Hasta La Gadget!

Let’s say that each of these Plattfuss Rubber Bands, made from old bike inner-tubes, is 2mm wide. You get around 70 in a pack, which requires 140mm (5.5-inches) of OG bike tube to make them. The sizes in the pack are assorted, from different tube sizes, but to keep things simple let’s assume they come from 700c tubes.

These tubes fit a wheel with a diameter of 622 mm (forgive the international standard measurements – inches are impossible to work with at small sizes). Thus the circumference of a 700c wheel (and therefore the tube) is πD, or pi x diameter, or 1,954mm, or around 77-inches. Thus you could get 13 packs of Plattfuss Rubber Bands from a single inner-tube.

The price for a pack of the Plattfuss bands? $7. The price of 13 packs? $91. The price of a used inner-tube? Free.

Plattfuss Rubber Bands [Plastica via Uncrate]

See Also:

• IT Clips Turn Inner-Tubes into Bungees, Belts
• Rubber Wallets Made From Old Inner-Tubes
• How To: Make an iPod Nano Case from a Bike Inner-tube
• Rubber Bags Made from Bike Inner Tubes
• (Almost) 1001 Uses for Old Inner Tubes

The Grace Pro Race electric bike is best described by the words of those who passed along the details of this new photoset to me.

Chuck Squatriglia of Wired.com’s own Autopia blog asked “What would happen if you crossed an old-school Cannondale with a modern downhill mountain bike and then made it electric?”

The Cycle EXIF blog, which sent this to Chuck, calls it a “Teutonic behemoth.” And Derp, a commenter on Cycle EXIF, calls it a “Stillborn Transformer.”

The official line, though, from Grace, is that this is the “world’s first street-legal e-motorbike.” And it is. The bike can hit 45km/h (28mph) by spinning its rear-wheel brushless 1.3kW motor. It’ll run for up to 50km (31-miles) and do it all off a one-hour charge, powered by the li-ion batteries hidden inside the frame. And as you can see from the photographs, it looks nasty

The frame and CNC-milled aluminum blocks that make up the bike and motor are made in the same factory in Berlin – somewhat appropriate as this looks more like an old East German moped than a push-bike. How much for this intimidating piece of machinery? The Grace Race is available built-to order only, and will cost you just 7,398 Euros, $9,944. For more on this Teutonic behemoth, check our previous coverage, with equally awesome photos (warning: silver jumpsuit).

Grace Pro product page [Grace via Bike EXIF. Thanks, Chris and Chuck!]

Photos: Gracebikes / Flickr

See Also:

• Electric Bike Runs (Almost) on Water
• Gocycle Black, The Non-Electric Electric Bike
• Sinclair X-1: Sir Clive Tries Another Electric Bike
• Volkswagen Electric Scooter Charges in Your Trunk
• Electric Cargo Bike: A True Car Replacement?
• Grace: An Electric Motorcycle Disguised as a Bike

Evan Solida’s Rael is yet another concept bike, although this one doesn’t dicker with the time-tested double-triangle frame, wheels and chain. Instead, it aims to make a regular carbon-fiber road-bike safer to ride.

What you don’t see is Solida’s Cervellum Hindsight digital rearview camera hidden in the seat-stays. It continuously records a loop of video and if it detects a crash with its accelerometer, it keeps recording for ten seconds and then stops, keeping the footage as evidence. The Cervellum can also be hooked up to a 3.5-inch transflective (viewable in sunlight) LCD screen mounted on the handlebars, giving you a digital rear-view mirror.

The part you do see is the redesigned brakes and handlebars. The drops have been refashioned into pistol-grips, and the brake levers flipped to point up instead of down. The point is to let the index fingers get to the levers whether you’re riding on the hoods of the brakes or down in the drops.

Everything else is pretty standard, as it should be, although far from pedestrian. the gears, for example, are Shimano’s Di2 electronic-shifters.

The bike may be a concept, but the Cervellum camera is on its way to market, although there’s still no launch date. And as concept bikes go, this one looks like it would actually be good to ride.

