Keepfiring

First off to make the score known, I've never ridden a recumbent, but once in a while I go through an intersection next to one and it keeps occurring to me that on some the leading thing is the chainring. I've spiked my hand on one while freeing up some chainring bolts once, and once was enough. Are there horror stories floating around of head-first bent crashes where the chainring causes some major damage, or is does that turn out to be pretty impractical because of the cranks or some other thing I'm not thinking of?

purplepeople

First off, I've never heard of anybody doing a header on any well-designed recumbent. Probably has something to do with the feet-first position.

As for me, I like cornering hard, which sometimes results in a crash from losing traction. I often end up being stood on my feet and having to run a little to keep balance. For sure, I've never hurt myself on the chainring. Probably it's because my feet are attached to the pedals and only release during the crash and after everything pivots on the pedal.

One memorable experience I have is that a hooligan in a car cut in front of me and stopped, causing my chainring to destroy their rear tail-light. They took off so I could really see what happened, but certainly there was no damage to my bike and it's a good bet that part of the metal was punctured as well. That was one of my first recumbents and it didn't have clipless pedals so I was able to put my feet down pretty quick to stay vertical.

In the future, I'm hoping that nobody every opens their car door in front of me because I promised myself that to prevent myself from plunging into traffic, I'm going to steer to the right, with a high likelihood of injuring the fool that opened the door.

:)ensen.

BlazingPedals

Most recumbent racing is done on short wheelbase-type recumbents, which have their chainrings out front as observed. Despite that, the HPRA does not require chainring guards, because nobody can ever remember a competitor being injured by an exposed chainring. So I'm guessing it's a low-probability event unless you're negotiating crowds of pedestrians or something.

My big chainring is usually protected by my chain.

Keepfiring

That's kind of too bad. I have this vision of a dude on a recumbent fixed gear rolling up to a horrific car crash and using his cr as surrogate jaws of life. ah well.

djwid

My raptobike has only one front chainring, so it is always protected by a wrap of chain.

aikigreg

I've seen it happen a lot on uprights, but never on a bent.

..Now the poor sucker you're crashing INTO might have another story!

BlazingPedals

I guess if an upright rides over someone, the same problem happens. If the rider isn't doing an endo at the time.