Wood Bike, 100kph? on a budget

I would like my next bike to just be for me and my own selfish ideals. Not for fashion, or to blend in with the local Lycra bunch, or to ride on one of megacorp's next season must haves, and not to be even that practical, sexy or safe. I just want to go fast using as little as possible.
I always appreciate design that stretches the full potential from fairly modest materials, to me that's good design. Exotic materials seem to have a bit of a "halo" effect in regard to perceived performance advantages. eg.formula 1 uses carbon fiber and titanium, so if we make a penny farthing out of that it will be fast. No it will still be shit. I'm not arguing it will not be better than a cast iron one but maybe we should stand back and look at the design from a distance to see what the real issues holding it back are?

A very large chunk of any electric vehicles budget and weight budget is battery. Most of us spend more on battery than bike! I'm not going to whinge about batteries not being good enough, too expensive or "bigoil" or "patent owners" just keeps all the best stuff on a dusty shelf somewhere. I would just prefer to minimize the need for carrying so much of these heavy, expensive lumps around.
At commuter speeds of 60km/hr my down hill bike uses around 2500w or about 25km range with 1000w/hr of battery. If I reduce frontal area and improve its drag coefficient down around something like a competitive racing recumbent (around .035CdA) I should get around 250km!! on the same battery, or go the same distance and my battery costs dropped to just 10% of what it used to be. I know most of you get it and this is all baby talk but i have not seen any real max efforts for economy. Doctor bass did pretty well with around 200km distance? But i think it was weighed down with a fair whack of batteries, and rode real slow. But he set a good bench mark.

For the monoque chassis i looked at various materials and made some vacuum infused test panels of various cheap and nasty cores (paper honey comb,cheap blue polystyrene,end grain balsa(my favourite) and strip plank paulowina timber) and for fiber(bamboo, jute or burlap or hessian and fiberglass layups) w'll use a bit of carbon fiber in high load points. One of the drivers for material was also for rapid prototyping and to minimize the amount of sanding! The hessian looked really good,(well piss week compared to man made fibers) was cheap and had a "green " organic fiber look but it really drank the epoxy resin, around 55% by weight (fairly heavy) and so would need a good mold for resin infusion to keep the resin weight down. I am building a large yacht(it involves a LOT of sanding) and more sanding makes me want to punch myself in the face, and making nice composite infusion molds means LOTS of sanding, so i shelved that idea and choose strip plank paulowina or kiri. It looks like balsa but weighs about 290kg/ cubic meter compared with balsa's 150kg. It is plantation grown so encourages a market for planting trees not knocking them down and it was the cheapest $120 for all the timber needed to make the bead and cove strips 1/4 X 20mm for the body/chassis. Any way here's some photos of the fiberglass model i made 2 weeks ago. I have machined all the bead and cove wood strips, made the buck and strip planked one half of the body and scored a free GM 500W mag wheel motor 18inch (thanks Toolman) and it will probably be FWD to start with but will be able to fit large RC motors on the back. Please give comments or feel free to take the piss. this is a work in progress. P.S yes it does need trainer wheels for landing.

I like this idea very much! I've long thought that making a monocoque was a good idea, but haven't ever had the time to get around to building one. If I did, I was planning on using the lost foam method, as you've done with your model, pretty much as Rutan home built aircraft are made but with most of the foam being removed.

I look forward to seeing how this comes out, should look stunning if your strip planking it and finish the strips naturally.

I like the sound of this project. Can imagine the reaction of something like this getting around the suburbs.

When you say monocoque I take that to mean all the internal structure will be supported by the skin of the vehicle from internal formers and braces etc.?

Have you done any sketches of the internal frame and layout?

I think my next bike build (after the current steel roadbike build I'm doing) will be wood.

It's a damn good material. Spruce is supposed to have some excellent structural and fatigue properties, though with the external of the bike being structural, I don't think you would even need very strong wood to get the job done.

Whole bike wood or just the shell? Seems to me that steel for the basic frame might be lighter than most wood. But wood for the fairing would be strong and light, just like an old ww1 fokker shell was. It's more or less wood canoe technology, well perfected tech.

This is brilliant. Wood has better tensile strength to weight ratio than aluminum. Go with it. If they can make supercar out of wood including suspension why not a bike:

http://www.joeharmondesign.com/

Chucky needs some head support for confort and aerodynamics.

Supply me with metric measurements, I'll draw it up in SolidWorks and make some aero simul... :wink:

http://peraves.wordpress.com/dupont-kevlar%C2%AE/

Love it, love it...

Supa kewl, subscribed whoa!

This cought my eye this morning.
Very cool project & I am a huge fan of strip boats. looking foward to the progression.
Wood is my favorit medium for creating.

