AZUB

Ales Zemanek

AZUB stands for “Ales Zemanek Uhersky Brod,” the names of the company owner and the Czech town they call home. This is no division of a trans-Pacific holding company. These people love not only their product but Czech manufacturing in general. They want to show the world what their country can do.

In 1997, Zamenek was a young engineer on vacation in Norway and he saw a recumbent bike shoot past him. He immediately became obsessed with them. He designed a frame which he proceeded to build, unbuild, chop up, re-weld, and start again. Three years later he sold his first three bikes.  He applied for government grant to launch his manufacturing but was turned down because nobody else was making recumbents. Fortunately he got started anyway, because 10 years later the national museum called to order one of their bikes for display. AZUB is now an icon of Czech manufacturing.

Honza Galla doing his part for siltation

The crew
Zemanek handled the engineering and design, and he hired bicycle adventurer Honza Galla, captain of the Czech national blind cyclists team (among other things) to handle marketing. Galla spends a lot of time testing AZUB models for their roadworthiness, driving them in, out, up and over all sorts of daunting places, sometimes with his wife on the back of their Twin tandem. Zemanek’s older brother Lada joined to handle logistics and production, letting his brother noodle over the bottom bracket height.

Just another trike ride. Honza Galla and Karel Šebela raced these AZUB Tricon-20 trikes from France to Kazakhstan in 2013, finishing 4th out of 28 in just over 46 days.

Honza Galla at the 2017 Heart of Texas Recumbent Rally