Comparing my Recumbent Trikes | A Detailed Review

I have ridden three recumbent trikes in my time on the road. Two of them were Scorpion 20fs models from a German company called HP Velotechnik, and my recent trike is a TiFLY x from a company called AZUB Recumbents in Czechia.

Many people ask me why I made the switch and how the new trike differs from my old one. In this video I will go over the similarities, the changes, advantages and improvements I made to the current trike from my old ones.

If you want to see the building of my new trike in Czechia, look at this playlist:

Want to see my Tour in Italy:

00:00 – Increased Wheel Size
01:54 – Pedals and Pedal Extenders
03:13 – Stand Up Assist Bars
04:43 – Steering
05:19 – Suspension
06:34 – Fenders
07:16 – SON HUB Dynamo and Lights
08:22 – Braking System
10:15 – Rholoff Speedhub
11:15 – Cable Threading and Handlebars
11:37 – Bags and Panniers
14:02 – Rear End and Luggage Rack
15:05 – Manual Operation Front Chainring
17:15 – 26 inch wheel advantages
19:16 – Wrist Rests
19:49 – Padded Seat

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hey guys so a lot of you have asked me what do you think of this trike as opposed to the previous strike that I had which was an HP velotechnic 20 FS so in this video I’m going to discuss with you a little bit about the differences between this strike and the last trike that I had and some of the benefits and a couple of the negatives so I wrote around Asia on a scorpion 20fs from a company called HP volatechnic and that trike had one huge difference uh being that the wheels all three wheels on that trike were 20 inches meaning that the trike set much lower to the ground the wheels were a lot smaller the trike overall was a lot smaller this is a beach the new trike now is from a company called azub the tie fly X they make a few different ones they make a tie fly with 20 inch tires all around they make a tie fly 26 with a 26 inch wheel in the back and then they make this which is a tie fly x with 26 inch wheels all the way around the first obvious thing is Aesthetics when I sit down in this strike I feel like this is a more suitable sized vehicle for a guy of my size so I’m six foot two and this trike is is perfect for me I feel like proportionate wise it doesn’t look like I’m riding a like a little clown car and I’m a little I’m like a big clown in a little car that’s not to say anything negative about the Scorpion 20fs it’s a great great vehicle but I do feel like the upgraded wheel size was something that appealed to me visually I’m saying that straight up there is a number of other differences though that I decided on when I went with this product but there are also some things I carried over let’s talk about the things I carried over from the previous I carried over my pedals and pedal extenders if you guys don’t know what pedal senders are they also call them knee Savers they’re this nut here that extends out the pedals to the left and the right on both sides and what they do is they allow your feet to have more of a natural position as opposed to pointing in they’re sort of more the normal standing stance which they say is better for uh for your knees and my knees are not very good I also carried over the pedaling Innovations pedals so I have a huge surface area to rest my feet which also helps on my knee pain in my opinion if you are going to go without clip-ins get the largest surface area with a little grip on it and that will help to mitigate the potential of having uh leg suck which is where your legs go underneath the trike and you end up mingling your legs it’s a risk obviously to go clipless but it’s a risk that I I take because I enjoy being able to wear my Keen sandals and ride around more freely without having to clip in when I was clipping in it was causing me knee troubles and I’ll talk more about the pedals in a future video or a video that you’ve already seen I guess now another thing that I carried over were stand up assists it’s these two bars that stand up they look a little bit different than my last trike but they serve the same purpose purpose for others and purpose for me is a little bit different their original purpose is to help people people get into the trike and use them as a place from which to grab and sit down in the trike but for me obviously I still use them for that it’s kind of nice especially when you have when you’re riding this around the world and there’s all sorts of people that you run into that really want to sit in the trike and you’re a little nervous because sometimes they’ll actually try to support themselves on my side bags which are like the the bicycle handlebar bags that I have on either side of my seat and they end up freaking me out because they could literally just rip them off if they put their body weight on them so I always make sure to tell them use these as your assist to sit down in the seat and get out but what I like about them is they provide me a platform for mounting my mirrors and for having my writing computer which is what I did on my previous strike Plus I like to just sit down and have the the stand-up assist act like a little bit