My Sun Trip Bike, Back to Back Tandem Trike with Rowing Generator, Pedals, +Solar

That was the first thing I noticed when I saw the picture.
Luckily you chose an obvious toy gun, unlike what other people are known to handle.



justin_le said:
solarEbike said:
thepronghorn said:
Did anyone else spot the super soaker water squirt gun strapped to the trike? What's it for?


5 border crossings so far and no border guards have asked about it either, I thought we'd at least get some joking from them.
 
Other than the missing bolt, have you had any other issues with the foam core/fiberglass panel racking? I did that last year, except I used a flax fiber woven fabric instead of fiberglass. A ridiculous amount of labor hours, but they ended up being very light and strong. The only issue I had is that they earned the nickname 'dancing solar panels' because of the rickety aluminum poles I used below.
 
They appear to be shopping for floor tile in Svilengrad. :) Or maybe a toothache. There appears to be a dentist across the street.
 
wturber said:
They appear to be shopping for floor tile in Svilengrad. :) Or maybe a toothache. There appears to be a dentist across the street.

I did the same thing as you, and was stunned by the derelict building that they're apparently spending the night in. Then I realized that the latest Google images are from 2012, and the Guest House wasn't renovated until 2014. *whew*. :)
 
philf said:
wturber said:
They appear to be shopping for floor tile in Svilengrad. :) Or maybe a toothache. There appears to be a dentist across the street.

I did the same thing as you, and was stunned by the derelict building that they're apparently spending the night in. Then I realized that the latest Google images are from 2012, and the Guest House wasn't renovated until 2014. *whew*. :)

I dunno. I think they've been doing a lot of roadside camping given some of the locations where the map shows them stopped. And there's an empty lot across the street as well. It will be interesting to know more once they are finished with the trip and their honeymoon.

http://www.ebikes.ca/news/suntrip-update/
 
Phil, thanks for dropping in and so great to hear from you again, and yeah it is crazy to think that 10 years has gone by. And at the same time how both so much and so little has changed.

philf said:
I did the same thing as you, and was stunned by the derelict building that they're apparently spending the night in.

While there are lots of pretty derelicty buildings in this rather curious Bulgarian border town, tonight we're almost staying in the Radisson!

RadiInn.jpg

It's funny, we wound up here because of an ongoing game of cat and mouse with a Fedex care package we've been trying to receive. It ended up being a day late in Sofia and we didn't want to wait any longer so had them redirect it to the first hotel we could find in the south/easternmost part of Bulgaria. Online it was called the "Radi Inn" but it wasn't till I saw the sign that I got it :)

Anyways, for those who've been following the race, we've been loosing ground the last week and are about 3 days behind schedule for where we wanted to be assuming a ~200km/day target.

That's partly from frequent worthwhile distractions, partly from the 4 day "Raintrip of 2018" that we and most other riders got caught up in last week, and partly from a full 24 hour stopover in Sofia waiting for this fedex thing. That means that in order to actually make it to our flight out of Tehran in 2.5 weeks at this stage we really need to book it!

Today was finally a perfect day that played out how I imagined most of the trip would be. We clocked 220km averaging 30kph while consuming 12.8Wh/km, with sun almost the entire day, arriving before sunset and not completely exhausted. I've got the full data log available for people to look at here (Including named sections where we stop for breakfast, fixing flat tire, gas station pit stop, and getting pulled over by Bulgarian police..)
http://www.ebikes.ca/tools/trip-analyzer.html?trip=QL43AM
(I recommend switching the horiztonal axis from "distance" to "time" after it loads)

We spent most of the day on a major freeway with super wide shoulders and no trees lining the side of the road so there was minimal shade to deal with, and the result is a solar output graph that has very few dips in it. It peaked around 390 watts mid-day, and gave just under 3kWhr of solar energy for the day.

SolarOutputGraph.jpg

Our preferred method or riding is to use the CA3 to set a speed limit and we use that as a cruising speed, and then the speed limit is adjusted up or down if we want to increase or decrease our consumption. We started the day with it set to 30 kph, but after a breakfast stop and due to tailwind the battery was getting nearly fully charged and so we increased our speed to 32 kph for the bulk of the time when the sun was mostly overhead.

SvilengradTripGraph.jpg

Later in the evening, as the sun was further down and we weren't totally sure if it might tuck behind evening clouds or not we changed to a constant power rather than constant speed mode on the CA3. That way we could be sure to properly meter the power out of the battery pack to ensure that no matter what we'd be able to make the full 220km distance. As we approached Svilengrad seeing that we'd make it with plenty to spare we started being less thrifty on the motor power again.

Started the day with the battery at 36.0V, ended the day with the pack at 36.2V after eeking out some late evening sun by the hotel.

