Horses of Iron

[Lock]

McCoy Sportsman glow plug engine

Haha! I was trying to figure out how it got power to the wheels but I think the thing is powering an air prop!

McCoy_1949.jpg (20.65 KiB) Viewed 1290 times

[sk8norcal]

^ at first I thought it was a faucet ...

more...
http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=646607

[sk8norcal]

http://retrorambling.wordpress.com/2011 ... -19151930/

[amberwolf]

That last one could have the engine replaced with powerchair motors, and even the look could be kept, almost. The PC motors with a rightangle gearbox look a lot like the part of the engine you can see from the right, down in front of the footplates.

[sk8norcal]

girls on minibikes thread!!!!
http://www.oldminibikes.com/forum/gener ... es-19.html

[sk8norcal]

[sk8norcal]

lock, has anyone do electric version of these ?

http://www.mikeybike.com/propo_wheel.html
http://www.american-automobiles.com/Art ... Wheel.html

[sk8norcal]

dinkycycle
saw this at a custom bicycle show,
frame folds in the middle,

http://www.mikeybike.com/id132.html




===========

[Lock]

lock, has anyone do electric version of these ?
http://www.mikeybike.com/propo_wheel.html
http://www.american-automobiles.com/Art ... Wheel.html

No electrics I can think of. Funny, we talk on ES about adding hubs and non-hubs to two/three wheelers, but can't recall an extra wheel as a bolt-on kit complete w/motor and battery. Maybe a powered sidecar, but something as small as wheel and power-only?

Hmmmm!

Have to wonder why it became another evolutionary dead end...

Lock

[Lock]

Really good video on this site showing a restored single seat 1896 Riker electric runabout in operation and owned now by the grandson of Andrew Riker:
http://kdrv.com/oregon_trails/220967



Transcript from the video:

Oregon Trails: Electric Cars

August 12, 2011
By Ron Brown

GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- For years now, scientists and engineers have tried to develop a car that can run on electricity with the same power, range and reliability as gas and diesel-fueled vehicles.

A hundred years or more ago, electric cars were competing just fine with steam and gas horseless carriages of the day. Some of those ancient vehicles remain to remind us just how far we have...or have not... Come in the effort to have emission-free transportation.

Rick Riker is a Grants Pass city councilman and a former Josephine county planner. He is also the grandson of one of America's pioneer automotive developers and engineers, Andrew Riker. One of the prize possessions in his family is this single seat 1896 Riker electric runabout, which, as you can see, still runs well. The car was a basket case on display at the original Harrah auto museum near Reno, and then was sold to a man in Arizona who restored it in the early 1980's. Riker's parents bought it later at auction, and it's been back in the family ever since.

Riker has shown the little electric at some car shows, but says driving it in parades is a little un-nerving considering the primitive braking system on the car.

One of the big challenges Riker had when he got the car was finding eight-volt batteries. The car runs on 40 volts, using five 8-volt batteries connected in series. But a local battery distributor just happened to have them. They are often used to power tractors.

Today electric cars like this Nissan leaf have high tech batteries that can drive the car for a hundred miles at highway speeds without a re-charge. The Riker could go up to 20 miles an hour on the roads of the day and has a range of about 30 miles. These cars were very popular with women and taxi companies in the cities. There you could find chargers. Today it's the same problem, having enough places to keep your car charged to be able to drive very far.

Rick says, "My dad said that my granddad mentioned that if there was a battery station on every corner, that electric cars would've survived. But he also--my grandfather--foresaw that gasoline was the way to go and that's why he sold his electric car business. And what he envisioned that you would actually swap your batteries out. You pull into a gas station and then change the batteries out and then drive off."

Andrew Riker's foundation was in electric motor development, but when he sold his company he embraced the new gas engine technology fully. However, electric cars stayed around in declining numbers well on into the 1920's. And now they're trying to make a comeback, using new materials and new technology.

When Andrew Riker sold out in 1901, after about five years of making electric vehicles, many people think that the most valuable part of the sale was really the patents that went along and the engineering that went into his vehicles.

