Bike Week; Day one; build a bike

Building your own form of transportation seems very Mad Maxian, and I'm sure what little I've seen of the Baja Mil has effected my point of view, if not a little.

There are large groups interested in human powered vehicles such as the International Human Powered Vehicle Association. I wont go to into this, but a search on HPV in del.icio.us gives good results (also known as velomobile). Shown is the Go-One.

An open engineering design for a simple recumbent bike where the steering is controlled by shifting your center of gravity called the python has a good following of makers and builders (a great read is their Python Wiki.) There are other designs like the build your own recumbent trike designs. But I want to avoid excessive wheels, again it comes to portability, and a big trike is more to lock up ect... Here are some good videos of pythons in action; vid1, vid2. (right click and hit 'save linked file'.)

To make a bike truly care free it needs to be portable. This needs some bicycle origami like that used to make the Brompton Bike or the Dahon Bikes Flo folding mountain bike (the best of the folding bikes that I could find; the Brompton just doesn't look cool good, sorry.) I have a couple of ideas of what I'd like to try. Part of my problem is that the bike needs to be able to ride off-road, and do it comfortably.

Also I'd like to address the drive train. Ideally the gearing is very important. I would like some type of continuous gearing. Designs exist like the NuVinci, aimed at geriatrics. I've also been thinking about the need to use a chain drive, and if something different could be tried.

As well I would like to add in a type of regenerative braking and motor assistance. I've been thinking a great deal about compressed air propulsion, and paying attention to compressed air powered cars; MDI. The use of pistons does seem antiquated and the tesla turbine seems to be an interesting type of turbine for a DIY project; youtube is full of interesting videos presented by gyroscope.com (see video below.) Here is a great video with a tesla pump as well; the fun starts at about 6min in.

Untill I have a work space to make some prototypes I'll be in the planning stage, here is to hoping for a lab soon!

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