Building a Sit‑Back Recumbent Bike to Beat Headwinds: An Engineer's Journey

I’m sipping a Wanderlust IPA at the Breakside Brewery, Northeast Portland, with Adam Lazenby. Adam is the Design Engineer at nearby Leatherman HQ, and he’s recounting a tale of building his first sit-back recumbent bike, perhaps aptly named Eneptitude (note the ironic spelling). As a dedicated cyclist and bike commuter, Adam was frustrated by the prevailing, and sometimes torturous, headwinds that he regularly encountered on his route to work. One day, while staring up at the ceiling of his houseboat (where inspiration is, apparently, often found) he decided to build a recumbent bike to reduce wind resistance.

Starting with a $40 box of random old bike parts and a newly purchased TIG welder, he set up a workshop in the garage of his mate Matt Brown, fellow design engineer, and attempted to build the bike from scratch. The result? Nothing short of a death trap with sketchy welding, random geometry, and steering directly connected to the chainset mechanism (not wise). After two aborted commutes, Adam ‘decommissioned’ it for a simple reason – he wanted to survive. ‘So you just bought one, right?’ I ask. ‘No way,’ he laughs. ‘Eneptitude version two is already underway, and I’m sure there’ll be a version three, four, and maybe five before I’m successful.’

It’s a story that epitomises the way Adam and the rest of the designers and engineers on the FREE™ Series of Leatherman multitools think. It also demonstrates why the Leatherman is such an impressive product in both design and build.