In all, Riker built and sold 299 cars. Andrew Riker was hired by loco-mobile to be their chief engineer in 1902, to develop gas engines. He was also the first president of the Society of Automotive Engineers and died in 1930. There have been about a hundred different electric carmakers in the U.S. in the last hundred years, including Studebaker, Millburn, Baker, Waverly, and Detroit.

[sk8norcal]

see first link,

http://www.cyclebanter.com/showthread.php?t=155469

[Lock]

Hehe... Wrote him a note. It's an Ingo bike, as seen in the first 30 secs here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36kD4m7duEE

[bigmoose]

Lock, just wanted to thank you for this thread, I enjoy the new additions. Quite a history lesson on the pages you put together here. I wonder if the Riker really got 20 miles off of those 5 lead acid batts however. I think I saw a big (like 4 inch diameter) wire wound resistor next to the switch contacts under the seat.

[sk8norcal]

I rode a homemade Ingo bike recently,
the guy who made it said back in the days it was marketed to women as a fat burning device..

[sk8norcal]

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/11/ ... s-scooter/

[Lock]

Lock, just wanted to thank you for this thread, I enjoy the new additions. Quite a history lesson on the pages you put together here. I wonder if the Riker really got 20 miles off of those 5 lead acid batts however. I think I saw a big (like 4 inch diameter) wire wound resistor next to the switch contacts under the seat.

Hey Moose, glad you like. Yah, saw that coil too. I was thinking plug braking resistor but no mention about it in the vid. It'd surely be more effective than that dinky parking brake thingee! Betcha that Riker could get 20mi, as it was maybe only moving at 10mph?

Lock

[gogo]

1909 Racycle Board Track Racer FOR SALE!

Racycle_1-550x365.jpg

(82.32 KiB) Downloaded 63 times

[bigmoose]

How far we have come! From that Racycle sale ad "475cc, 4 cycle engine producing 4hp" ... and today's MotoGP bikes do over 200 HP out of 800cc naturally aspirated. Who would have thought a 50 fold improvement was possible back then!

[oatnet]

1909 Racycle Board Track Racer FOR SALE!

Racycle_1-550x365.jpg

The color reminds me of recumpence's recumbant - I wonder if his tadpole will also end up as art on someone's wall in 115 years.

-JD

[Lock]

1909 Racycle Board Track Racer FOR SALE!

Thanks for that gogo!

BTW:

Item Location: Needham, MA, United States
Ended: Aug 01, 2011 06:04:28 PDT
Bid history: 3 bids
Current bid: US $22,100.00
Reserve price not met

US$22.1K!

Lock

[sk8norcal]

some cool stuff in this thread,
check out the cushman military scooter..

http://www.gt-rider.com/thailand-motorc ... SOHC/page2

[Lock]

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/01ddb438-da09-11e0-b199-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Xl4MDVco

September 12, 2011 4:40 pm

Test drive: Positives outweigh negatives in battery power
By Rohit Jaggi

The strange thing about the future is how close the parallels are with the past. Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the sports car marque, built a hybrid electric car with in-wheel motors and an internal combustion engine to generate the power to drive them – in 1900.

Even the flying car – a motif for over-the-horizon modernity in fiction from The Jetsons cartoons to the somewhat darker Blade Runner movie – took wing in reality in 1919 with the Autoplane of aircraft pioneer Glenn Curtis. The new Transition – the most convincing example of the concept since the 1970s Ford Pinto-based Mitzar killed its creators when the wings detached in flight – is said by its US manufacturer Terrafugia to be only a year from delivery.

Meanwhile, the road vehicle industry is still sniffing around hydrogen power and fuel cell technology to deal with the twin problems of diminishing oil resources and carbon pollution. But it has largely settled on using electricity derived either from the grid or from on-board generators.

In volume terms, especially in China, electric two-wheelers are showing cars the way. Even in Europe, more electric motorcycles and scooters are sold than pure electric cars. The 11,000 sold in the first half of 2011 represented a jump from the 5,567 in the same period last year, although just 0.3 per cent of the European Union powered two-wheeler market, according to Acem, the Motorcycle Industry in Europe, the trade body.

