bike

157 Articles

Velomobile Gets Electric Assist

October 22, 2022 by 37 Comments

What do you get when you throw all accepted bicycle designs out the window and start fresh? Well, it might look a bit like [Saukki’s] velomobile.

Most bikes come in a fairly standard, instantly-recognizable shape which has been popular for over a century now. While it’s a vast improvement over its predecessor, the penny-farthing bicycle, there’s no reason that a bike needs to have this two-triangle frame shape other than that a pretentious bicycle racing standards group says they have to. If you want to throw their completely arbitrary rulebook out of the window, though, you can build much more efficient, faster bikes like recumbents or even full-fairing velomobiles. And if you want to go even faster than that, you can always add a standard ebike motor kit to one.

This is a lot harder than putting a motor on a normal bicycle. Bicycles tend to have standardized parts and sizes, and [Saukki]’s velomobile is far from the standard bike. First, he needed custom mounts for the display and also for the battery, which he needed to make extra wide so its weight wouldn’t rip through the carbon fiber body. The emergency brake lever motor cutoff needed to be dismantled to work with his control system too, and finally the mid-drive motor needed a custom mount as well. It’s a TSDZ2 motor that comes with torque-sensing pedal assist.

The changes didn’t stop there. The velomobile max speed is much higher than a standard bike. This called for some gear ratio changes, in the form of a monster 60-tooth chain ring.

This leads to the one major problem with this build which is that the velomobile can achieve such high speeds on its own that the electric assist cuts out for most of the ride. There is a legal requirement over much of Europe that e-bikes only have pedal assist (without a throttle) and that they stop assisting above a specific speed. But if you want to build an e-bike that pushes the boundary of the law instead of strictly adhering to it, take a look at this one which uses a motor from a washing machine.

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Motorcycle Builder Makes Downhill Mountain Bike

September 9, 2022 by 17 Comments

[Allen Millyard] is a premier British motorcycle builder. In these circles he is widely regarded and his custom motorcycles are nearly world-famous. But when his son took up downhill mountain biking, he decided to put his skills building a different type of vehicle. This is the Millyard MR001, one of the most unique mountain bikes ever built thanks to some design choices that solve many problems otherwise inherent in bicycles.

Perhaps the most immediately striking design of this bike is the aluminum space frame, a lightweight but extremely strong frame necessary for the high speeds and stresses of downhill mountain biking. Upon closer inspection, however, the sealed drivetrain warrants further inspection. Unlike most mountain bikes with gears, this one eliminates the typical derailleur which hangs below the rear gears. The gears are instead above the pedals in front of the rear tire, are completely sealed eliminating the maintenance requirements of a typical bike, and are designed in such a way that they can be shifted without the bike moving.

Despite the bike being built in 2007, it still includes plenty of features that still aren’t widely adopted in mountain biking. It’s also nearly completely silent thanks to the custom drivetrain, and [Allen] reports that it still sneaks up on other mountain bikers as a result. This is essentially the opposite problem of another bike we’ve seen around.

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$800 Mountain Bike Seat Post Chopped In Two

August 29, 2022 by 16 Comments

For those unfamiliar with the sport of mountain biking, it’s a wild hobby that is rife with hacking. It started in the early 70s when the first dedicated mountain bikers were hacking road bikes together to ride on trails to varying levels of success, but only in the last decade or so have there been a lot of electronics appearing in various bike parts that we can all tinker with as well. This video discusses some of the downsides with a very expensive electronic seat post on a mountain bike, and attempts to solve its shortcomings by cutting it in half.

This build involves a dropper seat post, which is an adjustable seat for mountain biking that functions like an office chair. By pushing a button on the handlebars, the seat post can be rapidly adjusted up or down on-the-fly. Normally these seat posts use a cable to actuate, but this expensive version is wireless. The only problem is the battery will occasionally fly off when hitting big jumps, so [Berm Peak Express] decided to cut the existing proprietary battery system out and create a new housing for it. The new housing has a wired extension for the battery in its new location under the seat instead of behind it, and this gives it the clearance it arguably should have had from the manufacturer.

While not the most involved project of all time, it does take a certain mentality to take a hacksaw to a bike part that costs more than a large percentage of bicycles. It’s a niche product to be sure, but it also shows that some of the biggest annoyances with proprietary parts are not too difficult to overcome. And, it is interesting to see the ways that some people are hacking bikes outside of admittedly clever ebike conversions.

