Transportation Hacks

1648 Articles

Ebike Charges At Car Charging Stations

March 5, 2026 by 18 Comments

Electric vehicles are everywhere these days, and with them comes along a whole slew of charging infrastructure. The fastest of these are high-power machines that can deliver enough energy to charge a car in well under an hour, but there are plenty of slower chargers available that take much longer. These don’t tend to require any specialized equipment which makes them easier to install in homes and other places where there isn’t as much power available. In fact, these chargers generally amount to fancy extension cords, and [Matt Gray] realized he could use these to do other things like charge his electric bicycle.

To begin the build, [Matt] started with an electric car charging socket and designed a housing for it with CAD software. The housing also holds the actual battery charger for his VanMoof bicycle, connected internally directly to the car charging socket. These lower powered chargers don’t require any communication from the vehicle either, which simplifies the process considerably. They do still need to be turned on via a smartphone app so the energy can be metered and billed, but with all that out of the way [Matt] was able to take his test rig out to a lamppost charger and boil a kettle of water.

After the kettle experiment, he worked on miniaturizing his project so it fits more conveniently inside the 3D-printed enclosure on the rear rack of his bicycle. The only real inconvenience of this project, though, is that since these chargers are meant for passenger vehicles they’re a bit bulky for smaller vehicles like e-bikes. But this will greatly expand [Matt]’s ability to use his ebike for longer trips, and car charging infrastructure like this has started being used in all kinds of other novel ways as well.

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Gwiz car and vapes

Vape-powered Car Isn’t Just Blowing Smoke

March 4, 2026 by 12 Comments

Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s now cruising around what has to be the world’s only vape-powered car.

Technically, anyway; some motorheads might object to calling donor vehicle [Chris] starts with a car, but the venerable G-Wiz has four wheels, four seats, lights and a windscreen, so what more do you want? Horsepower in excess of 17 ponies (12.6 kW)? Top speeds in excess of 50 Mph (80 km/h)? Something other than the dead weight of 20-year-old lead-acid batteries? Well, [Chris] at least fixes that last part.

The conversion is amazingly simple: he just straps his 500 disposable vape battery pack into the back seat– the same one that was powering his shop–into the GWiz, and it’s off to the races. Not quickly, mind you, but with 500 lightly-used lithium cells in the back seat, how fast would you want to go? Hopefully the power bank goes back on the wall after the test drive, or he finds a better mounting solution. To [Chris]’s credit, he did renovate his pack with extra support and insulation, and put all the cells in an insulated aluminum box. Still, the low speed has to count as a safety feature at this point.

Charging isn’t fast either, as [Chris] has made the probably-controversial decision to use USB-C. We usually approve of USB-Cing all the things, but a car might be taking things too far, even one with such a comparatively tiny battery. Perhaps his earlier (equally nicotine-soaked) e-bike project would have been a better fit for USB charging.

Thanks to [Vaughna] for the tip! Continue reading “Vape-powered Car Isn’t Just Blowing Smoke” →

The Perfect Cheat’s Racing Bicycle

March 3, 2026 by 24 Comments

One of the ongoing rumors and scandals in professional cycle sport concerns “motor doping” — the practice of concealing an electric motor in a bicycle to provide the rider with an unfair advantage. It’s investigated in a video from [Global Cycling Network], in which they talk about the background and then prove its possible by creating a motor doped racing bike.

To do this they’ve recruited a couple of recent graduate engineers, who get to work in a way most of us would be familiar with: prototyping with a set of 18650 cells, some electronics, and electromagnets. It uses what they call a “Magic wheel”, which features magnets embedded in its rim that engage with hidden electromagnets. It gives somewhere just under 20 W boost, which doesn’t sound much, but could deliver those crucial extra seconds in a race.

Perhaps the most interesting part is the section which looks at the history of motor doping with some notable cases mentioned, and the steps taken by cycling competition authorities to detect it. They use infra-red cameras, magnetometers, backscatter detectors, and even X-ray machines, but even these haven’t killed persistent rumors in the sport. It’s a fascinating video we’ve placed below the break, and we thank [Seb] for the tip. Meanwhile the two lads who made the bike are looking for a job, so if any Hackaday readers are hiring, drop them a line.

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Examining A World’s Record From The Age Of Steam

March 2, 2026 by 19 Comments

There aren’t many speed records that remain unbroken for the greater part of a century, but one of them is that of the fastest steam locomotive. As with so many such things, there’s a bit of controversy and more than one contender, but the one in the record books is the A4 Pacific, Mallard. In 1938, this locomotive thundered down an incline on the London & North Eastern Railway’s mainline in the north of England at 126 MPH. But can that number be taken as reliable? The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has a video in which they investigate.

