2. The idea of rear wheel steering
The concept of steering with the rear wheel has some nice properties.
  • The bike can be built low and compact.
  • The chain can be short, without the steering by the feet (flevo).
  • It will be very easy to fair.

2.1 Home built prototype

This is my first prototype of a front wheel-driven, rear steered bike. Unfortunatly this model has not been so succesfull. The back wheel steering makes it to difficult to keep the balance. To tell the truth: I have not been able to ride it at all!

2.2 Another idea which probably would not work

Before I made my current bike I had a lot of ideas to improve the rear wheel steering. I was convinced that it is not enough to just flip the rear wheel, one has also to influence the front wheel, i.e. it must be leaned.

Here is a new construction with a rear wheel steering. Or perhaps a hybrid of middle steering and rear wheel steering The problem is to find the correct angle for the bending. That is at least what I thought was the main problem.

Two main principles are shown in the picture.

  • The A case represents a more conventional case where the line hits the spot where the front wheel touches the ground. In this case the bike will lean more than it will be bent.
  • The B line is more upright and will cause the bike to behave like long bus with a accordion-like rubber connection. I guess it will not work well with a two wheel bike
Since I released these lines above I have received some feed back. I will later collect and present those, but there was in particular a response from Erik Wannee, who has a very informative www-page about rear-wheel steering and a lot of experience.

I expect that you can never ride on it. What will happen? The rear wheel will try to drop on the ground. So when you sit down on it, the rear wheel will flop to the right or to the left. It will take strong arms to avoid that. And because the front part (including your own weight) is allways much heavier than the back part, a steering movement will more easily flip the back part than that it will turn the front part in the good direction.

My own experiments with small scale models pointed in the same direction.

2.3 The next chapter

After considering these facts I had for a while given up the idea of rear wheel steering for bikes with two wheels.

However, I am going to give it a try again. It struck me that I perhaps had used the wrong way of learning to ride it. As I told you I used help wheels to learn the other bike. Now I have tried this idea out for the rear steered model. And now I am making some progress, even if this is a more difficult model to ride than everything else I have tried. But,...this chapter is not written yet...wait and see!!