Your Bike or Our Pro Frame: Same great activities

Did you know that our most popular activities can be used with our Pro frames or your own bike? We designed it that way to serve different customer groups, from brands to schools and nonprofits, each with different needs, goals, and budgets. 

Our pro frames make it quick and easy to get started hosting all of the popular Rock The Bike activities, minimizing complexity and maximizing your focus on your overall event vision. They provide great branding opportunities and the best choice for fitting a wide variety of riders from kids to adults. Easy to change riders with the new gym style seatpost.  

Using your own bike makes the most of your available resources and minimizes cost, making your pedal powered experience as accessible and sustainable as possible.

If you are new to Rock The Bike, please take a moment to consider which of these paths you want to take and the benefits of choosing one over the other.

Read on about the various activities available to either approach.

Bike Blending

Bike blending will always infuse events with pedal powered smiles. Whipping up a pedal powered smoothie or cocktail is already fun, and all the more when you hop off and let someone new blend next.

Fender Blender Pro	Fender Blender Universale
• Rock solid steel frame is safe and stable for people up to 250 pounds • Seat quickly adjusts to accommodate children and adults. • Wide variety of branding options. • Single speed means nothing to fiddle with. Just get on and pedal.	• Compact design you can bike anywhere with. • Comes with a strong aluminum rack you can use for general purpose. Recycled saddle bags make for a snap on storage solution. • Quick setup lets you quickly swap bikes. • Turn the bike you already have into a party bike!
Before you buy: Get your branding artwork ready. Look at our guidelines and make sure you allow 2-3 weeks during our busy season for printing to avoid rush fees.  Did you buy enough pitchers for a crowd? If not, check out our packages with value pricing on pitchers.  Take it to the next level with the Electric Fender Blender Pro, which generates Watts and pedals out smoothies at the same time. The electric power operates  separate from the mechanical blender drive and enables new activities on the same bike.	Before you buy: Watch our ‘ideal bike’ video or look at this infographic to know if your bike is a good choice. You may need a quick release skewer, which we will  include for free if you request it at checkout. Is your bike sized right for your group? If not you may want to have a kids bike and an adult bike blender.  Learn about coaching Pedal Power so you can be an excellent host when people step to pedal.
Buy Now! $2150	Buy Now! $559

Spin Art

When bellies are full of smoothies or treats, break out the art. Using our blender systems as a base, both models can spin a canvas into a creative masterpiece with our spin art attachment.

Spin Art + Fender Blender Pro	Spin Art + Fender Blender Universale
• Pedaler gets an ideal view of the creative moments.  • Fits kids down to 7.  • Brand your Spin Art drum to match the rest of your branding.	• Use your bike’s lower gears to dial in the perfect spin art speed.  • Get a second activity that works well in colder weather.
Buy Now! $675	Buy Now! $675

Pump it up with dance parties and live music. 

Live music is a great way to create an experience and our line of generator products do just that. Pedal powered dance parties are easy to set up and fun to pull off! Learn how our systems can support your next celebration.

Our AC generators in the Off The Wall line of products are the best option for a small scale dance party where you can show up with one bike and one speaker. This is our most affordable option for getting started. 

AC  Generators

Our Off The Wall line of pedal powered generators Produce AC current to charge phones and devices, and power a wide variety of ordinary or extra fun electronics (think dance parties with bubble machines and disco lights). These are single-bike setups. One Off The Wall generator can power 1-2 loudspeakers. We have selected a good compatible speaker, the Mackie DRM line, as being safe to pedal. You can test others or follow our recommendation. 

Our products are perfect for educational environments because they offer a tangible learning experience where you can feel the energy consumption of different devices through the resistance in your legs. The resistance will vary significantly between the bass-heavy vibrations of music and the lighter demands of spoken word. This is a great way to develop energy consciousness in a fun, physical way. 

Only Off The Wall Pro is compatible with our Off The Wall Recharge Station. There’s no official alternative for your own bike but the OTW generator stand does a great job at charging devices as well.

Off The Wall Pro	Off The Wall Generator Stand
• Worry free event focused design on all Pros.  • Pro seatposts are square and don’t spin.  • Pros feature fast adjusting seat posts with a pull knob to switch between multiple riders.	• Ideal for fitness! Get a workout you control by adding more devices. Dial in the gear and then jam. • Our quietest Off The Wall generator. The rubber on rubber generator has a pleasant pitch.  • Quick setup lets you quickly swap bikes.
Buy Now! $2425	Buy Now! – $620

DC Generators

Team efforts are the most fun. Link up multiple bikes with our DC generators. You’ll need a Utility Box and you may benefit from the Pedalometer if you’ll be engaging 5 or more people. Simply pedal to keep it in the green, then use the Pure Sine 110V AC power to run normal devices including full sound systems. Any speakers will work! 