That carmaking giants such as BMW are displaying electric two-wheeler concepts indicates how far the vehicles have come. The first electric scooter I rode, an early attempt by US manufacturer Vectrix, tried to kill me when the transmission locked up at speed. Later versions by the same company, and some other electric motorcycles, have been startlingly good, though let down in the case of fellow US manufacturer Zero by an extremely limited range if I used the power available.

Many in the current crop of plug-in electric four-wheelers are not only sophisticated but also address range concerns.

Nissan’s plug-in Leaf, aside from the £31,000 ($49,220) price tag before a £5,000 government incentive, impresses with its quiet capability compared with conventionally powered five-seat hatchbacks. Good acceleration and a respectable top speed of 90mph can be traded against a potential range on a full charge of 105-plus miles – indicated very clearly on a well-integrated satellite navigation system.

Warnings in the charging instructions made me fear that suspect wiring in my central London house, courtesy of the previous owners, might not be up to the job of topping up the car’s lithium-ion batteries. But the lead snaking in through the kitchen window from the rain-lashed driveway did the job overnight, and a fast charge of 80 per cent of battery capacity within 30 minutes is possible using the infrastructure Nissan promises to install at dealers.

The Japanese manufacturer has also shown a system that uses the batteries of a plugged-in Leaf as an electricity storage medium for homes – a neat way of smoothing out the supply and demand mismatches in power produced domestically from solar cells or small wind turbines. Or coping with power cuts. Nissan says a typical home could be powered for two days by a Leaf.

Tesla, the US manufacturer of an £88,000 high-performance plug-in two-seater, says the car’s electronics can deal with charging from any source – it too passed my Camden Square suspect-wiring test.

The Tesla Roadster is a good example of what an electric car can do, which is supply driving pleasure equalling that provided by internal combustion engines – up to 295lb-ft of torque and 288bhp yield a 0-60mph time of 3.7 seconds. Or, in more subjective terms, more acceleration than usually can be used on the road.

Not using all the power available helps to maximise the distance that can be travelled on a single charge, too – up to 245 miles is claimed – and I found that even hard driving failed to ruin the range. A charge from empty to full takes two to four hours using the fastest method possible, and 14 hours with the slowest.

How people use the cars is the crucial element. Car users often dismiss a 100-mile range as inadequate, despite longer trips being quite rare. Information from user studies indicates that when drivers’ confidence in the batteries and understanding of their usage grows they may plug in cars only every two or three days.

The forthcoming seven-seat Model S Tesla, promising up to 300 miles on a single charge, will be interesting. But focusing on extending the range of electric vehicles, which battery and controller technology improvements are bringing, is in part missing the point.

Pilots of aircraft, skippers of motor boats, and drivers who venture away from the filling-station network already know what it is to plan their journey given their reserves of fuel and the opportunities to top up.

Electric light aircraft are starting to appear, and their pilots are performing the same calculations about refuelling – but with electricity rather than aviation gasoline.

Car and motorcycle drivers could easily grow used to doing similar sums, though with less risk if they get the decimal point in the wrong place.

Once they do, the revolution in vehicle propulsion can really start motoring.

Rohit Jaggi writes a monthly cars column for FT Wealth magazine, producing written articles and video vehicle reviews

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

[Lock]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/car-life/classic-cars/1899-electric-car-yes-thats-right-sells-for-550000/article2167304/

This 1899 Columbia Electric Landaulet sold at auction this past summer for $550,000.

Darin Schnabel/RM Auctions

Classic cars 1899 Columbia Electric Landaulet

1899 electric car (yes, that’s right) sells for $550,000


bob english

Friday, Sep. 16, 2011 6:00AM EDT

If you’re looking for a way to electrify your driving experience you can opt for one of Nissan’s shiny new latest-tech all-electric Leafs for about $40,000 or you could keep an eye open for a good used model.

But be warned there aren’t many around as it’s been a century since pure electric cars have been built in any numbers and, as a result, resale value can be a tad high. An 1899 Columbia Electric Landaulet, for example, changed hands this past summer at an RM Auctions sale, setting an electric vehicle record of $550,000.

