Recumbent Trike Project (HPV)

This past weekend,Cole helped get me started with my flux core arc welder, and I haven't had a free moment of time since. I immediately began work on my first serious project, my recumbent trike. The goal of this project is to create a 3-wheeled vehicle with a comfortable full seat, suspension, and gearing for a top speed above 40 mph.

So far I have used about $60 worth of 1" x 1" x 1/8" wall square tubing and an old basic 26" diamond style bike frame for materials. It's amazing what you can get by walking into a small shop and saying, "do you have anything you're about to throw away?". The guy handed me a frame with the bearings still in it. Essentially what I did was cut the rear wheel forks with the seat post off, separate the remaining two tubes from each other, and connect one tube in line with the horizontal crossmembers on the rear forks. What this did was sit the bottom crossmember down level so I can put my seat into the frame without tilting it 60° upward. I will have pictures of this later.

Also, I used AutoCAD to draw a seat that appears to be a comfortable shape. The seat will be two three-part posts with canvas or some other material yet to be determined wrapped around them. I have used the square tubing for this entirely, so it has been the easiest thing to weld. I'll be honest, round welds aren't my cup of tea at this point. I've finished the posts, and am looking now at how I want to mount it to the rest of the frame. The two major options are welding or bolting it to the seat post. Welding would be lighter, but bolting would be more exact, and possibly stronger. Also, there's the matter of how much clearance my heavy butt will need between the stays for the canvas and the frame of the bike. I'm figuring on 2-3 inches at this point.

I'm still working out the design of the kingpins, leafing through the McMaster-Carr from time to time...if you have any ideas for a good way to go about this, let me know. What a kingpin does is it lets the frame and the steering wheels move vertically and twist about an almost vertical axis at the same time (if you put a suspension on it). Elimination of the suspension as a factor makes the problem much easier to solve, but including one makes the bike much more pleasant to ride. There are some good references about building kingpins, as well as recumbents in general on
Timothy Smith's pages. The trike I am building will be much like the one on that page, but with a suspension system (hopefully), a beefier frame, a larger set of gears, and a sweeter looking paint job. Oh yeah. Awesome.

More later.

Peak Oil, Recumbent Bicycles, and The Apocalypse

So there is quite a worry in the scientific community today about a concept known as "peak oil". If you haven't heard this term before, what it means is that a bunch of geologists, physicists, and other smart people have derived that we have passed the peak of oil production for the history of Earth, and are now on the downslope. Basically, they say there will be less and less oil each year, while our demands for it increase from year to year. This results in an exponentially growing difference in our supply/demand on that market, and essentially means that we need to be looking for alternatives...if you take a look at this website: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/, you can see just how worried some of these people are. (note that their science is a bit off in a lot of places, as far as their statements about natural gas use, ammonia production, etc.)

Honestly, I think these people sit around and look for things they can make a hubbub about, get some scientific background, and tell us a la Weekly World News that yes, when we run out of oil, we will all die, the sun will stop shining, the Earth will stop spinning, all the technology that we ever had before will disappear, France will rule the world, there will be 19 apocalyptic wars over the last 4 barrels of oil, the world as we know it will turn to one big barren desert, and we will digress back to the unicellular organisms from which we are supposed to have evolved.

Sure, we may be running out of oil, and yes, running out of oil has some big implications...but we have plenty of minds and plenty of hands and plenty of research to find alternatives to fossil-fuel powered transportation (which consumes the largest portion of oil output each year), even in the short time these people say we might have left to do so.

One viable option to limit the guzzlement (yes, I just made that word up) of oil is to ban vehicles like the bling-bling Escalades parading around town, and the 4 ton dualies all the urban cowboys just love. My favorite part of the concept behind these vehicles is that the car manufacturer designs the thing to suit the typical urbanite who has never set foot on a mountain, but they need 350 horsepower, 4 wheel drive, and 77 cup holders so they can get the groceries home ( a 2 mile, all-paved trip). They will never go off-road, they will never climb a mountain with their SUV...they're wary to drive the thing through a muddy puddle, lest we get some dirt on the shiny CroMo bumper. They just want to know that they CAN.

The problem lies in the way people tend to buy things. 10 years ago, SUV's were practically non-existent. Now everyone wants one because pop culture states you are officially awesome if your automobile frame is higher than that of the next guy, or if your rims keep turning when your wheels don't....look! Something shiny! Would you rather have a Geo Metro, or a Hummer H2? This tendency to buy what is popular on the market will keep most Americans from exploring more efficient options (as far as transportation is concerned, anyhow).

One option that many other countries of the world are already beginning to actively explore is known as a velomobile...essentially a human-powered car (fully enclosed, etc.). Obviously, now, we're not going to pedal from Athens to Cleveland all the time, but as for getting around town, or getting to work, etc. (where gas mileage is lowest) it's certainly an attractive option. There is an ongoing tech project online (in wiki style, or open-source....anyone can put their input so we may all work as a team, without knowing each other at all) known as the Open Source Velomobile Project, whose goal is to increase the visibility, market, and eventually wide-scale use of these machines to save gas, money, and perhaps even a life or two.

I am currently developing plans for a recumbent trike (a very fast, very odd-looking beast) that I plan to begin construction on in about 2 weeks. It will be in the tadpole style (two wheels in the front, one wheel in the back), made out of spare parts from old bikes and frames, and some cheap stock tube steel. I hope to have the construction completed sometime early this summer, so hopefully you will all see me flying down the bike path at 40 miles an hour with reckless abandon. Once I get some drawings developed, I'll upload a javascript viewer here so all of you can take a look at what I'm working on.

....and we're back....

So, here I sit with a still unfinished webpage on my oak server account (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~tc285202/ if you're interested), but for some reason I read Cole's blog and decided to start my own. I'm not going to drone on about how someone left the toilet seat down or what professor pissed me off on a given day in a given class on here, as that's been the main reason for me not starting a blog in the past.

I do, however, hope to either spawn some intelligent, productive discussion on my more extraordinary experiences from day to day, or at least get some people involved with upcoming technical projects that may turn out to be quite interesting.

Before I talk about anything technical and all the people who don't like blowing things up, etc. (females, and some males with slightly feminine dispositions) quickly decide this is not the site for them and hop it on over to emoticons.com or wherever it is you people tend to congregate (i.e. anywhere but Stocker Center, as far as females are concerned), I want to let you know that tech stuff isn't the only thing I will discuss on this site....just most of it.

At any rate, for those of you who don't know me, I have no clue how you may have stumbled across this site, but come back often...I won't list my likes/dislikes or whether I enjoy long walks on the beach...I'm an engineer. That's all you really need to know.

As for those of you who do know me...AWESOME.

More to come later.