engineering

Let's say you're inspired to create a music system for your bike that has the ability to rock a social ride with 10, 20, 50, or more people.

Unfortunately, there are no products on the market that allow you to do this. The only bicycle audio products on the market are ones that include speakers 3" or smaller. There's no way a three-inch speaker can generate the amount of bass that makes you or the people around you feel like they're 'in the music'. To do it properly you have to build your own. And while that may be appealing to some people, others, you perhaps, may not have the time or workshop space to make it happen. But you still want to have the awesome experience of leading social rides with a righteous music system, with beautiful integrated lighting, great bass, crisp vocals, controls on the handlebars, you know, the works.

To answer this need, Rock the Bike is creating a proper Cruising platform for bicycles. It will include the Soul Cycle Head Unit, which we've had on the market for two years, and a new beautiful, streamlined fiberglass bicycle-specific speaker box, which will be available in early '08. The new fiberglass cabinet will initially be compatible with the Xtracycle platform, but we will be releasing other versions (for the Mundo Utility Bicycle and potentially for standard rear racks.

Check out our Flickr photoset we're creating that shows the process of creating the Soul Cycle Mothership, as we call the new music cabinet. When you see the care and attention to detail that is going into the new music system, you'll get psyched about it's debut this year.

What's up bike people, I had a great ride home tonight from my friend Leila's house. I had three tubes of Hot Pants Pink Down Low Glow on my Xtracycle and it was really laying down a beautiful cloud of light on the wet streets. The rain had just started when I turned on the lights. They turned on fast, and stayed superbright till I turned onto York St. a mile later.

That's when I looked down and saw that the front tube in my dual-tube system was noticeably dimmer than the rear tube, and the single tube system I use on the rear of my xtracycle was about half-bright also.

It was refreshing because I got to see the limits of the wood glue and bamboo technology.