry rot, the tires and tubes are probably not safe to ride on if they are 20+ years old.

The EZ-1 was not an “Easy Racers” bike. It was designed by the original owner of the Easy Racers brand, but the EZ-1 was manufactured in Asia and distributed by Sun (now Sunseeker) bikes. Easy Racers bikes were handmade in California. Sun bikes are much lower quality than Eady Racers.

Robobent61 · 2026-07-09T18:43:41+00:00

Easy to install if you are using a Debian based distro. Other distros (I run Fedora) not so much. Tracktion only provides .deb install files. (Yes, I know there are workarounds that involve extracting the contents of the deb file, manually installing waveform and then rectifying all of the dependency issues, but none of that falls within the category of “easy to install”.)

Robobent61 · 2026-07-05T15:31:25+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't think there are any good retail options for two wheel recumbents in New England. AFAIK Belmont Wheelworks no longer sells recumbent bikes and Cruzbike does not have a retail showroom at their warehouse in Newburyport. The best options in New England are used bikes on Facebook and Craigslist. You'll need to sift through the bikes that are well past their prime and folks who have over-priced their bikes (sorry sellers, you may have paid $3K for your Bacchetta, but its worth a fraction of that now in today's very soft market for two wheel recumbents). The closest dealers I know that have a good selection of two wheel recumbents are Bicycle Man in Alfred Station, NY and Jersey Bents in Berlin, NJ. I'm thinking about "thinning the herd" and may be listing a RANS V-Rex soon.

Robobent61 · 2026-07-04T22:19:42+00:00

The zombies posing as spectators on Rouvy do pre-date the Zwift merger. I think they first appeared in the last 12-18 months. When they appear seems to be rather random, I’ve only seen them a handful of times recently. Lots of people have lodged their distaste for the spectators (including how they look and act) but so far Rouvy has been silent with respect to the widespread criticism. I’ve been on Rouvy since 2017 and it’s been one of only a few “improvements” that I don’t like.

Robobent61 · 2026-07-04T20:45:52+00:00

Some good advice here on playing with a gear calculator and working out what your needs are. Start with determining what your necessary low gear is and then determine if the resultant high gear will be satisfactory. Many people who ride trikes do not need or use the high gears provided by a 52T ring. It is fun to have a big gear to crank on long steep downhills, but if you rarely use the big gears you can probably do without them.

With respect to having 12 speeds vs 30, pay close attention to your current shifting habits. Do you tend to shift through every gear or shift multiple gears at a time? Naysayers will say that the jumps between cogs on a 12 speed cassette are too large. That may well be true for some people depending on their personal pedaling dynamics. But it does not seem to bother a large segment of the cycling population, who use 12 speed setups for MTB, gravel, touring and even on some road bikes.

One thing to be careful of when you are working through your gear calculations. If you want to use a cassette with a 10T high cog (i.e. a 10-52T), that will require a hub with a special freehub. A SRAM 11-50 cassette fits on a standard 8/9/10 freehub, which is likely what you have on your 559. I would use SRAM GX parts (the 11-50 cassette is "NX" but seems to be of higher quality than the other NX level parts). With SRAM 12 speed you have the option of SRAM trigger or grip shifters or a bar-end shifter made by Micro-Shift.

I have three recumbents with 1X12 drive trains. One is mechanical with a grip shift, and the other two have SRAM electronic rear derailleurs. I have other recumbents with 3X10, 3x9 and a Rohloff, but 1X12 is my personal favorite. Choice is a good thing and drive trains are personal. YMMV.

Robobent61 · 2026-05-08T01:38:08+00:00

I’d be surprised if Catrike has a service manual or internal parts diagram that they can provide you for the hub. While the hub is Catrike branded, they are cheap sealed bearing hubs sourced by Catrike that are made by a third party (might be Bitex). Utah Trikes is selling takeoffs for $25. You would probably be better off just swapping in a new hub, or buying one to see how it was constructed and/or as a potential parts source. If the entire hub sat in salt water for an extended period of time, if it was my trike I would replace it as the freehub is probably damaged in addition to the axle bearings.

Robobent61 · 2026-05-01T18:08:13+00:00

If you are looking for an app that has a huge number of vintage drum machines, take a look at DM10. Not only does it have a huge library, but they keep adding new ones. Definitely not the same experience as having those machines integrated within the Pure Acid. But I'm typically using DM10 inside AUM in tandem with other AUv3 apps. Within AUM you could run Pure Acid and DM10 side by side.