I mentioned police. Bulgaria has some excellent roads and some terrible roads, and yesterday while following a recommended bike route we were on atrociously bumpy road with no shoulder and cars wizzing by as though they were on a freeway. So we switched to all freeway riding today and it was just perfect for solar biking. Totally smooth, wide shoulder, minimal shading, minimal elevation changes etc. There was a sign that said no tractors but nothing saying no bicycles and we had at least 3 police cars pass us without any issues.

Then towards the end of the day we had the flashing blue, apparently bicycles aren't OK here after all and we were very politely escorted off the freeway. And then the police car did like almost all the other cars that passed us, they took out their cell phones and started filming us as we rode away :)
BulgarianWhiteAndBlue.jpg

I mentioned a flat tire too. Our large 30PSI knobby front wheels seem to be holding up decently well, but they certainly don't have the same puncture resistance of the worn out Marathon Plus's. In this case it was a small curled steel shaving (looks like it was hot off a lathe) which worked into the tire and made the leak.
FlatTireNumber4.jpg

I imagine this will be a semi regular occurrence and we'll need to budget time for it in our contingency planning.

Anyways, we're now in this not quite radisson hotel REALLY praying that the fedex package arrives in the morning so that we can set off to Turkey next!
 
justin_le said:
However the best condition is not a clear blue sky but a cloudy sky which happens to have an opening for the sun to shine through. Then you end up with both the direct solar light from the sun, PLUS all the diffuse light from the adjacent clouds. At one stage after a rainy morning in Italy we saw over 590 watts from our 550W peak panel.
Yep. You get all that benefit from the cloud lensing, plus the panels are cool (=higher voltage) plus they are clean from the recent rain. We've seen productions 20% higher than the STP ratings of the panels in conditions like that here - at least until the panels warmed up again.
 
Here's to a fun story and a good prayer. Said a quick prayer for your package to arrive as well. Don't know if it will help, but a little help never hurt in a time like this.

:D
 
Hah! A great vicarious adventure, thanks to you and almost Mrs. for the great fun. Any of us old farts would be proud to call you a result of our lust. VBG.
 
Well guys, here I was expecting to spend a day in a hotel lobby answering a bunch more questions and filling you in on all the many little side adventures we've had so far while impatiently waiting for a Fedex delivery that I was all but giving up on. And then, what a surprise, even before I could get my next post finished!

View attachment 1

This should have all the things needed for any mechanical/electrical eventuality that we could run into in Turkey and Iran where doing local repairs could be tricky.

View attachment 2

Thanks e-beach, the prayers were answered. We're now going to try and do 180km to Tekirdag before the end of the day and see what ferry schedules are like for tomorrow to get ourselves back on schedule (and to get ahead of the french Viguer brothers who are hot on our tail). Batteries have been sitting fully charged for a couple hours, time to rip!

RouteToTekirdag.jpg
 
Thanks a lot for the data on your "perfect day". Highly appreciated.

I hope that someday after the trip there will be data available for every day and every vehicle involved. That would be great.

Can you show data from a day with rainy or overcast weather, too if you find some time to do so?

I wonder about the rather high consumption of around 11.2Wh/km at "only" 30,6km/h average speed in perfectly flat terrain.

I expected more efficiency especially on a tandem trike. Maybe it's the very bad rolling resistance of three knobby tires or significant air resistance or did you experience heavy headwinds?

Good trip und all the luck you need!
 
I expect that when you consider the amount of stuff they are packing and a solar roof panel that isn't always attacking the headwind on a "knife edge" and that has a bit of a sag, that the trike isn't particularly aerodynamic.
 
What an unsettling place to end the day. The final tracking data for today leaves them here (not much around):

nowhereinturkey.jpg


This section of road (Muratlı Çevre Yolu) is very much a new work in progress - not sure how old this satellite image is, but if there's still no bridge there, it could be hard on the trike. Hoping there's no reason to be worried. :(
 
Well! If nothing else, this had me scratching my head a bit and ultimately updating to the latest version of Google Earth Pro (thanks, solarEbike - a picture is worth a thousand words). Nice though the new road looks, it's an odd place for the tracking to stop for the day. :(
 
philf said:
(thanks, solarEbike - a picture is worth a thousand words)

Perhaps a few words would have been helpful here.

The buttons indicated below turn Historical Imagery on and off. Try fiddling with those settings if you're not seeing the imagery you expect to see. In particular, try turning this feature on and off. If you're still not seeing the new image then it's likely that it's so new that Google is still in the process of rolling these out to all of their servers. It can take a while for everyone everywhere to see the newer images when they roll out an imagery update. I can't see the newest image when I have the Historical Imagery window open but if I check back in a few days or few weeks, it will be there. The version of Google Earth used shouldn't have any affect on the imagery you see unless perhaps you're using a really old version.


