RotoVelo is here (at last)

RotoVelo!

The story behind my getting a prototype RotoVelo is long and boring. I've been buying bikes off Ben at Trisled for a long time and over the years have become friends with him. In the sense that he accepts that things break around me and it's not my fault. Although he's still bitter about the wind trainer (it exploded). So I've become the unoffical destruction tester, and I also take a lot of the photos that go on his web site.
More than a year ago when he started this project I found out about it and decided that it looked promising. So of course I started asking when I could have one. Once he was confident it would work he also asked me to put together the lighting rig for it - a 12V LED based system that's fairly robust and works quite well.
For the last couple of months there have been interesting things to see in the TriSled factory, and some of them we've been sworn to secrecy about. The RotoVelo was one of those. There have been shells lying around, frames in various stages of construction, and even a few rideable vehicles.
The first step for me was picking a colour - Ben had a row of shells in various colours and us special customers got to fight over who got which colour. For me it was easy - red ones go faster. Then I had to wait.
Last week I got to go along and model for some of his promo photos. I spent half a day in the studio while the photographer went "move a centimetre forward. No, towards me forward. No, more that way". Seriously. Six hours and we got about 20 photos. But then I got to ride one, and managed to ride over the photographer's toes doing action shots. So I think we're even.
But finally the happy day has arrived - I've been allowed to take my velomobile home!