bike

160 Articles

Crazy Bike Frame Made Out Of 147 Nuts

November 16, 2022 by 39 Comments

Bike frames are most commonly made out of steel. If you’ve got money for something nicer though, you might go with something in aluminium or carbon fiber. [The Q] went completely off-the-wall with this build, though, constructing a bicycle frame out of 147 nuts. 

Those forks don’t inspire confidence.

Yes, a variety of nuts in various sizes were laid out and welded together to make the frame. The overall layout is a conventional diamond frame, albeit constructed out of many nuts stuck together rather than with tubes. Notably though, several important areas aren’t made in this way. The front and rear dropouts are made of sheet steel, and the bottom bracket, seat post mount, and headstem are all made of steel tube. After welding, the bike was given an attractive coat of grey paint. It was then laced up with the usual running gear and given a set of chunky mountain bike tires.

We wouldn’t want to push this frame too hard over bumps and jumps. The video only shows the nuts being joined with tack welds, and the front forks look particularly fragile. One suspects a decent shock loading could snap parts of the frame apart. Overall, though, it’s an eye-catching bike that has plenty of easy places to attach a lock. For an ultra-fashionable city-bound cruiser, it would be hard to beat.

We’ve featured some weird and wonderful bikes over the years, including this tasteful plywood design. Video after the break.

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A man and a woman stand at opposite ends of a wooden-framed bicycle. It has 20" tires and a long, black seat. A rack extends over the front tire for carrying small items.

Plywood Bicycle Makes Frame Building More Accessible

November 4, 2022 by 37 Comments

Bike frames are simple on the surface, but can quickly become complicated if you want to fabricate one yourself. Brazing and welding tend to be less common skills than knowing how to bolt things together, so [Arquimaña] has brought us the OpenBike to make the process accessible to more people.

An open-source set of files designed for CNCs and 3D printers, the OpenBike uses readily available materials like sheet plywood to make a sturdy, if unconventional-looking, bicycle. Like many other consumer goods, most bike frames are currently built in Asia. This allows for economies of scale, but removes locals from the design process. By using simpler tools, OpenBike allows for more local direction of what features might be needed for a particular region.

Shifting even a small portion of trips to more active forms of transport is an important part of lowering carbon emissions, so making bikes a more attractive means of transportation is always welcome. What might be important in one region might be superfluous and expensive in another (multiple gears in a hilly region, for example). OpenBike could be especially useful as a way to rapid-prototype different feature sets for a particular region before committing to a more traditional frame-building technique for larger batches of bikes.

If you want to see some other bike hacks, why not check out this extending bicycle, this steampunk recumbent trike, or these bike hacks from around the world?

 

via Yanko Design

DIY Bike Wheels Welded With Rebar

October 24, 2022 by 43 Comments

[Liebregts] is working on a trike design, and needed a pair of wheels to go up front. Regular bicycle wheels wouldn’t do, as they’re not designed to work with a single-sided support. They also wanted to be able to mount disc brakes. Thus, they set about building a set of custom wheels to do the job.

The build began with a regular set of 20″ bike wheel rims with all the spokes taken out. A ring of steel rebar welded on the inner perimeter gave the rims more strength. A set of hubs and axles were then fabbed up with a welder and lathe, with provisions for bolting on disc brake components. Lengths of rebar were then welded in as non-adjustable spokes. Next, it was time for a coat of paint. Finally [Liebregts] mounted the tires and brakes, and called the job done.

Obviously, it is possible to buy wheels specifically for trike builds. However, [Liebregts] found it difficult to find exactly what they wanted, particularly where the disc brake option was concerned. The best option was a custom build.  The resulting wheels are obviously much heavier than traditional bike wheels, but they’re also likely a fair bit stronger, too. If you need to weigh down a tarpaulin, for example, these wheels might just do the trick.

We’ve seen some other crazy wheels on trikes before, too! Oh, and who says wheels need to be a full circle, anyway? Creativity will never cease to amaze!

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.