Liddiard Omnidirectional Wheels

July 23, 2016 by Jenny List 46 Comments

Omnidirectional wheels are one of the hardy perennials of the world of invention. There seems to be something about the prospect of effortless parallel parking that sets the creative juices of backyard inventors flowing, and the result over the years have been a succession of impressively engineered ways to move a car sideways.

The latest one to come our way is courtesy of Canadian inventor [William Liddiard], and it is worthy of a second look because it does not come with some of the mechanical complexity associated with other omnidirectional wheel designs. [Liddiard]’s design uses a one-piece tyre in the form of a flexible torus with a set of rollers inside it which sits on a wheel fitted with a set of motorised rollers around its circumference. The entire tyre can be rotated round its toroidal axis, resulting in a tread which can move sideways with respect to the wheel.

The entire process is demonstrated in a video which is shown below the break, and the small Toyota used as a demonstration vehicle can move sideways and spin with ease. We would be wary of using these wheels on a road car until they can be demonstrated to match a traditional tyre in terms of sideways stability when they are not in their omnidirectional mode, but we can instantly see that they would be a significant help to operators of industrial machines such as forklifts in confined spaces.

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It’s Not A Bridge, And Not A Tunnel. Or, Maybe It’s Both?

July 22, 2016 by Cameron Coward 94 Comments

The gist of the idea is to suspend an underwater tunnel from floating pontoons. By the time you finished reading that sentence, you probably already had a list of things in your head that seem to make this a terrible idea. After all, it does seem to combine the worst aspects of both underwater tunnels and bridges. But, the idea may actually be a good one, and it’s already being seriously considered in Norway.

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Motorcycling Like It’s 1905 With A Home Made Engine

July 19, 2016 by Jenny List 76 Comments

The modern motorcycle represents the pinnacle of over a century of refinement in design and manufacture of its every component. A modest outlay will secure you a machine capable of three figure speeds with impeccable handling, breathtaking acceleration and stopping power, that somehow seems also to possess bulletproof reliability that will take it to a hundred thousand miles of faithful transport.

At the dawn of the internal combustion engine age it was a different matter. Machines were little more than bicycles with rudimentary engines attached, brakes and tyres were barely capable of doing the job demanded of them, and the early motorcyclists were a hardy and daring breed.

You might think that this article would now head into retrotechtacular territory with a nostalgic look at an early motorcycle, but instead its subject has a much more recent origin. We happened upon [Buddfab]’s contemporary build of a 1905-era motorcycle, and we think it’s a bike you’d all like to see.

The bike itself is a faithful reproduction of a typical Edwardian machine. It has a modified bicycle frame with a belt drive and springer front forks. That’s all very impressive, but the engine is a masterpiece, crafting a more modern parts bin into something resembling a 1905 original. He’s taken the cylinder, piston, and half a cylinder head from an aircooled VW flat four and mated it with the crankshaft of a 125cc Honda, welding the two connecting rods together to join German and Japanese parts. With a custom-made crankcase, Lucas points, and the carburetor from a British Seagull outboard motor it both looks and sounds like an original, though we’d expect it to be significantly more reliable.

You can see videos of both bike and engine below the break, as he takes it for a spin through American suburbia. Sadly we’ll never see it passed to the definitive writer on early motorcycles for an expert view, but it would fool us completely.

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A Grounded Option For The Jet-Setting Homebody

July 15, 2016 by James Hobson 29 Comments

Over the course of 10 years, [Bruce Campbell] has built himself a sleek pad out of a Boeing 727-200 in the middle of the picturesque Oregon countryside.

As you’d expect, there are a number of hurdles to setting up a freaking airplane as one’s home in the woods. Foremost among them, [Campbell] paid $100,000 for the aircraft, and a further $100,000 for transportation and installation costs to get it out to his tract of land — that’s a stiff upfront when compared to a down payment on a house and a mortgage. However, [Campbell] asserts that airplanes approaching retirement come up for sale with reasonable frequency, so it’s possible to find something at a lower price considering the cost of dismantling an airframe often compares to the value of the recovered materials.

Once acquired and transported, [Campbell] connected the utilities through the airplane’s existing systems, as well going about modifying the interior to suit his needs — the transparent floor panels are a nice touch! He has a primitive but functional shower, the two lavatories continue to function as intended, sleeping, dining and living quarters, and a deck in the form of the plane’s wing.

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Fail Of The Week: How Not To Build Your Own Motorcycle

July 12, 2016 by Jenny List 100 Comments

There’s a saying among writers that goes something like “Everyone has a novel in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay”. Its source is the subject of some dispute, but it remains sage advice that wannabe authors should remember on dark and stormy nights.

It is possible that a similar saying could be constructed among hackers and makers: that every one of us has at least one motor vehicle within, held back only by the lack of available time, budget, and workshop space. And like the writers, within is probably where most of them should stay.

[TheFrostyman] might have had cause to heed such advice. For blessed with a workshop, a hundred dollars, and the free time of a 15-year-old, he’s built his first motorcycle. It’s a machine of which he seems inordinately proud, a hardtail with a stance somewhere closer to a café racer and powered by what looks like a clone of the ubiquitous Honda 50 engine.

Unfortunately for him, though the machine looks about as cool a ride as any 15-year-old could hope to own it could also serve as a textbook example of how not to build a safe motorcycle. In fact, we’d go further than that, it’s a deathtrap that we hope he takes a second look at and never ever rides. It’s worth running through some of its deficiencies not for a laugh at his expense but to gain some understanding of motorcycle design.

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Mechanical Horse-Bike

July 2, 2016 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Oh [Rodger Cleye]! You had us at “unicycle, duct tape, styrofoam, and tie wraps”. But watching the horse-bike in action (video below) is just about enough for us to go out and make one ourselves. (For our child, naturally. We’re far too dignified.)

If you trawl around [Rodger]’s YouTube channel, you’ll see no end of odd motorized vehicles. Like last year’s motorized horse project, or this stormtrooper speeder. But there’s just something about the way that the horse’s legs move along with the rider that is slightly more enchanting. (That’s the “unicycle” part of the build.) And, we assume, the rider gets a little bit more exercise to boot.

We’ve featured a few builds of [Rodger]’s before, including his motorized couch build that’s obviously controlled from the seat-mounted coconut, and of course a pneumatic Boba Fett rocket.

A Strandbeest Bicycle

June 30, 2016 by Jenny List 20 Comments

“If you’re asking ‘why,’ you don’t get it.” So said [JP] when he told us about his strandbeest bicycle build. After all, who in their right mind would graft a complex multi-leg mechanical walking mechanism to the rear end of a perfectly good bicycle? But to expand on his sentiment, to not understand his creation is to miss the whole essence of our movement. Sometimes you just have to make something, because you can.

3D printed strandbeest bike proof of concept

If you aren’t familiar with the strandbeest, it is the creation of Dutch artist [Theo Jansen]. Complex skeletal walking machines powered by the wind, that in the case of [Jansen]’s machines autonomously roam the beaches of the Netherlands. Hence the name, from Dutch: “Beach beast”.

[JP]’s strandbeest bike came together over 8 months of hard work. It started with a conceptual CAD design and 3D print, and progressed through many iterations of fine-tuning the over 400 parts required to put four legs on the back of a bicycle frame. It’s an impressive achievement and it is fully rideable, though we suspect we won’t be seeing it at the Tour de France any time soon.

He’s posted several videos of the bike in action, you can see one of them below the break.

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