Generator Pro	Roll Up Generator Stand
• Make a colorful fleet! • Power a live music performance. • Build your team with fun and collaboration.	• Highest power capacity tire rolling dynamo on the market. • Compact design that you can easily bike anywhere with. • Quick setup lets you quickly swap bikes.
Buy Now! – $2150	Buy Now! – $550

 

A colorful fleet powering a live performance at Maker Fair 2024 in Vallejo, CA

 

Choose Your Path

Using your own bike showcases the humble bicycle as a tool for empowerment. If your goal is to get more people riding, using a regular bike as your pedal power frame helps you make a beautiful statement. This is all the more powerful when you roll up to events on your bike, then convert it to pedal power mode. We’ve experienced many inspiring moments at the bikeable events we still do around our Oakland HQ. We plan to continue making more of our pedal powered activities compatible with your bike. Let us know which one you want to see next, an ice cream maker?

With our Pro frames, the benefit is the simplicity of a single-function machine. To a general audience it can come across with a much higher degree of polish, especially when you integrate your brand’s logo or a unique inspiring message. 

Either way we will help you get your group moving and active while giving energy back.

This custom art bike, made and based in San Francisco, rides through the city at 12 feet tall, then sprouts roots, branches, and leaves at events, where it becomes a 2500-Watt double-stack main speaker at our Pedal Powered Stage. Integrated LEDs look stunning at night. The Tree has two seats and creates all of its own power using an integrated One Bike / One Speaker circuit.

Above, El Arbol in action as a Aerial Dance rig at Gaia Fest in 2012.

Aerialist Shredder performs on hoop from El Arbol’s trusty rear branch. 

Tara performs on El Arbol at the start of the SF Marathon

El Arbol without its Canopy of Leaves.

The sound quality is incredible. By using the audio elements from 2 Modified JBL PRX loudspeakers, it has the ability to get music out at festival levels with very low distortion. We use El Arbol as half of our Pedal Powered Stage at the San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival. The height of the upper loudspeaker (9′ up!)  helps the sound spread out easily out above a crowd, without requiring deafening volume levels for those in the front.

It’s fun and expands the notion of ‘Stage’ to include the pedalers.

Read More

A mom and her son Pedal Powering a music performance on a Mundo 500 generator at the Oregon Country Fair. Rock The Bike built the Pedal Powered Stage used at the Fair.

We help our event partners engage their communities to provide the greenest source of power possible. Read on to see how we do it!

Read More

Rock The Bike is helping Pure Austin Fitness pedal power their spin class. Pure already owns two of our Fender Blender Pros, and the goal of the current project is to convert these bike blenders to pedal power generators using our latest technology, then use them to pedal power the audio in their spin class. Here are some shots from the work I did in Austin over the past five days.

On Friday I met up with Pure Austin’s Beto Boggiano at his workshop. We chopped off the dropouts on the Fender Blender Pro frames, in order to respace them for the new generator hubs.

We used the generator hub itself to position the dropouts at the correct width, rather than, say, measuring the distance with a caliper and then holding the dropouts with a pair of vice grips.  The gym mats and wood are to lift the hub and hold it at the correct position for tacking.

Here’s a shot of the inside of our generator hub. The copper coils move past rare earth magnets that are bonded to the inside of the aluminum hub shell, creating an electric charge that makes current flow through a cross-bridge rectifier. From the Wikipedia page on generators:

A generator forces electric charges to move through an external electrical circuit, but it does not create electricity or charge, which is already present in the wire of its windings. It is somewhat analogous to a water pump, which creates a flow of water but does not create the water inside. The source of mechanical energy may be a reciprocating or turbine steam engine, water falling through a turbine or waterwheel, an internal combustion engine, a wind turbine, a handcrank, compressed air or any other source of mechanical energy.

Above: Beto tacking the dropouts back on in their new position.

After welding the dropouts back to the frame at the correct width, it was time to rebuild wheels around the new hubs. The rim and tire add mass that creates a flywheel, smoothing out the pedal power. Plus, with a tire back on, the tire-rubbing bike blender interface will still completely functional (though optional). Pure Austin will be able to rotate the blender’s roller away from the tire during the spin class (to minimize noise and power loss), and then move it back to crank out smoothies for the cyclists after the class.

Before the trip, Rock The Bike’s engineer Leif had encouraged me to build the wheels ahead of time so that I could devote my time to installing the system once in Austin. Unfortunately I ran out of time preparing for Austin and instead brought rims and spokes with me. I ran into a number of issues. In the photo above, note the spoke nipples poking way out of the rim. I’d built up the wheel as a one cross when the spokes were spec’ed for a two-cross pattern.