Rael: a road bike concept by Evan Solida [Bicycle Design]

Cervellum camera product page [Cervellum]

See Also:

• Two Brakes, One Hand: How To Stop a Polo Bike
• Coasties: Fixed-Gear Style, Only With Brakes
• Peugeot Concept Bike Channels Tron
• Commuter Cycle Concept is Bike and Briefcase

A bike rack should do two things. It should be secure, and it should be easy to get your bike in and out. A secondary consideration is the amount of bikes that can fit onto one bank of racks, and last comes aesthetics. Thankfully, the just-installed artist-designed bike racks in San Francisco conform to all of these requirements, and they do it with some clever and sometimes site-specific style.

The racks are the winners of the Treasure Island competition, and the designs are inspired by the SF Bicycle Coalition’s plans for this reclaimed island in the San Francisco Bay. Here they are, along with some pros and cons.

Todd Gilens’ sloped (and winning) design (above) is based on the diagonal street plan of Treasure Island, although it looks like it could be inspired by the hundred of abandoned bikes found in any city, fallen and stomped into death. You can find it on Market and 6th.

Pros: Locking points are almost identical to those of a standard staple-shaped rack.

Cons: Too tempting for drunken vandals to mash a bike until it matches the bends of the rack.

Kirk Scott’s Map Rack is shaped like Treasure Island, and the conceit is that an internal cross-hairs pinpoints the actual street location of the rack on the island. You can find this one in front of City Hall on Polk Street.

Pros: Almost identical to a standard rack. Easy to line up a lot of them in a small space. Extra cross of metal for better locking.

Cons: The extra bars are thin, encouraging bad locking. Every rack is different, making it harder to lock-up with your routine style.

Ryan Dempsey’s Wave Rack represents the waves that will engulf Treasure Island when the next big earthquake strikes, just before the very island itself liquifies due to being built on soft, reclaimed land and its building sink into the earth. Actually, it just references the waves in the Bay. You can find it near Scott’s rack, in front of City Hall on Polk Street.

Pros: The main legs are vertical enough and close enough to work like a proper rack.

Cons: Takes up a lot of space. Has annoying crest section to catch on handlebars and baskets. Reminds residents of impending, unavoidable doom.

New Artist-Designed Bike Racks in San Francisco [San Francisco Bike Coalition. Thanks, Teri!]

See Also:

• Our Bike Racks, Ourselves: Crowdsourcing Two-Wheeled Parking …
• Over-Designed Petal-Like Bike-Rack
• England Gets NYC-Reject Bike Racks
• Bike Rack Art Installation Shines in New York City
• Cyclehoop Turns Every Street-Sign Into a Bike Rack
• Bike Coalition Wants to See Your Rack

The Livestrong Limited Edition Indoor Cycle differs from all other stationary bikes in just one way: It looks totally bad-ass.

The bike, which comes in the trademark yellow-and-black colorway, will cost $1,700, $1,000 of which goes to Livestrong, Lance Armstrong’s cancer charity. Just 500 will be made, and there are several Lance and cancer-themed design flourishes: the number 28 on the fork represents the “28 million people living with cancer,” and the “seven stars on the seat post represent Armstrong’s record-breaking seven Tour de France wins.”

But what you really want to know is just how fit can you get, without even going outside on a real bike? The answer is “pretty fit, if you don’t use it once and dump it in the basement, next to the Bullworker and the in-line skates.” Up front is a 40-pound flywheel, spun via a belt-drive, and the seat and handlebars are adjustable for height. And what handlebars they are! More like a bristling nest of stag-beetles than a regular bike cockpit, there are enough hand-positions to sate even the most ADD of “riders”.

There’s also a computer to tell you every piece of info you might want: heart rate, time, distance, RPM and a calorie-counter.

Of course, you could get all this from an actual bike. An old beater with a cheap cyclo-computer would keep you just as fit, and stop you from getting bored as you ride. But then you couldn’t pretend to be Lance Armstrong, on your way to a “record-breaking seven Tour de France wins.” Or more correctly, “Tour de Spare Bedroom wins.”

Livestrong LS28IC press release [Pitchengine via Uncrate]

See Also:

• Fetish: Stationary Bicycle Celebrates the Art of Spin
• Wii Exercise Bike: Biggest Game Controller Ever?
• $10000 Exercise Bike for Posing, not Riding
• Bike-Mounted Bookshelf for Suicidal Readers