of a cage and keep me protected I I got into a car accident on my first attempt at riding around and I felt like the more material that I had around me was beneficial to save me when I might be involved in an accident and so that was quite good the other thing that carries over from the previous trike is the steering so this is indirect steering system they call it and it’s sort of you could say Automotive style you have a bunch of ties into the to the handlebars that provide an indirect method of turning the the wheels and I like the feeling of that I feel like it gives you a lot more control um but there’s a lot of people that really enjoy the direct steering direct steering is like the handlebars are integrated into the uprights and when you turn the handlebars they directly turn the wheels the suspension system this is the azub titanium leaf spring suspension and there’s a lot of reasons I like this over my previous suspension system the previous suspension system was built into the kingpins and there was bushings O-rings and dampeners that were contained inside the kingpins and when that went bad it meant that I had to disassemble the entire Kingpin and there’s a lot of delicate components in here that would end up popping out and you had to have it under pressure and it was a really really frustrating thing to repair this doesn’t really need much in in regards to maintenance the dampeners on either side can be replaced fairly easily the actual leaf springs are made of titanium and have been tested over a million times you’re never going to flex these to where they will deform in shape and you’re never really going to break these unless listen if you’re going to break these you’ve got a lot more problems than a ruined suspension so so that’s why I sort of like this on top of it it’s extremely stylish and I love the look of the azub uh it’s like almost a one-of-a-kind thing they’re they’re leaf spring suspension system and so it gets a lot of oohs and Oz one of the carryovers from my previous strike that I made sure to have on my new trike because I love them no matter what is the fenders so I have fenders on both front wheels as well as the back wheel I I ride with friends who don’t have uh fenders and on a rainy day you’re riding through the mud everything gets caked in mud your panniers your seat yourself it’s just a complete disaster and if you’re doing a long tour like this I don’t even know if it it’s a real long tour it doesn’t even matter I just if you’re riding around without fenders you’re risking a really sour day getting covered in and mud I learned a long time ago especially after my first car accident that the more noticeable you are the better and I have a bit of a problem is that I am very forgetful and so a lot of people put a battery operated light on the front of their uh trike in the back of their trike and they have it and when they run through a tunnel or whatever but I would always forget these things and so in order to alleviate that and provide an opportunity to know that my lights are always on no matter if I remember or don’t remember I’ve added I’ve kept a sun Hub Dynamo this sun Hub Dynamo is different than the one on my previous strike just because these wheels are bigger but this is actually the same this is from my old trike though the actual light but uh yeah when my wheels are turning my lights are on and that provides me a lot of security it makes me feel better about riding and it makes me know that no matter what I’m doing no matter how aloof I am that people are going to see me because these are ultra light bright and there’s a front light as well as a rear tail light now as far as braking goes I made a pretty big big upgrade to a system that I had on the previous strike so on the previous strike I had both brakes operating from my right hand steering and that is the same I like to be able to have my other hand free my left hand free to videotape or fly the Drone or whatever and so I don’t want to have both hands having to operate the brakes a lot of people use both brakes to so you’ll break this one and you’ll pull into one turn you break another you pull into the other I actually had that braking system when I started back in China and it was great it was really amazing because you could pull yourself into turns it felt very organic and whatnot it didn’t take long for me to realize that as fun it is as it is to use your brakes and help you drive it was a big hindrance when you’re trying to talk to people or you’re sharing videos or you’re flying the Drone because as you’re braking you’re pulling into turns and you you need both hands so instead I’ve moved both brakes to one side and they used to be cable operated the bb7s the standard ones but on the new trike the asub uh azab built me in a tektro system and they’re a hydraulic system so the the hydraulic uh cables come out of the brakes uh here and they go down and then they tee off right underneath the trike and deliver the hydraulic fluid to both uh both wheels and both brakes hydraulic brakes brakes work great until they don’t and then they’re really really frustrating to fix and so I haven’t ran