Fortunately, these missteps and delays gave me a chance to bike around Austin on a bright blue Mundo and meet several cool salesmen and mechanics at Bicycle Sport Shop, Austin Bikes, and Mellow Jonny’s. I was impressed how much people in Austin already knew about the Mundo and its development, considering there are only a few Mundo riders there. I got stopped in front of bars for test rides and one rider even flagged me down… “Is that a Mundo?” It’s amazing how well educated and networked bike people can be about the products they buy.

The Monday 6PM spin class came and went without Pedal Power. I did get to see Beto, the gym’s owner and most experienced spin coach in action, which was great. The big black box on the floor between the palm tree and the instructor’s podium is a digitally powered JBL PRX subwoofer. The main speakers are mounted to the ceiling. You can see one of them at the top of this image just right of center. The mains are powered by two rack-mounted amplifiers, out of view. Hopefully we’ll be able to Pedal Power both the amps and sub. But we won’t know until we try.

Above: Bob Farr, an old-school Austin Xtracycle rider, and pedicabber, showed up Monday for the Pedal Power Workshop at Pure Austin. The technical delays described above limited our ability to fill the sweaty gym air with solder fumes at the workshop, but I was able to show Bob lots of good data and parts on paper and  on Pure’s public iMac. The next day Bob showed up to help me bust out the last few details of installing the generator wheels. Here Bob is pedal powering 80 watts of LED lighting, a successful test of the Electric FB Pro.

Above: tracing a round object to mark a cut in the wheel covers, making room for the larger hub.

We succeeded in electrifying both of Pure’s Fender Blender Pros. The next step on the project is to build them a Pedal Power Utility Box. I would have liked to have the triumph of a pedal powered spin class, but at least we finished the primary goal of converting the two FB Pros they had, and I won’t have to fly back to Austin to complete the project.

Pure will have time to thoroughly test the system before using it at their fitness expo, March 6.

One of our favorite local bands, Tornado Rider, performed their hit “I’m a Falcon” on the Pedal Powered Stage we hosted at the August 6th edition of Sunday Streets.

As lead singer Rushad Eggleston sings and plays his wireless electric cello, 5 pedalers supply the pedal power on the Biker Bar and two electric Mundos, while checking the status of the pedal power system with our 6′ pedalometer.

Great footage from Chico’s first ever Bicycle Music Festival.

SHAKE YOUR PEACE!’s Gabe Dominguez pedal powers a press conference of Salt Lake City’s mayor Rocky Anderson, opening their Live Green festival. May 2007.

Below: Rock The Bike’s Paul Freedman pedal powers a press conference for San Francisco’s Wade Crowfoot, announcing the city’s endorsement of pedal power.

Live at Maker Faire 2008 from Rock the Bike’s Pedal Powered Stage. Watch in high quality by clicking twice on the video itself and selecting “Watch in high quality” on the YouTube page:

Video from Rock the Bike’s Pedal Power stage at Maker Faire this year. The sound system we’ll be using at Saturday’s BMF is even better.

Nice clips of SHAKE YOUR PEACE! performing, as well as Yacouba and the Spirit Gatherers, and Fossil Fool, the Bike Rapper.

When Clif Bar wanted to pump up the volume on their “2-Mile Challenge” bike advocacy tour, they turned to Rock the Bike for a human-powered Soul Cycle Mothership party bike. The party bike helps spread smiles at events and increase the numbers of visitors to Clif Bar’s 2-Mile Challenge bus.

The bio-diesel burning, retro-looking tour bus is a rolling exhibition of bicycle transportation options and inspiring bike culture stories.

Ryan Mayo, Clif Bar’s Mobile Marketing Manager, had this to say:

“We feel strongly that there is great need for people to start thinking creatively about using the bike as a means of transportation to fight the effects of climate change. With our Soul Cycle Mothership, we’re dropping climate neutral beats and inspiring others as we ride!”

Clif Bar has found that the element of music helps increase the numbers of visitors on their 2-Mile Challenge bus. The Soul Cycle Mothership makes a personal connection with event goers as they stream by. Inspired participants can pedal-power a couple songs, and even sing karaoke-style through the Mothership’s PA system. And 2-Mile Challenge Tour staff can make announcements over the music, pulling people in when the crowds get heavy. When crowds are light, they pop the bike off the beefy dual-sided kickstand, switch to battery mode, and get mobile.

Mayo adds, “Last week at an event, I was cruising around the venue with the Soul Cycle Mothership, when Bob Marley’s “Get up, Stand Up” came on the player. I cranked the volume dial up and turned heads throughout the whole place. People threw their fists in the air and sang along as I rode by – Don’t give up the fight! The sound infectiously spread smiles throughout as we shared our organic Clif Bars with the people.”

Had a great time performing with Ken the mad scientist, Joel, Zori, Mafi, and Daniel last night at the KFOG Kaboom. We had completely sustainable sound — solar charged keyboard amp, and human powered vocals. We performed about 2 hours in an area filled with tailgaters, for tips, food, and fun.

http://www.pleasantrevolution.net