A few weeks ago I had the brief opportunity to take a ride on the Withlacoochee Trail in central-ish Florida. I live, shall we say, slightly north of Florida, and so instead of riding my faithful Catrike Expedition I rented. My rental ride was a HP Velotechnik Gekko in a bright yellow/green.
I really like my Catrikes, but my experience with other makes is extremely limited - my first trike was a Pocket, and while I’ve been cycling most of my life, that’s the Pocket was the only recumbent trike I’d ridden, and I’d bought it without a test ride from a man on the internet (on eBay). I did get a chance to ride an Expedition before buying one, briefly, at the bike expo in Milwaukee, but that was honestly just to be sure I liked the additional size. I was already hooked at that point.
So the Gekko was somewhat of a new experience for me. I described most of the details about that experience in the Withlacoochee trail post, but there was something I noticed about the Gekko that I left out of that post.
I was in a hurry to get riding on the day that I went out in Florida, so aside from a quick look over to familiarize myself with the location of the controls and the in-seat storage, I decided I’d have to learn anything else about the trike on the go.
The thing that stood out the most was how startlingly clear the view to the rear of the trike was.
The mirror on the Gekko is a teardrop-shaped, heavy-duty affair that gives the impression of durability and quality. It also seemed extremely stable and vibration free.
My Catrikes, like most, have the round Mirrycle mirrors on them. These are small, inexpensive mirrors that do give a view of the activity to the rear, but they are extremely subject to sympathetic vibration with road imperfections. This can be controlled for to some degree by removing the vertical section of the mounting system, which I did on my Pocket. However, that seems to be less of an option on the Expedition, as the position of the mounting post and the fenders make things a little more intimate on that machine. Even with that change, tho, the improvement is incremental - the vibration is reduced, but not gone. This means that you can see things coming up behind you, but details are not available - it’s hard to tell a car from a truck from a wildebeest (big wildebeest problem here on the roads of Northern Illinois, don’t ya know...).
And that was the difference here. While there wasn’t any worry about motor vehicles approaching from the rear - the Withlacoochee is a recreational trail - I was still surprised at how well I could see riders approaching from behind, for example, or the receding image of people that I passed. The difference was stark.
Stark enough that I asked the very helpful woman at Trailside Cycles about the mirror. She went out to look at the trike, and indicated to me that it was a HP Velotechnik mirror (which made sense at the time - more on that below). She also had one in stock.
I asked if she thought it could be mounted on a Catrike and she thought it could, pointing out that it mounts to the head tube.
The price on the package - $69.50 - was not insubstantial, particularly compared with what I was accustomed to spending on Mirrycle mirrors, which can be ordered from Amazon for less than $13. I gave thought to taking a picture of the package and looking it up online later - this is often a fairly decent strategy for saving a bit of cash on a purchase. However, I am loathe to do that to a small business in general (but hey, suck it Wal-Mart!), and the folks at Trailside Bike had been very kind and accommodating to me, so I thought it only fair to buy it from them. In deference to the price, however, I bought just the left side mirror.
As is often the case, it took me a while to get to mounting it to the trike. In this case the primary impediment was that the bolt that came with the mirror - as well as the one already in the head tube - was too short. I didn’t have a longer one at home, so it had to wait until I could make it down to my localest bike shop.
I was a little concerned that what looked so clear and vibration free on a Florida trail might not contend quite as well with the weather-challenged byways of rural Illinois. Since the new mirror mounts to the head tube, and the Mirrycle mirror is mounted to the accessory bar, I left the old mirror on so I could do a direct comparison.
Yeah - it’s better, even in Illinois.
The Mirrycle’s are convex mirrors, which adds a wide field of view, but makes everything in the mirror smaller (objects in mirror may be...). By contrast, the flat display on the HP mirror provides for a larger picture, and while it does have a reduced field of vision, what it offers is more than sufficient to see the road behind.
While that’s good, the more vital detail is that it is stable - virtually vibration free, even on the Northern Illinois asphalt. This leads to a clear picture of what is approaching from behind, which can be more important than you might think. Wildebeests aside, the whole idea of a mirror is that you can glance into it periodically to see if something is coming. The small, unclear image in the old mirror would sometimes appear to render immovable objects - trees over a hill, for example - as things approaching from the distance. Sorting that out sometimes takes extended viewing and processing time, all of which is time not looking at the road ahead.
When the thing in the mirror is an actual vehicle, it’s good to know the type, at times. While I firmly believe in taking my lane, how one handles approaching farm implements is still different than what one does for automobiles.
So - in short, I like it. The price is rather dear, to be sure, and if I had just been looking at it on a website instead of having used it on the rental trike, I can just about guarantee that my cheapness gene would have won.
Which brings me around to the type of mirror, and where one can find it. It turns out that researching the mirror for this post - and for consideration of a right side mirror for myself later on (I like symmetry) - was a bit confusing. If there is a way to order it through the HP Velotechnik site I was unable to find it. Even doing a site search for "mirror" turns up nothing related to mirrors. So I looked over the package from Trailside Bike for information, and it has has two labels on it:
I started out with the larger label, and then when to the smaller one. I should have started with the smaller one. Using "HP Velotechnik Mirror" got me to Industrial Bicycles. You can also find them at Utah Trikes (of course) under "B&M Head Tube Mounted Mirror". In both cases they are slightly cheaper (by 50¢) than I paid at Trailside Bike, but shipping from the former is over $20, and for the latter is $13, so I got a pretty good deal buying it on site (makes that cheapness gene unclench just a little bit).
What oddly didn’t occur to me until later was to look up and see whether Trailside Bike had a means to order one. They do - and they’ll ship it via US Mail for as low as $5.27.
So that’s where I’ll go to get the right-side mirror if I can get that cheapness gene to unclench the rest of the way. After all, I like symmetry, and I want to be able to see the approaching wildebeests from all angles...