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A good pair of clips on your pedals can really improve the efficiency of your bike ride. Unfortunately, they have other problems: The pedals now have a rightside up and upside down configuration, it hurts to wear them with sandals, and they rarely fit when wearing steel toed boots.
Shame. I like
steel toed boots. How can I use them with my bike? Well, steel is ferrous metal... so just magnetize the whole pedal. Most magnets should be strong enough to insure that the ride remains more efficient, without making it too difficult to dismount.
Plus, you can then us the magnets as part of a generator to power your lights... Uhh, maybe not.
The seat of the matter
Bicycle_20Seat_20Shorts
[normzone, Aug 25 2008]
[link]
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Magnets give a high force at zero distance; this then decreases rapidly (1/r2?) as distance between magnet and metal increases. What this means is that if you try to pass any power by pulling up on the pedals, at some point it's just going to release your foot abruptly, with possibly interesting consequences. |
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And if you want to take your foot of the pedal you also have to use more force than when declipping. |
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A good idea would be either pedals, which have a normal platform (when you are in sandles) with a clip inside, or clip on one side and normal pedal on the other. Or try toe-clips (a metal or plastic cage around the whole front of your foot). I've also seen sandles with an SPD "horseshoe". |
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Why not go for a transtarsal piercing? It
should be fairly easy to install a half-inch
diameter nickel tunnel through each foot,
which could slide directly onto suitable
pins on the end of the crank. Oilav! No
need for pedals. |
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I like this, big rare earth magnets should be strong enough, though I'd be worried that it would magnetize your boots and you'd pick up nails and scraps as you walk, but still should work as well as clip-ons. |
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//Why not go for a transtarsal piercing? It should be fairly easy to install a half-inch diameter nickel tunnel through each foot// I hear they tried that with some guy a few thousand years ago, and he died. But he's been OK ever since. I don't know if he uses them for riding bikes though. |
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I suppose it might be possible to try to draw power from this setup on the downstroke. The force of your foot should be keeping it attached to the pedal at that point, so I suppose the clips really only function throughout portions of the upstroke. |
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But I would wager that any device suitable for drawing power from this setup will be too close to the pedals to stand up to your booted feet. |
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Any magnet sufficient to hold while a cyclist is pulling up would be excessively heavy. They do make two sided clip in (called clipless for historical reasons) pedals that also have a standard platform around it. |
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Additionally, if you really want to wear sandals, there are several companies making them with attachment points for the required cleats.
There are also reports of people modifying work boots or hiking boots to take cleats as well. |
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- and the pedals needn't have a "right way up" - I use pedals which are double-sided, i.e. my cleats clip into them whichever way up they are. |
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maybe an electromagnet that releases when a sensor notices panic from the rider. |
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//this means is that if you try to pass any power by pulling up on the pedals, at some point it's just going to release your foot abruptly, with possibly interesting consequences.// |
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I would tend to disagree with this. During normal operation, a bicyclist attempts to produce most of their force using the downstroke of one leg, and not the upstroke of the other. I should imagine that if such a device were to release one's foot, it would not be much more interesting than if the operator had removed his foot from a bicycle pedal that had no attachment devices. |
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