This Minibike Will Land You In Hot Water

February 13, 2022 by Jenny List 32 Comments

The minibike is an American phenomenon which fascinates those of us from countries in which such contraptions are illegal on the road; they seem to deliver bucketloads of low-octane fun in which we are unable to participate. [HowToLou] has one, and as it’s something for use in the Great Outdoors it naturally requires some means of fixing a brew. His solution to the need for a mug of boiling water in out-of-the-way places? A gravity-fed heat exchanger for the exhaust pipe, fed from a reservoir made using an upturned bottle.

As can be seen in the video below the break it’s a simple enough piece of work but surprisingly effective. A piece of small-bore copper tube is passed through a cork into the bottle, then wrapped round a piece of pipe which forms an exhaust The resulting heat exchanger is insulated, the engine started, and the cork loosened just enough to cause a bit of water to flow. The result – a good flow of hot water for that morning coffee.

It may not be the most practical of water heaters, but it’s certainly a bit of fun even if it might not work with all the minibikes we’ve covered.

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3-Wheeled Electric Skateboard Does Things Differently

February 9, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Typically, electric skateboards drive one or more wheels with brushless motors, while keeping everything mounted on otherwise fairly-standard trucks to maintain maneuverability. However, [swedishFeetballs] decided to go a different route, building a 3-wheeled design using some interesting parts.

The build relies on a large combined hub motor and wheel, similar to those you would find on a hoverboard or some electric scooters; this one is a Xiaomi part sourced from eBay. It’s controlled via an off-the-shelf electric skateboard speed controller that comes complete with its own remote.

The hardware is all bolted up to a custom skateboard deck built from scratch to accept the large single rear wheel. Up front, a regular skateboard truck is used. Batteries are mounted under the deck. Reportedly, the board has a top speed of 15 mph, which unsurprisingly matches that of the Xiaomi M365 the hub motor is sourced from.

It’s a neat way to build an electric skateboard, and to be honest we couldn’t be more curious as to how it rides. Unfortunately, only a few seconds of footage is available, but we’ve embedded it below for your watching pleasure!

Meanwhile, you might also be curious as to the benefits of a half-track skateboard. Video after the break.

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A Bugatti Without The Inconvenience Of Wealth

February 8, 2022 by Jenny List 52 Comments

There are many of us who might have toyed with the idea of building a car, indeed perhaps more than a few readers might even have taken to the road in a machine of their own creation. Perhaps it was a design of your own, or maybe a kit car. We think that very few of you will have gone as far as [Vũ Văn Nam] and his friends in Vietnam. In their latest video they compress a year’s work into 47 minutes as they craft a beautifully built replica of a Bugatti supercar. If you haven’t got a few million dollars but you’ve got the time, this is the video for you.

The skill involved in making a scratch-built car is impressive enough, but where there guys take it to the next level is in their clay modeling to create the moulds for the fibreglass bodywork. Taking their local clay and a steel frame, they carefully hand-sculpt the car with the skill of an Italian master stylist, before clothing it in fibreglass and removing the clay. The resulting fibreglass shell can be used to make the finished bodywork, which they do with an exceptional attention to detail. It might be a steel-tube home-made spaceframe with a wheezy 4-cylinder Toyota engine behind the driver instead of a 1000 HP powerhouse, but it surely looks the part!

Looking at the construction we’re guessing it wouldn’t pass an Individual Vehicle Approval test for roadworthiness where this is being written, but at the same time it wouldn’t be impossible to incorporate the extra work as this is a proper road-going car. The video is below the break, and though the few pieces of dialogue in it are in Vietnamese you probably won’t need to turn on the auto-translate to follow it.

This isn’t their first fake supercar, there’s already a Ferrari in this particular stable. Meanwhile if you’re of a mind to make a car, consider the world’s most hackable vehicle.

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OpenBikeSensor Measures Close Calls

February 5, 2022 by Robin Kearey 54 Comments

Cycling is fun, healthy, and good for the environment. But unfortunately it’s not always the safest of activities, as inconsiderate drivers can be a significant hazard to cyclists. Several countries, including Germany, France, and Belgium have introduced legislation mandating a minimum passing distance of at least 1.5 meters between cars and bikes. Enforcing such a rule is tricky however, and without accurate data on average passing distances it’s hard to know how many drivers are following it.

Enter OpenBikeSensor, an open-source hardware and community science project designed to gather exactly this information. Currently in its prototype phase, it aims to make a simple bike-mounted sensor that measures the lateral distance to any passing vehicles. The resulting data is collected online to generate maps highlighting danger zones, which can ultimately be used by city planners to improve cycling infrastructure.

