FALCON

An ambitious project by Alexander and Pim Visscher.

Aug 2022

Welcome to a brief overview of project FALCON, our first Aerodynamic Recumbent Tandem Quadricycle! Built from scratch and designed with extreme perseverance.

Aug 2019

How it all started..

On our 600 kilometer bike journey through the Netherlands, we found ourselves on the Markerwaarddijk, a dike with a length of 26.5 kilometer.

The Netherlands is known for its winds, but this time, they were very strong. This is where the first concept of Falcon came to mind...

The birth of a new project..

We cycled roughly 50 more kilometers after the dike to arrive at our first stop. We continued early on the next day.

The idea of Falcon started to really grow on us. We got so excited that we stopped and sat down along the road and drew our very first designs...

Concepts, concepts, concepts!

Still excited about the idea after several months we had sketched many concept ideas. Some of which were a little bit unrealistic, but you should always dream big.

Jan 2020

"We felt the lack of experience throughout the entire planning process"

Research

We knew very little about how bicycles actually work. But Google is your best friend!

We scoured the internet night upon night to get a basic understanding of the general design of a bicycle, material strength and how we could convert that into a four-wheeled, two person recumbent bike.

We found ourselves held back a lot by the lack of experience we had at the time.

A bit of downtime

We didn't know how to possibly get past the preparational stages.

Not only was the lack of practical knowledge a major restraining factor, how would we pay for the components? And where could we build it?

The project slowly came to a standstill..

July 2021

"Suddenly, everything fell into place"

July 2021

The Lindenhof

We suddenly found ourselves in the ideal situation to press forward. We had both created a budget for ourselves and found the perfect time and location with appropriate tools to actually build the quadracycle!

After an exciting call in the evening we decided to actually go for it!

"Hold up, we're actually doing this?!"

Lets do it for real!

After nearly two years of dreaming, the project finally seemed very real! For one entire month, we spend nearly every evening and many nights properly researching, planning and organizing the entire project. Because that's all we had, one month to prepare!

Drive System and Framework

The main focus was to come up with a proper drive system and a frame that would be strong enough to hold two men.

One of our demands was to have a drive system that is independent from the other person cycling. This would make travelling much safer as none of the drivers' pedals will be forced to rotate when the other person is pedaling

This proved to be more difficult than we first imagined...

Frame rendered [driveshaft close-up].jpg

Steering Mechanism

This one cracked our brain for a long time. It was difficult to figure out how exactly the steering mechanism should be configured. We've been calculating a lot and used tools like GeoGebra to calculate and simulate the system.

August 2021

Building stage

After a full month of intensive planning, we finally arrived at the Lindenhof, where we would build the bike.

Schermafbeelding 2021-08-30 195048_edited.jpg

"This is not the end, it is just the beginning"

Final words (for now...)

We spent a full month building Falcon, or in proper terms; the 'Recumbent Quadricycle Tandem'. Things got stressful at times, and we faced many challenges. But it's been an incredible project to have worked on, and hopefully expand on in the near future!

While the quadracycle is nowhere near perfect, we are very satisfied with the prototype we delivered.

This page barely scratched the surface about the Falcon project. We will be adding much more information as time goes by, as well as making a video documentary about it, so keep an eye out!

- Alexander & Pim Visscher