TLDR: When riding any form for bike, including a velomobile, wear your helmet, but don't crash on a busy road during rush hours, at least not if you expect any great deal of assistance.
About a year ago, I bought a used Sinner Bikes, Mango velomobile, it haven't seen much use since then, I think around 1200km, but it's a fun ride, and a nice way to get some excersise. So last Thursday the 22'nd of September I took it for a spin commuting to work.
Unfortunately, on my way home in the crossing between Ballerup Byvej and Knardrupvej https://goo.gl/T8OI2F the trip ended rather dramatically.
Those who have been there before will know that going out of town towards the crossing, is a nice long downhill ride, and those who have done it on a bicycle will know, that the window of oppotunity for bicycles to time the green light, is rather slim, but today it seemed like the timing was right, so I stomped some extra joules into the pedals, and went for it. In the post mortem analysis of the event, the maximum speed on the computer showed 63km/h, which I know for sure, was reached on that exact slope.
Towards the crossing I was slowly overtaken by a group of 4-6 motorcycles, of which apparantly none of them had noticed my presense on the bike path just next to the road on which they were driving. Or maybe they were just being rude, when all of them turned right in the crossing, right in front of me. Well, actually it loked like one of them had seen me, as it looked like he was stopping up, but when the rest of the group showed no intend of doing the same, he continued anyway.
Braking was no option, and braking and steering at the same time, is a sure recipee for disaster, but magically I managed to steer just behind the last ones of them, and I even managed to show them my right middle finger, while swearing at them.
Unfortunately some office warrier had decided to place a traffic island in my path, which I hit with my left front wheel, sending it into the air, leving me driving on the right front wheel and the rear wheel.
The Mango velemobile isn't constructed for two wheel drive, so after a few meters, the momentum from when I hit the curb, had spun the velemobile all the way onto it's right side, and I was now sliding on the asphalt in the velomobile at considerable speed.
Needless to say, everything went rather fast, but I did remember to appriciate sliding next to, and not into the signs showing the direction and distance of nearby cities. I reckon that a close encounter with a 40mm galvanized steel tube, solid founded in the ground, would probably had been a grim exierence for both me and my ride.
At some point in the slide, I had transisioned from asphalt to grass as the sliding surface, which provides a bit more traction, thus bumping me a bit more around inside the velomobile, and my head into the ground a couple of times.
After having slid approximately 15 meters the velomobile finally came to a stop, using the last of the kinetic energy I had managed to put into it on the downhill slope, to pop back up on all three wheels, with the nose pointing 180 degrees relational to my original travelling direction.
I sat there in the velomobile a few seconds, before checking that I was still alive, which fortunately seemed to be the case. Next thing was my hand which I had used as a signalling tool to the motorcyclists, to make them aware that I was not impressed with their style of driving. This hand had a strange sensation, a bit like when everything is just covered in blood. Luckily this wasn't the case, it had just been smashed into something sometime during the accident .
So I climbed out, and did a quick system check of myself, which apart from two sore shoulders, an sore arm and a sore hand, seemed to be in one piece. The right side of the velomobile was badly scratched, and the left front wheel, though still turning around, wasn't round anymore.
The motorcyclists were all gone, and not a single soul cared to stop and ask if I was ok after having crashed my velomobile at 60km/h.
I figured that if I wanted to have a just a tiny chance of getting the damagages done to me and my ride covered, I would have to call the police, which I did. When I came through, the lady in the other end was less than impressed with me, because i hadn't just dialed 112 (the equvivalent to 911) in the first place, then she couldn't find the roadname that I spelled to her from the sign hust next to where I was standing, but in the end she sent a police car and an ambulance.
Finally 5 minutes after the crash while waiting for the police, the first person, a guy on a bicycle, cared to stop an check if I was ok. We talked a bit, and he went on with he's buisiness, in retospect it might had been a better idea if I had asked him to stay and wait for the ambulance, which he did offer, since I at this point had sligthly started to feel the impact to my head, and was thus looking forward to the ambulance arraiving.
The police and the ambulance arrived at the same time, so we had a bit of conflicting interests, as the police wanted to know what had happened, and paramedics wanted to to check that I was ok. But we managed to sort things out, and the paramedics really wanted to invite me on a ride to the hospital, an invitation I accepted. So the police locked the velomobile to the sign I had just slid past, and I went off to the hospital in the ambulance.
At the hospital I made a deal with the paramedics, that if I promised not to pass out on the way in, I could walk in, instead of being brought in on a stretcher. After a nurse had done a quick check on me, and offered me some pain killers, I was left to wait a total of 4 hours, before the doctor had time to check up on me.
When I was not just waiting, I used the waiting time to arrange transport home for both me and my velomobile, I did try to use my PC, which fortunately had survived the crash, but not knowing if I had got a concussion I figured that that might not be the best idea of the day, so it was quickly packed away. Also I was unfortunately enough to arrive just after dinner time, so I had to surrive on juice and coffee. About an hour before the doctor had time, I got a bed so that I could lay down and relax.
Finally when it was my time, it took 10 minutes, and the doctor was unable to find anything wrong with me, he asked me serval times "60 km/h?" and concluded that I might had been just a tiny bit lucky, which probably isn't all wrong.
At ~23:00 I was picked up, THANKS for doing this, you know who you are. We drove past the crash site, to pick up the velomobile, which fortunately was still there, and around midnight I was finally home, 6 hours late.
Before I went to bed, I took some painkillers, just to give myself a chance of falling asleep. At this point I was really starting to feel the events of the evening, I couldn't lift my right arm above my head without it hurting like hell, and my neck was stiff like if I had got a crick.
I didn't managed to sleep much, and when I got up, my upper body was trashed, my neck shoulders and arms was hurting, and my left shoulder had red stripes from knocking against the inside of the manhole in the velomobile. I think what best described how I felt was "how you feel the day after you had a lucly escape from a 60km/h crash in a velomobile".
It did help easing the pain, to get up and move around, but not a lot happened today, I did however managed to pick up a new rim from the local bike shop, when I was out shopping for lunch. And inspect the damage to the velomobile, which seemed to be, a lot of sctarches to the right side, a trashed left front wheel, structual damage to the rear, which I have no idea of how had happened, and two missing side mirrors, on the right mirror the holder was torn out of the glass fiber, I found one of the mirrors in the bottom of the velomobile. Impressively enough the front suspension hadn't suffered any damage.
The day after I started rebuilding the velomobile, switching out the rim was relatively simple, though it took some time to true it up, but the end result wasn't too bad at all. After having replaced the rim, I noticed that the rear wheel was tilted to the left, and upon closer inspection I found that the 12mm axle holding it had suffered a bend, and it needed to be replaced.
Getting the axle out proved to be quite a challenge, and I had to disassemble the whole rear suspension, since the bend prevented removal of the rear wheel, the way it was supposed to be removed, but eventually I got it out, and could confirm with a ruler that the axle was in fact bent.
I made a new axle on the lathe, and assembled everything again, just to find out that the rear wheel was still tilting to the left, though not as much, still clearly visible. This could only mean that the rear suspension arm was twisted, and sure enough when I had once again disassembled everything the twist was obvius.
Using some of the larger tools in my collection, and a purpose made mandrel, I managed to untwist the suspension arm, and when I got things back together, it finally looked right.
The structual damage to the rear was fixed with a couple layers of glass fiber and some epoxy, of course I forgot to fix the hole left by the right mirror, so this will have to be be fixed another day. When the epoxy has cured, the velomobile will be rideable again, and then I can fix the cosmetics during the winter.