into the problem of having to repair a faulty hydraulic line but so far they’re way way more and I’ll use this word facetiously fluid of a braking system they’re very reliable they break very very smoothly and I’m really really happy with them uh so far if you look at the handles you’ll also see one of the differences between my first strike and uh the second trike after the car accident and this strike it’s that the uh cabling actually goes up and into the handlebar down to the the below area of the trike underneath the seat and this was a bit weird because normally this is my roll-off speed Hub and that’s another device that came from the previous strike the roll-off system uh is is the same one from my previous strike and I actually like that because roll-off speed hubs actually get better with AJ Ware I I love the roll-off speed hub for tons of reasons I’m going to probably make a dedicated video about why I love the roll-off speed Hub but just know it’s an integrated gearing system that’s in the back of the trike and we on the rear wheel and it’s very easy to shift you don’t have to be move moving in order to use a derailleur and use the momentum of writing in order to shift gears which is nice but what I was trying to say is that all of the cabling goes through the top in through the bottom and so what that does is it reverses the the shifting motion so like on my previous strike this was all the way around and so counterclockwise is now clockwise and clockwise is now counterclockwise so that’s other than that flip the system is the same and again I have hydraulic brake as far as baggage systems go this is the same bags that I had on my previous strike uh second version the first version I think I had Arco Rd 60s which were more of a fabric fabric bag and I was running through some typhoons and and Cyclones and things and monsoons through southeast Asia and things I was worried about things getting too wet especially me as a YouTuber I’m carrying a lot of video equipment with me and so I I wanted to have some security so I upgraded uh geez I don’t remember exactly when but I I at some point I upgraded now these are the ultimate six I used to use high Vis bags but hi Vis was nice but they got dirty really quick if you get oil or grease on a high Vis bag you’re never going to get it off whereas these more nylon bags you can clean these up I mean these are these are amazing these are the are the ortlieb recumbent panniers if you can find one of these in yellow buy it like buy it right away because they don’t make them anymore and the yellow ones are basically uh dinosaurs but I love them I enjoy them they you could still get some in black but uh ortlieb doesn’t make them anymore but of course they make these side bags these are great they’re magnet latched I can I have two of them on either side of the seat they are extremely waterproof I mean you could put and dip these in water and they won’t get water in them a little word to the wise though I actually was in a monsoon in in Taiwan and it was pouring it was pouring so much that I had my rain suit on and tight around my face and I wasn’t really concerned with the work looking left or right and it wasn’t until I had ridden about 10 kilometers or so that I did look over and I realized that this bag was totally open and to get as a testament to how waterproof they are they can keep water out but they can also keep water in and this thing was brimming brimming with water and so it was a drone soup and my my drone was was just in in a uh in a pool uh because as much as they keep the water out they also kept the water in as a side story I was able to air out my batteries and the Drone worked and we lost a couple of batteries but but I was expecting total loss so I’m pretty happy about that so here we’re on the back of the trike uh I have like I said a fender over the rear wheel which is great if you don’t have a rear rear fender the water comes up and it hits you right in the back of the head and trust me I’ve had shoulders and backs of the neck completely caked with uh with don’t like it here’s my roll off speed Hub original from my last trike the gearing and stuff is fairly similar obviously we have the 26 inch wheel on the back and I have the light that is powered from the Sun Hub Dynamo on the front what is different though is I upgraded the rack this is a king rack from azub and you sort of need it because you got this big tire in the back a lot of times you have these Rinky Dink racks that go over the rear 26 and this thing is a beast not only does it allow for a lot of options but it’s also just a good looking rack um I got a my trike has a fantastic rack okay if you’re American you know that that humor misogynistic humor so there’s one thing uh more that I would talk about is about the front chain ring I’ve gone through a number of different iterations I think the first strike I had had a fixed ring on the front with the roll off in the back and I had a fairly decent gear range it was all dependent on the roll-off speed Hub I’ve uh also adopted the use of a slump Drive which is an internal gear system in the front and I’ve used the high