It’s official, the Dual sLEDgehammer is a thing.
Now you can host a competitive pedaling challenge at your event with this side-by-side competitive sLEDgehammer. It converts 100% of the riders’ muscle power to light and feels harder as more light stages turn on. The rider who sustains the highest Wattage level for 3 seconds and reaches the victory sequence first is the winner. We took it out to a party for the semiconductor industry last week and got dozens of people pedaling and competing, breathing and gritting their teeth in an evening-long series of heats to determine the strongest rider in the company.
Here’s a good view of the gear. The only thing out of view is the power-analyzing circuit that typically sits on a nearby table. The key elements shown are: 2 Generator Pros (bikes), 2 11′-tall sLEDgehammer light towers, cabling.
The Generator Pro can take a lot of monkeying around. Its frame is wide and stiff and its gear ratio is satisfyingly steep. People pedal really hard during a sLEDgehammer heat and you want the gear to be neutral.
Note to rental customers: If you don’t tighten the stem bolts enough when building up your bikes, your handlebars can slip like in the image below. The solution is to return the bars to a natural position and retighten the stem bolts as shown, but with more torque!
To make it as fair and competitive as possible we altered the All Important Difficulty Knob to have discreet settings: levels 1 through 5. We tested both towers and found them to be relatively precise. Level 1 requires 250 Watts to win. Level 5 requires 700W — same as the recent Toaster Challenge video!
Another low tech way we made the night more fun and competitive was putting up a leaderboard. We kept track of every race and were able to set up a round robin playoff at the end, to determine who was the strongest rider at the company. Here’s the podium shot with 2nd place Vivek and 1st place Rui in the middle:
By the end of the night these two competitors had each done 5 or so heats. So their test was one of power and endurance.
A dual sLEDgehammer is a hit if you have a competitive audience at your event. It will accurately reveal over the course of an event, who is the strongest rider?!
Word of advice: the sLEDgehammer is a peak power test that rewards riders with higher muscle mass and better pedaling coordination. Two riders who may be just as fast on the street can have way different results on the sLEDgehammer. The leaner, smaller rider has less body weight to move on the street, but the sLEDgehammer isn’t a street-riding test. It’s a peak power test. You may consider having different classes of riders competing at different difficulty levels to make the competition fair.