Google_Earth_Pro historical imagery.jpg


My guess is that this is not where they've stopped for the night since their last known speed was 24 kph and the last tracking point was at 7:30 PM local time and they've usually been stopping for the day closer to 9 PM. Their stated destination for tonight was Tekirdağ 30 km away so it seems feasible they made it there and the tracking data just isn't keeping up for some reason.

Maybe the Spot device has a low battery? JLE mentioned lack of USB ports and they just got 2 more in their last care package. The satellite network could be down but there appear to be updates past that last timestamp from others. This assumes that the Sat-View platform is correctly accounting for time zone differences. Or perhaps they've been abducted by aliens and will mysteriously re-appear many km from their last known location with no knowledge of how they got there. The most complicated explanation is usually the correct one, right?


View attachment 1


UPDATE: So it looks like they camped by the side of the road in a field 4 km (10 minutes) down the road from this spot. Maybe they set up camp and noticed that the Spot device needed charging and plugged it in and it started broadcasting again? I plan to use an inReach device for my trip but I don't plan to broadcast the locations of such campsites until after I've left the location.


 
justin_le said:
Thanks e-beach, the prayers were answered. We're now going to try and do 180km to Tekirdag before the end of the day and see what ferry schedules are like for tomorrow to get ourselves back on schedule (and to get ahead of the french Viguer brothers who are hot on our tail). Batteries have been sitting fully charged for a couple hours, time to rip!

RouteToTekirdag.jpg

Well, it looks like they must have caught a ferry because the appear to be in the middle of the Sea of Marmara right about now.
 
wturber said:
Well, it looks like they must have caught a ferry because the appear to be in the middle of the Sea of Marmara right about now.

For the other folks on the road who check the tracker and aren't aware that Justin and An-So had planned a ferry ride (would this not render them disqualified, were they actually going the distance to Guangzhou?), it would give them pause to wonder what other special features this trike has. I mean, this *is* Justin after all :D.

On another note, the Viguiers are really bolting along.
 
wturber said:
Well, it looks like they must have caught a ferry because the appear to be in the middle of the Sea of Marmara right about now.

One of the approved ferries, too. At first I thought it looked like they might be taking a bit of a shortcut by not riding all the way to the Bosporus and taking one of the short ferry rides to cross there but the official Sun Trip map has an advisory about avoiding Istanbul altogether due to traffic concerns.

I've added these additional map layers to my KMZ file if anyone wants to re-download (directions). It has lots of useful tidbits for the participants like good/bad border crossings, approved ferries, locations of helpful hosts along the way and no go zones. I've used some of this data to plan my own around the world trip. Thank you to the organizers for making this available.

The KMZ file also works on an iPhone if you get the Google Earth app. I assume there's an Android equivalent. No elevation profiles and it crashes a lot but kind of handy for checking the status while away from a computer. Here's a screenshot from my phone.


 
This trip is so inspiring! What an awesome group! This is the kind of stuff that got me excited about ebikes in the first place and it rejuvenates my love for ebike tech (and life really). Keep rowing! :D
 
grindz145 said:
This trip is so inspiring! What an awesome group! This is the kind of stuff that got me excited about ebikes in the first place and it rejuvenates my love for ebike tech (and life really). Keep rowing! :D

Yep. Cool stuff and certainly a bit infectious. It has me seriously thinking about putting together a solar trailer and going on some longer rides.

Oh - and it looks like An-So and Justin are have probably just about finished their ferry ride. Hopefully they got their batteries good and charged during the ride.
 
solarEbike said:
UPDATE: So it looks like they camped by the side of the road in a field 4 km (10 minutes) down the road from this spot.

Indeed! In and among a field of sunflowers, which has been the one constant agricultural staples we've seen since Croatia onwards.

RoadsideCampingTurkey.jpg

Our hope of making it all the way to Tekridad was thwarted by both a headwind and Turkey having a rollercoaster terrain of short but reasonable steep (6-7%grade) hills, not quite long enough to get appreciable regen on the downhill portion but definitely long enough to make every uphill leg a slow drag, increasing consumption, and reducing the average speed. Apparently there is quite a bit more of this in store for the rest of Turkey too. So as 9pm (suntrip cutoff time) approached we still had ~20km to go and with nothing remotely interesting in site just pulled into the nearest field.

Maybe they set up camp and noticed that the Spot device needed charging and plugged it in and it started broadcasting again?

