Every biker should have one of these
 

"Friendship blades". Too funny! :p

Just 'take the lane'. This device will be no good when being passed too closely by big rigs, box trucks, monster trucks, motorcycles', and mopeds.

Wait a minute. It only extends two feet eleven and seven-eighths inches from the bicycle. However, most three foot laws grant the cyclist three feet from whatever portion of the bike or rider that extends the farthest out. I'm wider than zero inches.

"*Not for use with pedestrians." Damn, that would be the best use. :D

Hmmmm.......... this product makes me want to play one particular Nugent song.

Just go down to your local big box store in the early Summer months and find where they have the swim toys and look for those long stiff foam colored rods that are like 8-foot long and 3-5 inches diameter that plug together like giant foam tinker-toys for floating water toys and buy one of the stick lengths in a bright color and cut about a 4-5 foot long length of it and mount it on the back of your bike sticking out 3-foot on your left side. Only weighs an ounce or two at most, round profile is actually fairly aerodynamic and its soft and won't do any actual damage to a car that brushes it.

Don't forget to order the left-handed metric screwdriver with your purchase.

Good point from B - it's 3 feet of CLEARANCE. Probably more like 5 feet from the center of the bike. 3 feet from the center is going to give just a little more than a foot from the left arm. Maybe not even that much.

FWIW, there's also the Flash Flag, which is a real product. I'm not sure this one isn't, though it was added to the catalog on April 28, not April 1.

I tried something like that once, an electric doorbell buzzer (old style) on a stick. Didn't scratch the paint, but made a teriffying noise inside the cars. But it was hand held, with a wire to connect it to the bikes 12 volt batery.

Years ago there was the safety spacer. This was simply a pennant on a stick. I don't know if they still exist, but they at least had one necessary feature that a so-called safety device needed.

The stick was of a breakaway design, while this toy isn't. So while purporting to be a safety device, one must consider what happens if a car doesn't just tickle it, but hits below the articulated ringers.

I've thought a distance-measuring device (eg optical range finder), set for 3' clearance, triggering the most powerful horn you could carry on a bike, would be ideal.

Hot bike....another brilliant piece of design and engineering.

No biker should need one... Motorists should just give us a decent and respectful (of a fellow human) passing distance without having to be chided to do so.

I'm looking for a aero-styled machine-gun mount. Carbon, Ti, maybe Reynold's double-butted 531. Gotta fit right above my bottle cage. Google's giving me nuthin'...

Nobody should ever be in an avoidable accident either. Yet here we are.

How about connecting it to one of these: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25197786

Of course, then like the dog who chases cars, what do you do with them once you catch them?

One has to wonder... are we really telling motorists that they should avoid us by at least three feet or more, or are the laws just put on the books quietly so no one knows except the legislator looking for the photo op?

And of course, if you have something that extends 2.93 feet from your bike, that means that "no less than 3' passing" means that the legal passing distance is now 5.93 feet from your non-enhanced bike. You haven't really shown the legal passing area for your bike, but instead given yourself a really wide bike.

And when somebody hits it anyways -- they didn't have a 2.75 foot passing distance, but instead a minus 0.18 foot passing distance. It's a hit and run if they took off, though the police aren't likely to do anything about it unless they personally witnessed it.

And that said, there may be other laws that affect such attachments. They may require a red flag, or may not be permitted at all.

If these "freedom blades" actually scratch the paint of the car, I'd say that's a really bad idea. And if they're sharp, it's a really, really bad idea -- it's more likely to hurt you or a pedestrian than a car for starters.

After I posted my reply, I looked closer at the sidebar to the left of the article, and the other items, and I realized this was a spoof

It may have been a spoof (and the "freedom blades" strongly suggested such) but such products do exist, and people often do make their own.

I do agree that if you're making your own, a fun noodle is great -- highly visible, bends easily, soft, etc.

However, a round profile is not particularly aerodynamic, though it's certainly better than a square one.
This video describes aerodynamics of various shapes. In general (I read this somewhere else, not this video), if a rectangular shape had a cross section of a given size and it had a given drag, you could reduce that drag by one half (50%) by having the same cross section but a rounded shape. (This would be an approximation of our fun noodle.)

However, if you kept the same cross section and had a standard airfloil shape, the drag reduced by a factor of 10 (and I don't remember if this was a factor of 10 better than the rounded shape or the rectangular shape.)

If you want your fun noodle to be aerodynamic, whittle it down to an airfoil shape and make sure the ends are smooth as well -- but the flexibility of the noddle is going to mess with that shape, and I'm not sure how effective this will really be.

Though really ... if you put this sort of thing on your bike, in general aerodynamics aren't a large concern. But the fun noodle will add a considerable amount of drag.

I happen to have the book, can't remember the name of it right now, aerodynamics of shapes , or something, by Ascher Shappiro,,, and the photographs were taken from that film! Thanks for sharing, I subscribed to that youtube channel.

You must be thinking of this chart:

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...IMG_0002-5.jpg

The "factor of ten" can be correlated to this chart!

It's 5' in New Mexico.

Nope, hadn't seen that chart, but it agrees with what I remembered, and fills in the gaps. Thanks!

And it looks like the teardrop shape has 20 times less drag for the same frontal area than the cube, so assuming that that also holds for an airfoil shape (a teardrop extended in one dimension), that would mean the round shape is twice as good as the square shape and the airfoil shape is twenty times as good.

Making bike components have an airfoil shape rather than round may look goofy (especially wires/cables) ... but there's a good reason for it.