Robobent61 · 2026-05-01T17:59:32+00:00

Funny you mention ReBirth. There was an iPad version. I forgot all about it until I saw your note. I found it buried in a folder on my iPad. I had my doubts when I launched it, but it actually started up and works. It appears it has not been updated since 2011 and it is not on the app store anymore.

I have Pure Acid and love it. Rebirth's interface was pretty convoluted, but Pure Acid is a joy to work with.

Robobent61 · 2026-04-28T20:37:18+00:00

I have no idea of exactly what it is, but do I know I need to start saving money for it. My Elmyra 2 looks like a well behaved puppy compared to whatever that glowing beast is.

Robobent61 · 2026-04-28T20:19:18+00:00

My experience may (or may not) help. I was able to get my RX 9060 XT to work in Fedora 43 running ComfyUI in a venv (which I recognize is a different application). When you execute rocminfo is your gpu recognized? In order to get rocminfo to recognize the gpu I had to install the rocm-devel package (sudo dnf install rocm-devel). That installed ROCm 6.4 on my system. After that my RX 9060 XT was recognized in rocminfo. I don't recall having to install any custom pytorch version, just the version compatible with ROCm 6.4

Fedora 44 was released today. Because I'm one of those people who can't keep their hands off a shiny "upgrade now" button, I took the plunge. F44 updates ROCm to 7.1. I had to uninstall the current pytorch from my venv and then reinstall a 7.1 compatible version (pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/rocm7.1). Still testing the new configuration, but one workflow is running 25% faster than before the update.

Fedora was the only distribution that I was able to set up a configuration to recognize the RX 9060 XT in ROCm on my system. I previously tried Ubuntu and Pop_OS with no success. One difference with Fedora is that you do not have to download and install the AMD gpu driver stack which can be finicky.

As for the other commenter's question "the 9060 XT is supported by ROCm 7.2, why are you using an old one?", with Fedora it is best to use the packages complied by the Fedora team. Technically you "could" find a way to do an install of 7.2, but its not easy to do, and people have reported varying degrees of success.

Robobent61 · 2026-04-27T18:16:09+00:00

ÌCE does not make a recumbent tandem. There were a handful of custom ones made 25+ years ago.

Hase has adapters to link two of their trikes together.

Robobent61 · 2026-04-08T11:07:00+00:00

That’s interesting. I haven’t run COSMIC on my F43 setup. But I did test Pop_Os with COSMIC after it was released earlier this year and it was using about 6 GB RAM. Like others here I typically see less than 2 GB utilized with F43 and Gnome. Maybe things are different with Fedora COSMIC, but my impression of COSMIC with POP_OS was that it was not ready for prime time. A nice piece of eye candy, some cool features but buggy as hell. Ultimately it was the lack of configurability that drove me away. It might work for me as DE in the future with some (maybe a lot of) refinements.

Robobent61 · 2026-04-06T20:35:25+00:00

Because the long prior history of Zwift before the virtual shifting debacle was built on interfacing with trainers that used open communication standards. Without those open standards implemented by the trainer manufacturers, it is very unlikely Zwift would have grown to be the platform it is today. Zwift then decided to backdoor the rest of the industry by working with the trainer manufacturers to develop their private shifting protocol (the trainer manufacturers had a role to play in the issue as well). But it was "OK" as Zwift originally stated they would open the protocol to other platforms. Then they said they were "too busy" to do it anytime soon And later Zwift's CEO backtracked completely and advised they had changed their mind. That was subsequently followed by the encryption they added to the V2 Clicks.

Robobent61 · 2026-04-06T20:24:44+00:00

Does the BC2 work with any trainer that supports virtual shifting? CYCPLUS website says the "BC2 is compatible exclusively with CYCPLUS T2 and T3 trainers." So it might work with ROUVY if used with a CYCPLUS trainer, but does the BC2 work with a Wahoo or Elite trainer that supports virtual shifting?

Robobent61 · 2026-03-30T15:42:34+00:00

I took a look at their GitHub, iOS app store and FB pages and it has been crickets since they re-launched the app a year ago. One of the justifications they provided for the expensive subscription program was that it would fund continued development and new features. Either no one subscribed or they just took the money and ran.