Nah the Suntrip people set up the spot for a very low rate of data updates so that the loading of the live map wouldn't get bogged down from too many datapoints with all the participants tracks. It's not really useful as a real-time tracker, as we found when we were trying to hook up with the French Viguier brothers in Belgrade. We were zigzagging through the city to their latest location, and then once we got there it was updated to somewhere else. It was only after we gave up trying to meet that our paths crossed by happenstance on the way out of town.

And speaking of crossing paths, that's also what happened more or less in Tekridag yesterday when we met with Waiwon Ching of eZee bike ! He came a totally different route, riding much of Italy and then taking a ferry to Greece. He's also been a bit of a Suntrip rebel; didn't take a GPS tracker and is charging up at hotels so not attempting to follow the official rules at all, but he IS one of the few others on the suntrip trajectory going through Iran ( as well as the team from Morocco ) and so I'm glad we've met up for a bit.

WithChingAtTerminal.jpg

It's possible that we'll reconnect again later but for the next while we're going to try and hit consistent 200km days while he's doing more like 150.

Cephalotus said:
Thanks a lot for the data on your "perfect day". Highly appreciated.
I hope that someday after the trip there will be data available for every day and every vehicle involved. That would be great.

That's what we're hoping to get from all of the databoxes that we built and installed on almost all the vehicles just before departure. I'm not sure if the Suntrip organizers are planning to make that all public or not but I sure hope so since it would be wonderful to have others able to access that as reference info for solar travel.

Can you show data from a day with rainy or overcast weather, too if you find some time to do so?

Exactly. It's the kind of thing I need some time and mental space to plough through which is hard to find while on the trip. But I have all the logged data on hand up to one that I just shared and can provide a dropbox link if you want to have a direct look before I have time to present it here. Each day is about 10MB uncompressed, data logged at 1 second rate.

I wonder about the rather high consumption of around 11.2Wh/km at "only" 30,6km/h average speed in perfectly flat terrain.I expected more efficiency especially on a tandem trike. Maybe it's the very bad rolling resistance of three knobby tires or significant air resistance or did you experience heavy headwinds?

No the winds were ideal and mostly from behind, this was a realllly ideal day. In normal conditions we'd see more like 15 Wh/km, and riding around Vancouver in the testing (more stop and go) we were often 17-18. At first I was also a tad disappointed by the overall wh/km numbers but it's not at all surprising. We probably have at least double the effective air drag of a normal bike, since it's a wide trike, with more or less upgright seats, and the roof support structure has more struts and things attached to it than most of the other vehicles. Plus it weighs a ton, not just the heavy solid steel base frame but also the loads of stuff we're carrying. Here it is laid out on the street yesterday when we stripped it for doing some mechanical work to give you an idea of what's in tow

TooMuchStuff.jpg

Effectively this vehicle was built for cruising comfort rather than propulsion efficiency, and then we've got enough motor oomph and solar area to still make it work. We got protection from the sun, protection from the rain, and enough cargo gear to be self reliant at surviving and repairing whatever gets thrown our way. If you look at it per-person, it's still pretty good. 5-6 wh/km apiece on ideal days and 7-8 wh/km each on more typical terrain.

But it's true that other riders on tandems will surely have generally better wh/km stats than us, since they are generally lower profile, with more recumbent seats, and a lower roof height with a lower drag roof support.

wturber said:
Oh - and it looks like An-So and Justin are have probably just about finished their ferry ride. Hopefully they got their batteries good and charged during the ride.

The batteries got all charged up just waiting for the ferry departure! We thought there was one at 11am but it turned out that didn't stop in the right port so we had to wait till 5. But at least the evening ferry ride became the perfect opportunity to do some upgrades and repairs with parts from the care package and tools that I brought along, and the ferry deck was converted to a workshop between the trucks loaded with livestock.

FerryWorkshop.jpg

I got a set of metric self drilling taps now and being able to form threaded holes makes me feel like I can really do anything :)

View attachment 3

This is me getting the tilting roof mechanism repaired so that we can again change the roof angle while riding again without having to dismount and use tools.
 
Don't forget to lube the threads! :D

I'm curious. How is the back to back scheme working out for conversation and such? The setup is counter-intuitive since we are so used to facing in the direction we are traveling for obvious reasons. But it struck me as one of the really good things about your trike.
 
Everything about this thread has been so amazing and engaging—not just Justin's posts (which are incredible), but also the maps and data others are providing as well.

Justin: I really love the fact that you share your encounters with people/places on your trip. The ride experience you've shared has been great, but the points where you mention meeting people along the way or people that helped you on your journey give me hope for the human race. In this environment of constantly negative news, reading about your interpersonal experiences has been a really hope-inspiring story for me. I hope that karma is good to you on the rest of your journey and you continue to have these good experiences. Thank you for doing this and sharing it with the rest of us.
 
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