That’s quite a premium over a Leaf considering the latest owner of the Columbia might expect a range of perhaps 60 kilometres versus the estimated 160 for the Leaf. And the Leaf can wind itself up to 140 km/h while the Columbia can only manage about 20 km/h. The Leaf driver also gets to sit inside, unlike Columbia’s high and out in the open buckboard-like chauffeur’s perch. The Leaf doesn’t have that neat landaulet three-way-folding roof to let passengers enjoy a little fresh air and sunshine, though.

One thing Leaf buyers and purchasers of early Columbia electrics likely do share in spite of the century separating them is the feeling they were/are riding into a new era powered by the fuel of the future. For the Columbia owner, this notion was short-lived.

Electrical World and Engineer magazine in 1900 noted that electrics were the first vehicles to prove themselves in North America and that “it is generally conceded the electric vehicle in urban service where the mileage limitations of storage batteries need not be considered, has no rival.” But the author also felt gasoline-fuelled vehicles were more practical in most other areas of usage.

Although battery power meant the Columbia owner didn’t have to put up with nasty smelly gasoline and its rough, unreliable and noisy early engines, or deal with smooth but fiddly to operate and potentially explosive steam power, advancing technology meant it was gasoline that soon emerged as the dominant automotive power source.

Which it still is, and to the chagrin of modern electric vehicle enthusiasts, will likely remain for decades to come. Range was, and still is, the key issue. That led to electric car sales peaking by the early 1910s, fading away in the 1920s and essentially disappearing by the 1930s.

But as the century was turning, the electric car business was humming – electrics outselling gas and steam cars combined – and Pope Manufacturing Co., the biggest bicycle builder in the United States, was enjoying the fruits of its pioneering electric car efforts.

In the mid-1890s, founder Colonel Albert Pope had hired engineer Hiram Percy Maxim, the son of the inventor of the fully automatic machine gun, who had designed something that produced loud repetitive bangs himself, a three-cylinder engine he used to power a tricycle.

Working for Pope, he soon re-jigged this into an electric-powered four-wheeler that the company began producing in 1897 under the Columbia name. By 1904, the newly created Columbia Automobile Co. of Hartford was selling 22 electric and three gas models.

Things were also getting a little complicated on the business side with Pope and various partners involved in the notorious Selden Patent, which claimed design rights on all automobiles and was used to hold the industry up for licensing contributions. It was subsequently overturned.

With its Selden cash-flow gone, the Columbia company then became a pawn in another grandiose auto empire building scheme, but with interest in electrics waning and facing other problems, it was forced to close its doors in 1913. Just 27,000 Columbia-badged vehicles in total were built.

Designer Maxim – an early amateur “ham” radio pioneer and also responsible for creation of the gasoline-powered Columbia models – later parlayed muffler development into the invention of the “silencer” for rifles and pistols.

Columbia electrics, like the 1899 Landaulet, were already more or less silent, of course, which was a large part of their appeal to a mostly genteel clientele interested in being sedately chauffeured around town in the company’s offerings that year. These included Broughams, Surreys, Phaetons, Dos a Dos, various styles of physicians’ carriages, Runabouts, delivery wagons and, it appears, the one-off Electric Landaulet.

This horseless town carriage with its unique three-way-opening-top body design was built on a tubular frame with solid axles front and rear suspended on fore-and-aft mounted leaf springs. It was powered by a pair of 2-hp Edison DC motors mounted at the rear with band brakes operating on their armature shafts.

Weight was 3,000 pounds or so with the batteries accounting for about half of that. These were recharged by a system that ensured they weren’t undercharged – “starved” – or overcharged. An alloy plug was inserted into the controller beside the driver to complete the electrical circuitry and he could select from four speed ranges: three, six, 11 and 13 mph.

The Landaulet was apparently delivered to the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York where it was tested, and then used to convey officials around town before being sold to a Charleston-area plantation owner who used it for a few years and then put it into storage.

It emerged in 1976 and was fully restored to its current condition, its brilliant black finish highlighted by red pinstriping and red leather upholstery.

Back in 1899

Henry Bliss becomes the first person in North America to be fatally injured by an automobile when he steps off a New York streetcar and into the path of an electric taxi.

New York's newspaper boys – the “newsies” who hawk copies of the city's dailies to earn 30 cents for a long day – go on strike for two weeks.

