Interesting link: Atomic Zombie/CHOPZONE
I've posted a little previously about some of the bikes that "Atomic Zombie" posts to Reddit. This guy publishes free plans for homemade or modified bicycles on his website, atomiczombie.com, which is also called CHOPZONE.
The guy sells his designs for weird bicycles. Some of them are lowrider bikes, some seem genuinely useful, and some seem like bizarre stunts he's designed for the hell of it. There is one bike which is also a chicken enclosure.
You can buy all these diverse plans at once - 40 of them, apparently. One of the selling points he's highlighted for the plans is that, all together, they amount to over 5000 pages... which means that each plan is, on average, 125 pages long. My god. Those are some substantial plans. (I have not bought the plans, because I don't know how to weld and don't have a place to weld.)
There are so many different recumbents here - recumbents made out of square tubing, recumbents made out of chopped-up bikes, recumbents made for touring, or cargo... similarly, there are a bunch of trikes, including three different tandem trikes, one of which is recumbent.
The thing is... there are loads of people making these bikes!! This is not a lone wolf guy just running a website full of lonely bike plans. He has created an actual community and it's been around for so long that it seems like many different backyard welders have used his plans over the years. You can find people online discussing the wide range of Atomic Zombie bikes they've built. There's someone in that reddit thread who has built three different bikes off this site.
You can see even more people who have built these bikes on the creator's forum. I haven't dug into it very deeply, but I was surprised to see that a big part of the forum is a list of additional bike plans - quite short, fully online, and free to read. Check out this "evil road bike" called the "Tour De Hell."
Anyhow, the chopper I was about to build would take a speed bike and turn it into the exact opposite of what a true racing cyclist would desire - a dangerous chopped and lowered speed bike with handling characteristics similar to that of an angry blind mule on steroids. Yes, a lightweight low riding speed bike, with erratic handling, yet still capable of serious speed!
I also recommend checking out this tallbike which has a ladder built into it. The ladder handrails double as control handles for the front wheel, so the rider can climb up and down and also control the direction of the bike while it's coasting. Deranged!!
Why would a person want to build and ride a 12 foot two wheeler you ask? To win a Darwin award? Train for the circus? Overcome a fear of heights? Set a world record? Who can say, but for me it has always been the same reason - because it's fun, and it beats sitting on my butt watching the tube!
When I started digging into this site a little bit more, I noticed that the operator is actually having a difficult time getting the site to continue paying for itself because traffic dropped off a cliff after 2020. What a bummer! Apparently the majority of income he gets off this site is for a portable chicken coop plan. He seems to be trying to get reddit to work as some source of traffic, but says it's a big hassle.
Social media has been cutting weird and small web communities off at the knees for well over a decade now... and frankly, despite its challenges, this site is clearly doing much better than a lot of other places that have long since vanished. The weird part of the internet still exists, but some parts of it are holding on by a thread.