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In Peters words....

I've made one too in the past by adding a custom-built axial flux generator. Works fine, and seems to provide plenty of inertia to overcome the pedaling deadpoints (top and bottom). It still could benefit from slightly more inertia though.

Have included a few pictures in this mail; feel free to use it (or not). If you need more details, let me know. Long time ago I did a write-up on Fieldlines too (http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/12/10/163646/91) with plenty of detail.

Things I've learned from it:

1) I don't like riding exercise bikes. I just got in from a 2.5-hour normal bikeride on the recumbent, but 2 minutes on the exercise bike is utterly boring (unlike a real bikeride where the scenery constantly changes)

2). It taught me the value of a watt. This is the most important thing I've learned from building and using it. After that, one starts to appreciate wind, solar and gridpower, with their abundant energy with zero physical exertion, and the nearly free grid-power. 75-100W continuous output power was doable with that bike, 50W was a breeze.

3). It clearly shows the fundamental behaviour of a generator that, when it's electrically loaded, it becomes harder to cycle. A lot of laypeople don't seem to grasp this fundamental characteristic of generators, but sitting on an exercise generator bike for a few minutes where the electrical loads is varied teaches this principle quickly and convincingly. I've used the bike in the past in JOTA events, where one of the scouts had to pedal to generate the power for a transceiver.
Keying the mike (~10A load @ 13.8V) had a very direct effect on the guy sitting on the bike...

All in all, it was a fun project to build that is now gathering dust in the attic.

Regards, Peter.

Thanks Peter