German sewing machine and bicycle maker Adam Opel AG begins building automobiles.

The American Lines SS St. Paul becomes the first ship to announce her arrival by “wireless” after making contact from 66 miles at sea with a Marconi station in England.

Charles Murphy sets a cycling speed record, covering a mile in less than a minute while drafting a railway boxcar on a track laid between the rails on Long Island.
globedrive@globeandmail.com

Murphy_1899.jpg (48.45 KiB) Viewed 1854 times

[Lock]

Ohhh! Stealing this from sk8norcals post here ("Juncker Bicycle - Electric Bike 1933"):
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31993

Juncker_1933.jpg (93.85 KiB) Viewed 1840 times

and the note from the image on Flickr:

An early electric bike from the 1930s on display at NEMO in Amsterdam. Without the battery the bike weighed 50 kilos and the frame was reinforced to bear the extra load of motor and battery. Charging the bike took an entire day after which you could cycle 40kms which took more than 2.5 hours on this bike. Only about a hundred of these were made.

Information and photo from NEMO science museum in Amsterdam

The colour is interesting. Wonder if Juncker was hoping for military contracts...

Pic of the exhibit at the museum:


I'm gonna guess that the "battery pack" beside the bike is actually a pack of Leyden jars...

English language page about the exhibit on the museums web site:
http://www.e-nemo.nl/en/?id=1&s=635&d=1118

The exhibition Everyone Electric

Everyone Electric is an attractively presented exhibition on technological innovations in the field of electric transport and provides a glimpse into a sustainable future with electric cars, smart grids and clean sustainable energy generated at home.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the first series of the Nissan Leaf to be rolled out, this family car is powered entirely by electricity and has been hailed 2011 car of the year. That electric transport goes back quite far in history will become apparent to visitors on the basis of a timeline. The timeline includes a number of historic objects from NEMO’s heritage collection, such as a car used in the Witkar sharing project from 1974 and an electric bicycle from 1933. Furthermore, visitors can view a range of different charging points for electric cars from the Netherlands and abroad.

Due to the increase of the number of electric cars in the future, a smart grid (or intelligent electricity network) is necessary to spread all the electricity consumption evenly over the day.
This is clarified for visitors by means of an interactive digital model of a metropolis.
Moreover, visitors to the exhibition will see devices which, owing to the arrival of a smart grid, are interesting for use at home. These include a washing machine that decides when to start on the basis of electricity rates and a small windmill that can also be fitted on the roof of your home.

Want to know more about Everyone Electric? Visit the exhibition and join in the discussion on the clean city of the future!

---------

Practical information on the exhibition Everyone Electric
The exhibition Everyone Electric can be viewed from Tuesday – Sunday, from 10.00 – 17.00 hours in Science Center NEMO in Amsterdam. Location: Oosterdok 2, 1011 VX Amsterdam (on top of the IJ tunnel, only 10 minutes walking distance from Amsterdam Central Station).
For more information, go to: http://www.e-NEMO.nl

Partners
The exhibition is a cooperative undertaking between NEMO and the Air Quality Programme Bureau of the municipality of Amsterdam and has also been made possible thanks to the DOEN Foundation. Science center NEMO is the place where young and old get to learn about the prospects and opportunities offered by science and technology. In the coming years, NEMO will be focussing on the contribution science and technology makes to solving problems such as climate change and exhaustion of fossil fuels and raw materials in the science center’s Innovation Hall.

With the ‘Amsterdam Electric’ programme, the municipality of Amsterdam is hard at work stimulating electric transport in the city. From an economic perspective, this also offers major opportunities for new innovative developments.


DOEN Foundation is the fund of the Dutch charity lotteries and contributes to preventing further climate change by reducing the emission of CO2. In order to achieve this goal, DOEN support initiatives in the field of sustainable energy and sustainable transport. The exhibition Everyone Electric is supported by DOEN from the National Post Code Lottery fund.

[Lock]

Seen here:
http://www.boredpanda.com/cool-inventions-from-the-past/

Cyclomer_1932.jpg (57.53 KiB) Viewed 1833 times

From that site:

The Cyclomer, a bicycle on land and water can ride with a load of 120 pounds.

I'm thinking hub motor...