It’s safe to say that the southern UK is not known for its winter snowfall. If you have lived through a British February then the chances are you’ll know a lot about rain and grey skies.
Happily this hasn’t deterred [Stuart]. Ever the optimist, he’s turned a pile of scrap metal and an unloved mountain bike into a fully functional ski-bike, and he’s just ready to go should the jet stream deliver a covering of the white stuff on the Thames Valley.
Using the facilities of rLab – Reading Makerspsce (he’s also a founder member of the up-and-coming Newbury and District Hackspace), [Stuart] didn’t just bodge together his “iCycle”. Instead he’s made it a really high quality build, with CNC’d aluminium fork stanchions to mount his skis, and foot pegs that are engineered not to let him down on the slopes. Best of all, the bike is nearly all made from scrap materials, only the bearings, axles and paint were brought in for the project.
Skiing hasn’t been featured very often in our coverage of the world of makers, however we have featured a skiing robot, back in 2009.
did something like this years ago but had a hand studded snow tire in the rear.
I see he put footpegs on the thing, however he’ll find you generally need to be wearing snow skates on your feet to use one of these and have any hope of maintaining control.
Relevant: http://www.ski-bike.org/index.html
People have been regretting these since at least 1914
http://www.ski-bike.org/images/skibiking-1914s.jpg
First patents were even issued before that, apparently in 1892:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibobbing
They are pretty common around here where I live, but that could come from the proximity to the Alps in Switzerland and that we generally have more snow and winter sport activities than other regions.
This reminds me of a man who had a surf board bolted to a car roof rack. The closest surf was 7000 km away.
Maybe I should bolt one of these to my roof rack. I live in the tropics – hell will freeze over before we see snow here.
Don’t worry, when the big melt happens good bye Gulf Stream. Your latitude may vary, but it will be colder. It’s already measurably slacking.
I remember these from the 80’s…
I brought the bike with me to France and we’ve been learning to ride it the hard way (no instruction!) Lots of bruises but also lots of success. @DV82XL: You don’t need foot skis, you can balance the bike on the pegs in turns at most speeds. We’ve got some video footage and I’ll be putting it up on the NADHack youtube account.
Good for you. I suspect the skis your using on the unit have far better edges then the ones I tried as a kid back in the day.
What about a pair of skis or a snowboard? Simples and proven technolies.
What, no comment about Apple suing him for trademark infringement because of his bike name?
Because the skis can rotate, they need to be longer in the front, just like in the picture from [Tinkerer] above, or thy will crash into the frame on the next bump.
(which Iearned from my own experiments with an ice-longboard)