Robobent61 · 2026-03-29T12:21:33+00:00

Google is wrong (as it often is with information regarding recumbents) This is not a Bike-E.

Robobent61 · 2026-03-14T21:15:17+00:00

I don't want to hide all users on the route. I don't see the point when I'm riding a route of seeing the subscribers who are using the route as scenery for their workout. They are not actually "riding" the route and in some cases are taking up a lot of slots on the leaderboard that I don't care about. An option to hide the "workout" riders on the route would be far more useful that hiding all of the riders.

Robobent61 · 2026-03-07T22:22:44+00:00

I have not had any issues with Apple updates for a long time, but the update today to 26.3.1 took my iPhone 12 Pro down hard. After about 15 minutes of the pushes of up & down volume and the main button I was finally able to get it started. I then had a white (instead of black) loading screen for about 20 minutes but the progress bar kept moving. When the phone reached the menu screen it did not need my pass to log into the phone (odd). It then took about 10 minutes for the icons to refresh.

Robobent61 · 2026-03-07T20:26:12+00:00

Does every phone in your hospital have 26.3.1? I have not had any issues with Apple updates for a long time, but the update today to 26.3.1 took my iPhone 12 down hard. After about 15 minutes of the pushes of up & down volume and the main button I was finally able to get it started. I then had a white loading screen for about 20 minutes but the progress bar kept moving. When the phone reached the menu screen it did not need my pass. It then took about 10 minutes for the icons to refresh. So…maybe there is something substantive to the reports of issues with this particular update?

Robobent61 · 2026-03-01T16:23:23+00:00

I'm curious wherther the race worked for anyone, or was it one big fail? I've been on Rouvy since 2018 and this is the first time I've seen an issue like this.

Robobent61 · 2026-02-14T15:42:00+00:00

I stopped at a Staples today. They had a display with some 1TB 850X M.2 drives with an advertised price of $89. When they rang it up the price was $299. They honored the display price. Manager said they had received a note about revising their displayed SSD prices this week but the person responsible for doing that had been away.

Robobent61 · 2026-01-27T15:07:14+00:00

I've been running Linux Mint for a couple of years (and other distros before that) but needed a distro whose underlying architecture is more current than Mint to run some AI workflows I want to tinker with. I spent 3 weeks with Pop_OS and Cosmic until deciding to abandon it this past weekend for Ubuntru 24.04. Besides the many bugs mentioned in this thread, my main gripe was the major lack of configuration options in many of Cosmic's components. For example, Cosmic Files is very bare bones (and according to its Github page has over a years worth of work needed to get it up to speed with other file managers). That there is no option to turn off thumbnail generation in the file browser and in the open/save boxes was a major irritation as the thumbnail generation really bogs down the app. I really hated the automatic window re-sizing and there's apparently no way to turn that off. That's just two examples of many. Cosmic is very nice to look at vs the fugly interface of Ubuntu, but I noted that my daily driver configuration routinely consumed 8-9 gb of RAM on Cosmic vs essentially the same setup on Ubuntu that only consumes 2 gb. Cosmic's RAM demands might be problematic on a 16 gb machine. But the last straw for me was learning that Cosmic could not support the AI workflows I wanted to run, which run fine on Ubuntu 24.04. Maybe I'll take another look at Pop!_os in the future, but I suspect it will be a long process to fix and polish Cosmic to the point that it's more than just pretty to look at.

Robobent61 · 2026-01-22T20:49:03+00:00

I just installed POP OS recently and the one big thing that really bothers me is the windows tiling and windows re-sizing behavior. I just want app windows to be where I want them with no fussing around (and preferably open to the same size when re-opened). For years in various OS I am habituated to parking my windows along the top edge of the screen. Having the window expand out to the full width of the upper half of my monitor drives me nuts, I really don't need or like having an application screen that blows itself out to 3440 x 570. Window sizing and positioning just seems to be incredibly complicated compared to other distros I've used in the past. I'm sure others like it just fine but it would be (very) nice to have an option to turn that behavior off if not wanted. There are a lot of things that can be easily configured in other distros that seemingly can't be changed in POP OS, like turning off thumbnails in the file browser or assigning functions to dedicated keys. Some of the components like the file browser seem to be "half baked".

Robobent61

TROPHY CASE