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Recumbent trikes have the potential for leg suck, but two-wheelers havee no especial safety risks.


This wasn't a trike but a two wheeler and you can have leg suck on those just the same (low racer, a Zephyr).


> recumbent bikes are expensive

New recumbents are expensive, but used ones are very cheap. Afyer seeing several within an hour's drive of me for $300, I got a Rans Rocket for $100. Appparently it had been available (but poorly advertised) for two years.

A little while after I became "the guy who rides a recumbent", I was given a Rans Vivo for free, because the owner hhad determined that the expected sale price wasn't worth the time and effort to sell.


> My ebike's minimum speed for the motor is 15kph

That is a flaw in your ebike. Weird and dangerous.


The cost wouldn't necessarily be in the bike, but in requirements for mandatory paid registration, licensing classes, insurance, inspection, and safety equipment.


Saving fuel and parking cost adds up fairly quickly if you have a sensible setup.

However as a cycle commuters I’m not sure it saves much money over driving if done wrong. I’ve got a glorious bike. I chew through parts and consumables at an expensive rate.


Wattage is basically meaningless. There is nk standard way to measure it. Almost all "250 watt" ebikes consume much more than 250 watts of electricity at full throttle, and can produce much more than 250 watts of mechanical output for seconds or minutes at a time.


The fact they listed wattage and actual peak wattage is different doesn't change the fact that an e-bike's power, not whether the throttle is connected to the handle bars or the pedal, is what actually creates fast and dangerous bikes.

If regulation based on power was drafted, it'd be a simple matter of using a voltmeter and galvanometer to see if a bike is compliant with power limits (arguably motors have different efficiencies, but electric motors are close enough to 100% to use this method).


for simple learning, I invite you to consider SolveSpace


Has there been any work on it to make it usable w/ touch or a stylus or a trackpad?

I'm on the verge of breaking down and buying a license for Moment of Inspiration 3D since it was designed for use on tablet computers (which is my preferred sort of hardware).


To rotate the view in SolveSpace, you need any one of these:

* a keyboard's shift key and a right mouse button, or * a middle mouse button, or * a 3D mouse.

I've done some work in SolveSpace with a Wacom tablet, by binding the stylus's buttons to the middle and right mouse buttons. SolveSpace is a pretty simple program, so you don't need to dig deep through the UI to get to all the functions. Lost of the often-used functions have keyboard shortcuts, but I don't think there is anything that is only accessible through the keyboard.

Depending on what you aim to do, you might be interested in keeping up with Blender's currently-in-development tablet mode:

https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/


Yeah, that's the problem --- Samsung colludes w/ Wacom to deny right-click functionality to their devices using the S-Pen --- really, really, really miss that some days.

I'll keep experimenting w/ this in mind for the next time I'm using my Wacom One attached to my MacBook.


SolveSpace is available in library form. It uses NURBS to represent surfaces, with triangles as a fallback.

https://solvespace.com/library.pl


Notably the library was used (at least for a while) in the development of Dune 3D:

https://dune3d.org/

but then the author used the source directly as noted in the Github footnote:

>I ended up directly using solvespace's solver instead of the suggested wrapper code since it didn't expose all of the features I needed. I also had to patch the solver to make it sufficiently fast for the kinds of equations I was generating by symbolically solving equations where applicable.


Just because you type dimensions in doesn't mean it's parametric. If you're manually patching meshes, you're almost certainly not doing parametric CAD! (This does match with my memories of SketchUp, beck when it was owned by Google. I had to fix holes and overlapping geometry by editing the .STL files in Blender before any of the primitive slicer programs could process them.)

OnShape and Fusion360 are fully parametric CAD programs. Another free-tier closed-source one is Siemens Solid Edge (the "Hobbyist" edition). FLOSS parametric CAD programs that are reasonably usable are FreeCAD (complicated but powerful) and SolveSpace (an 80/20 sort of tool -- nowhere near as powerful, but vastly easier to use).


Yeah I learned SketchUp like 17 years ago it's crazy. But I want to make more complex round shapes and ensure it is a solid (for 3D printing) so time to make the jump.


FWIW, the FLOSS CAD program SolveSpace can generate parametric sketches and export them as SVG files (file > export 2d view)


Is there a facility when doing this for controlling colour/fill?


SolveSpace does have some ability to control the color and fill of areas. It's nowhere near as powerful as Inkscape, but enough to make simple diagrams. The exported SVGs can also be edited in Inkscape.


Nice! (if memory serves, the last time this came up that wasn't possible)


> chamfer all outside edges

FreeCAD can do this. So can all of the proprietary parametric CAD programs I've ever used, some of which (PTC OnShape, Siemens Solid Edge, Autodesk Fusion) have usable free tiers available.


If you are a programmer OpenSCAD is easier to learn. However you will quickly run into limits. Just a few hours of a FreeCAD tutorial and I was already seeing how I could do things I'd never attempt in OpenSCAD. FreeCAD has a reputation of not being great, but I'm not far enough into it to learn the limits - things I can't figure out feel like things I could learn, in OpenSCAD the things I couldn't figure out where because they were too complex - I could but the code wouldn't be readable so there was no point (not to mention math errors).

FreeCAD is designed for the things real designers really do. OpenSCAD is designed for the things mathematicians do.


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