The hardware is based around a set of ultrasonic sensors that measure the lateral distance to any large object. A GPS module keeps track of the bike’s location, while an ESP32 reads out the data and stores it onto an SD card. The user interface consists of a handlebar-mounted display that shows the system’s status. There’s also a button that the user needs to press any time they are passed by a vehicle: this will trigger a measurement and log the location. Once back home, the user can connect the OpenBikeSensor to their WiFi network and download their trip data.

The initial results look promising, and any project that gets people cycling and tinkering with electronics at the same time is worth looking into. It’s not the first time we’ve seen bike-mounted sensors either: people have designed their own sensors to measure air pollution in South America, or simply their own bike’s speed or tire pressure. Continue reading “OpenBikeSensor Measures Close Calls” →

Building Switching Points For A Backyard Railway

January 26, 2022 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

A home-built railway is one of the greatest things you could possibly use to shift loads around your farm. [Tim] and [Sandra] of YouTube channel [Way Out West] have just such a setup, but they needed some switching points to help direct carriages from one set of rails to another. Fabrication ensued!

The railway relies on very simple rails made with flat bar and angle iron, allowing the railway to be built without a lot of heavy blacksmithing work. For a light-duty home railway, these are more than strong enough to do the job.

As for the points, a simple V-shaped frog-and-blade design was used. The frog is the V-shaped section where the rails diverge into two directions, sitting in the center of the Y, while the blade is the part that moves to either side to guide the carriages in one way or t’other.

The blade consists of a 2.2 meter long piece of angle iron with a pin welded on, allowing it to pivot. Two pieces of flat bar were then welded together with a pin to make the frog. Two metal bushes were then forced into a wooden sleeper, allowing the blade to pivot as needed. The rails themselves are slightly kinked as needed and everything tacked down into sleepers with bolts and pipe pegs.

The design runs smoothly, much to [Tim]’s enjoyment. It’s a clear improvement over the earlier design we looked at least year.

There’s something inherently charming about a railway built with little more than wood, metal, and hammers. Seeing the little stone wagon run down the rails to bed in the sleepers is utterly joyful in a way that’s difficult to fully explain. Video after the break.
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The Road Is Peppered With Rock Salt Alternatives

January 25, 2022 by Kristina Panos 79 Comments

Every winter, millions of tons of rock salt is sprinkled across roads in the US, mostly in the Midwest and Northeast regions. It’s a cheap and effective way to prevent accidents. Rock salt is chemically the same as the stuff that sits next to the pepper, except it isn’t as finely ground, and it doesn’t have sodium or potassium iodine added to it to prevent goiters. Both table salt and rock salt melt ice by lowering the freezing point of water. So does sugar.

Much of what we salt the Earth with every winter comes from underground networks of salt crystal that formed when various ancient seas dried up. As natural as it may be, rock salt is bad for the environment. For one thing, chloride is forever, and can’t easily be decoupled from the soil and water it taints when it washes away. Rock salt also corrodes concrete, makes its way into the groundwater, and is bad for pets. Worst of all, its efficacy drops along with the temperature. At 15° F (-9° C), rock salt loses more than 86% of its melting power.

Disposable Detroit

All this salt is not great for cars, either — it’s bad for the paint and eats up the frame. In the saltiest parts of the US, aka The Salt Belt, cars only last a handful of years before they become Flintstones mobiles. Well, not really, but salt is terrible for the brake lines and most of the undercarriage. Consumer woes aside, there’s a real environmental impact to manufacturing all these disposable cars to meet the demand.

But the problem is that we need to use salt, or at something like it. Even though millions of people are staying home a whole lot more, the trucking industry still relies on salted highways and local roads. So if you like stocked grocery stores and stuff arriving from the Bezos Barn in a timely fashion, you can see the problem. So what are the alternatives? Are there any?

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Giant Wheels Make For Exciting Powered Rollerskates

January 15, 2022 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Roller skates are fun and all, but they’re pretty well limited to rolling on relatively smooth surfaces. [Fireball Tool] wanted something a little more rugged, so set about a build of his own.

The challenge of the design was to build these skates using as many wheelchair parts as possible, including the wheels. Roughly 22″ tall, the wheels have great bearings inside and are designed to run on a single-sided axle support, perfect for the skates. A metal bracket is then used to attach a snowboard boot binding so the wheels can be fitted to the wearer’s feet. Training wheels were fitted to the rear to make it easier for the rider, while a chainsaw engine was pressed into service to provide some welcome propulsive force.

In a short test on a flat workshop floor, the wheels performed ably. The hope is that the large diameter wheels should do better than traditional roller skates would on rough surfaces like grass or dirt. We look forward to seeing that test in action as a comparison to other powered skates we’ve seen. Video after the break.

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