speed drive and the Mountain Drive I have gone through a lot of different iterations I love the idea of having a big chainring on the front that provides you a lot of power when you’re cycling on like say a decline you can pick up a lot of speed but I also like the idea of having a small ring that you can get down to so that you can get up those mountain passes when you’re on a like fairly uh fairly steep incline what I have decided on doing now with the new trike is getting rid of the schlump drive which was a technological Masterpiece it was very very cool to have it but what I was told from asub is it wasn’t necessarily compact edible with the with the roll-off in the back so instead what I have is essentially a two chainring system that is manually operated I don’t have a derailleur I just use my fingers to move the chain and adjust the adjust what what chain ring I want based on that using my fingers but there’s two main ones that are open and then there’s a closed off one that’s like a emergency only granny gear that is blocked off with a little block here Aza put a block on it because it doesn’t really fit with the gearing ratio of the roll-off I shouldn’t use it unless I have an emergency so the Big Chain ring is 48 tooth the mid chain ring is 32 teeth and the little one in case of emergencies is a 24. so those are the standard differences and similarities between this trike and my previous scorpion 20 FS as far as ride quality goes and as far as traveling with this strike I am really enjoying it uh you have an extreme amount of clearance under the trike you can you can essentially take on trails that you couldn’t ordinarily with the the Scorpion I can uh for as a matter of fact I can ride through uh through Fields like entire Farmland Fields where you might have grass that goes above the tires and you just basically run over it which is something you couldn’t do you get bound down with the Scorpion 20fs you can do the same thing with stones and rocks because your clearance is so high I can jump up over curbs I can ride over over Boulders that would have disabled my previous trike I’d be teeter-tottering on them as far as resistance goes I think riding on uphills is a little bit harder just because of the sheer weight this is about five or ten kilos more uh heavy than my previous trike setup um but it is a little bit more difficult going on uphills uh but as far as uh standard speed goes and fluidity I feel like the big tires give you a little bit uh of you would think more rolling resistance but I feel like it’s almost less it feels very smooth when you’re riding the strike and I’m I’m really happy with it I did like the idea of the lower center of gravity on the Scorpion uh you you do feel that you’re up a little higher and so you have to take that into consideration especially around turns when you’re at high speed but if you pay attention to those things it’s a factor that you can kind of mitigate I’m not interested in in being a race car there’s a lot of people that buy a trike because they want to go really fast if you get a lightweight trike that’s not built for touring that’s only Built For Speed then getting lower to the ground it might be something that’s advantageous to you but it’s not necessary for for me personally so I really enjoy this I’m I’m having a great time riding around Italy follow my other videos as I as I travel around Italy there’s some fantastic drone shots there’s some really interesting stories I’ve had a great time here I’m not sure when you’re going to watch this video but I hope this helps to clarify why I made some changes where the changes are I’m sure there’s more that I missed like for example the wrist rests here are different but similar I love having something to sit on your wrist but the HP wrist rests actually had more cushion which was more comfortable but the drawback was that you sweat pools right here on your wrist and and I know on your palm and then it goes right into those wrist rests and it ends up irritating whereas these ones are metal doesn’t irritate as much obviously there’s a huge upgrade that I haven’t even talked about which is the seat this is the dream seat from azab I’m still enjoying it it’s a fantastic seat I used to ride only with mesh but this is a really really great seat there’s some things about it that I’m I’m thinking about if you’re not wearing sleeves and you’re bare armed sometimes your arm can rub here on the on the uh the the cushions that sit alongside the sides of your back and so that’s something that I’m trying to figure out if you wear long sleeve shirts it’s not a problem but it does rub a little bit and it can be a little bit irritating but you gotta weigh that with the fact that it is one of the most comfortable seats you’re ever going to sit in whether it’s in your house or whether you’re riding around the world which is pretty cool I have the same Garmin computer system that I had on the previous trike I have upgraded a lot of Technology but we can talk about that in a future video well thanks a lot like subscribe share comment and I’m going to keep writing Matt from Spezia Spezia take it easy guys bye