It’s a fascinating look at the science of railway speed measurement as it existed in 1938, the record itself, and the paper dynamometer roll which recorded it. We’ve placed the video below the break, and in it, we see an in-depth analysis of the noise and inconsistencies in the recording, and see them come to the conclusion that a safer figure to quote would be 124 MPH.

Our assessment is that, of course, the LNER wanted to squeeze every morsel of publicity from it in a game of one-upmanship with their arch-rivals in the London Midland and Scottish railway, so it’s likely that their use of a momentary figure makes sense in that light. Even the best-laid 1930s jointed track would have been bumpy compared to modern continuous rail, and we are guessing that the ancient clerestory dynamometer car would hardly be as smooth-riding as a modern express coach. The achievement of measuring at all with mechanical instruments in such an environment at those speeds would have been tricky, to say the least. It leaves us wondering whether 1930s electronics could have produced some kind of trackside measurement device, but perhaps the LNER trusted their mechanical instruments more. Perhaps the Pennsylvania Railroad should have followed its example.

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What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance

February 25, 2026 by 31 Comments

It’s a blustery January day outside Lakehurst, New Jersey. The East Coast of North America is experiencing its worst weather in decades, and all civilian aircraft have been grounded the past four days, from Florida to Maine. For the past two days, that order has included military aircraft, including those certified “all weather” – with one notable exception. A few miles offshore, rocking and bucking in the gales, a U.S. Navy airship braves the storm. Sleet pelts the plexiglass windscreen and ice sloughs off the gasbag in great sheets as the storm rages on, and churning airscrews keep the airship on station.

If you know history you might be a bit confused: the rigid airship USS Akron was lost off the coast of New Jersey, but in April, not January. Before jumping into the comments with your corrections, note the story I’ve begun is set not in 1933, but in 1957, a full generation later.

The airship caught in the storm is no experimental Zeppelin, but an N-class blimp, the workhorse of the cold-war fleet. Yes, there was a cold war fleet of airships; we’ll get to why further on. The most important distinction is that unlike the last flight of the Akron, this story doesn’t end in tragedy, but in triumph. Tasked to demonstrate their readiness, five blimps from Lakehurst’s Airship Airborne Early-Warning Squadron 1 remained on station with no gaps in coverage for the ten days from January 15th to 24th. The blimps were able to swap places, watch-on-watch, and provide continuous coverage, in spite of weather conditions that included 60 knot winds and grounded literally every other aircraft in existence at that time. Continue reading “What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance” →

Elongating A BMX For Drag Racing

February 24, 2026 by 9 Comments

BMX bikes are a unique frame geometry, essentially forgoing all travel efficiency for maneuverability and sturdiness. For how much abuse these bikes are designed to take, these are all good tradeoffs. But it turns out that these bikes also have an exceptionally low center of gravity, which could make them useful for drag racing, provided they’re given a suitably large electric motor and a few minor frame modifications.

The project began as a fun weekend project for friends [Sam Barker] and [Tom Stanton]. They had a 20″ BMX wheel with a massive integrated hub motor that seemed to be begging to be put onto a BMX bike that they had on hand. After hooking up a 72V, 20Ah battery to it they were quickly zipping around the driveway, but the short wheelbase on the bike was bottlenecking its maximum performace because the bike would wheelie under high throttle. To solve that, they broke out the welder and extended frame, which kept the wheelies to a minimum and allowed them to take it out and drag race.

Another benefit to the extended frame is that the bike has room to store its battery now as well; before the frame extension it was strapped to the side of the frame under the rider in a non-ergonomic fashion. The duo also had to figure out a braking solution since the BMX didn’t come with its own brakes, but a loaner caliper from a penny farthing was found for some basic stopping abilities. We might assume this bike is not street legal on many public roads, but not every ebike operates in the same legal jurisdictions you might be the most familiar with.

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Why Chains Are Still Better For Bicycles Than Belts

February 21, 2026 by 123 Comments

Theoretically a belt drive makes for a great upgrade to a bicycle, as it replaces the heavier, noisy and relatively maintenance-heavy roller chain with a zero-maintenance, whisper-quiet and extremely reliable belt that’s rated at an amazing 20-30,000 km before needing a replacement. Of course, that’s the glossy marketing brochure version of reality, which differed significantly from what [Tristan Ridley] experienced whilst cycling around the globe.

Although initially he was rather happy with his bike, its sealed car-like Pinion gearbox and Gates carbon belt drive system, while out in the wilds of Utah he had a breakdown when the belt snapped. When the spare belt that he had carried with him for the past months also snapped minutes later after fitting it on, it made him decide to switch back to the traditional bush roller chain.

Despite this type of chain drive tracing its roots all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, they actually offer many advantages over the fancy carbon-fiber-reinforced polyurethane belt. Although with the Pinion gearbox the inability to use a derailleur gearing system is no big deal, [Tristan] found that the ‘zero maintenance’ part of the belt was not true for less hospitable roads

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