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Gym Equipment Converted To Generator

June 29, 2022 by 41 Comments

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but the most likely eventual conclusion of changing it from one form or another will be relatively useless heat. For those that workout with certain gym equipment, the change from chemical energy to heat is direct and completely wasted for anything other than keeping in shape. [Oliver] wanted to add a step in the middle to recover some of this energy, though, and built some gym equipment with a built-in generator.

Right now he has started with the obvious exercise bike stand, which lends itself to being converted to a generator quite easily. It already had a fairly rudimentary motor-like apparatus in it in order to provide mechanical resistance, so at first glance it seems like simply adding some wires in the right spots would net some energy output. This didn’t turn out to be quite so easy, but after a couple of attempts [Oliver] was able to get a trickle of energy out to charge a phone, and with some more in-depth tinkering on the motor he finally was able to get a more usable amount of energy to even charge a laptop.

He estimates around 30 watts of power can be produced with this setup, which is not bad for a motor that was never designed for anything other than mechanical resistance. We look forward to seeing some other equipment converted to produce energy too, like a rowing machine or treadmill. Or, maybe take a different route and tie the exercise equipment into the Internet connection instead.

Hoverbike Turns Hoverboard Into Ebike

April 21, 2022 by 1 Comment

Hoverboards were a popular trend with the youths and in-crowd a few years ago, and now that the fad has largely died out there are plenty of them sitting unused in closets and basements around the world. That only means opportunities to put the parts from these unique transportation devices into other builds. A more practical method of transportation is a bicycle, and this build scavenges most of the parts from a hoverboard to turn a regular bicycle into a zippy ebike.

This bike build starts with a mountain bike frame and the parts from the hoverboard are added to it piece by piece. The two motors are mounted to the frame and drive the front chain ring of the bike, allowing it to still take advantage of the bike’s geared drivetrain. Battery packs from two hoverboards were combined into a single battery which give the bike a modest 6-10 km of range depending on use. But the real gem of this build is taking the gyroscopic controller board from the hoverboards and converting it, with the help of an Arduino Due, to an ebike controller.

Eventually a battery pack will be added to give the bike a more comfortable range, but for now we appreciate the ingenuity that it took to adapt the controller from the hoverboard into an ebike controller complete with throttle and pedal assist. For other household objects turned into ebikes, be sure to check out one of our favorites based on a washing machine motor: the Spin Cycle.

Prototype Robot For Omniwheel Bicycle

February 24, 2022 by No comments

For all its ability to advance modern society in basically every appreciable way, science still has yet to explain some seemingly basic concepts. One thing that still has a few holes in our understanding is the method by which a bicycle works. Surely, we know enough to build functional bicycles, but like gravity’s inclusion into the standard model we have yet to figure out a set of equations that govern all bicycles in the universe. To push our understanding of bicycles further, however, some are performing experiments like this self-balancing omniwheel bicycle robot.

Functional steering is important to get the bicycle going in the right direction, but it’s also critical for keeping the bike upright. This is where [James Bruton] is putting the omniwheel to the test. By placing it at the front of the bike, oriented perpendicularly to the direction of travel, he can both steer the bicycle robot and keep it balanced. This does take the computational efforts of an Arduino Mega paired with an inertial measurement unit but at the end [James] has a functional bicycle robot that he can use to experiment with the effects of different steering methods on bicycles.

While he doesn’t have a working omniwheel bicycle for a human yet, we at least hope that the build is an important step on the way to [James] or anyone else building a real bike with an omniwheel at the front. Hopefully this becomes a reality soon, but in the meantime we’ll have to be content with bicycles with normal wheels that can balance and drive themselves.

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Attack Of The Eighty-Foot String Shooter

January 1, 2022 by 24 Comments

String shooters are exciting because they adhere to the laws of physics in that peculiar way that makes us ask, “How?” and “Why?” After a bit of poking and prodding, maybe some light rope burn, we probably have a few ideas on how we’d make our own. [Nick Belsten] and [Joey Rain] saw some desktop models and thought, “Let’s make that puppy eighty feet long!” Video also embedded after the break.

Instead of hobby motors, flashlight batteries, and toy car wheels, they choose a washing machine motor and bike tires, then plug into an extension cord. The three-minute video isn’t a how-to build because once you start welding this kind of hardware together, you are already flying by the seat of your pants. You will see a front yard with people delighting in the absurdity of launching rope continuously over the treetops. There’s plenty of room for observing a wave traveling along the cord or polishing your fingernails in a hurry.

We want to make string shooters for the office and add our personal flavor, like lights or colored string so they’re safe to touch. If you have a unique twist on any physics experiments, drop us a line, but for insurance reasons, we’ll add that you should not make a chainsaw without a guide bar, aka, the forbidden chain-saber.

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