Hi Jeremy, Yeah Rutan is a bit of a hero of mine. He had free form open minded designs and an early adopter of composites and his planes have really raised the bar for performance, like sub orbital hops, 1st non stop no refuel flight around the world etc.
I have been involved with using polystyrene foam dissolving tools for some very big carbon fiber structural tubes before like 22meters long. Dissolved foam is an ok method, we used cnc type machines and it makes a heap of mess machining cubic meters of foam off and liters of styrene to melt out the cores which makes a toxic smelly goop. The volumes of foam needed makes it not that cheap and its probably best for single skin structures which are less stiffness to weight efficient than sandwich type structures. Some times when you walk past a pile of foam shavings and you have a static charge they lift off the ground and stick to you like sticky gravity defying blue snow and they are very light and you breath them in, Yuk!
I suppose i wanted to enjoy actually making this bike and a bit against supporting big oil, Dow chemicals etc. although i do need a couple of kilos of there help(epoxy). I'm originally a metal worker so wood is just so nice to work with it smells nice and has a feel good eco slant. You could easily make literally a carbon copy of this for about half the weight at around 10 X the price, but i don't know if it would have the same overall appeal as a green low tech but still high efficiency type vehicle.
hOtrOd The design could not be simpler naca 64-0xx 21% 2600mm long, and just rotate your solid works model into a bulb. You can plot the coordinates for the whole bike off a formula or from the model yacht bulb generator. Chucky doll is anatomically correct for me or he was after a bit of grinding (Barby dolls are not like me). he was a bit of a tight fit so i changed from 20% to 21% thickness and it still seems fairly small. I could of made a more complex design and pinched a little bit of frontal area, but building a symmetrical design means i can use the same simple buck for top and bottom of the bike saving money, time and materials, then just glue in some wheel wells, wheel covers, head rest tail cone, seat and bulkheads made from fiberglass/end grain balsa and then seal it up like 2 Easter egg halves. I'm trying to keep it low tech so any one could build something similar with with low tech "bucket and brush" type composite construction and get a result.
I would love to know approx Cd, CdA etc. if you have the means?
I encourage everyone reading this to put in their current e-bikes motor/battery specs etc into the grin simulator and then start messing with custom drag coefficients and see the wh/km improvements and speeds achievable with less air drag.
This will take a bit of time to make, and really low 2 wheelers do have pretty bad manners but it should be an interesting ride.

Zappy

Rough wheel locations

That looks bloody marvellous! I'm even more looking forward to seeing how this turns out now.

Paulownia is an interesting choice, especially as it's such an all around useful tree, fast growing, light, easy to work, can be sustainably harvested (it grows back from the roots once felled) etc. It's a pity it's not commonly available here in Europe.

Boody hell, i did not expected it to move that fast on the build. Super.

looks good,

Looks like you could turn this into a boat! ebike/ecanoe

oh i feel like trying to build my own canoe now

+1

After all is said and done, do you expect to have any room for storage, maybe with a small door?

Cargo, groceries?

Now for this you need center hub steering . Is there software for wind tunneling simulation?

EDIT: Found it, autodesk inventor + project falcon

If you can keep the water out you will have a boat lol

Bump.

this will prob work really well when done... and should hold up good...

but when i see wood... and 100kph on the same line .. your nuts lol

Is there any updates on this?

Sorry there has been a few distractions, like a new kelly on my downhill bike, repairing my downhill bike after my relatives flipped it. another cro motor & kelly controller on a downhill bike, nieces magic pie to hot up, weld ally battery boxes for Brian, fix the neighborhood's kids electric bikes and a little work on CA120, and pack up my teenage kids to Europe for the year. Its also been too bloody hot to work! I just get too hot at the end of the day's work, give up and drink beer.
I went off on a tangent for a little while researching about tyre rolling resistance.
As the aero drag drops a large amount by having such a small streamlined body, tyre rolling resistance becomes a lot larger part of my total drag, probably around 50% of the total. So this needs to be minimized, if we are to achieve high speeds with budget savvy, low power motors.
I looked into importing some super low rolling resistance solar race car tyres, and 14" motorcycle tyres do fit the 18" bicycle rim golden motor mag. This is a bit dodgy, but toolman and i have done this for a few years of offroading using motorcross tyres, but occasionally it does pop a bead off the rim.
Any way i found that greenspeed recumbent slicks actually had lower rolling resistance then the expensive solar race tyres and i had 2 X 16" 349 tyres covered in dust on the shelf! So it fit the budget(free!) and the mag rim had been broken offroad an rewelded by me and was a bit wobbly so i stuck it in the lathe and machined 8MM off the diameter and the tyres fit (with a bit of lube) . I made them a bit tight in case the tyre grows at higher speeds?
The motor was a bit of a basket case so i put in some new hall sensors some cooling holes in the side plates and machined the left side plate for a larger thin shell bearing on an aluminum axle collar and fed new 8awg wire into the little 500W golden motors hub. This motor is just a start and it needs to be changed to delta to bump the kv up etc later. I thought this small diameter tyred hub motor to sweet to sit under the bench while i finish the wood chassis so i needed a test chassis and fast.
I pulled my nieces pink girls bike (Bianca) out of the garage sale pile, a borrowed little high voltage 18fet controller. and in 4hrs and $3.80 worth of extra bits(i put 2 new nyloc nuts on the hub axle) i created lots of wheel spinning under steering terror. This side testing is great entertainment and we now have regular in shed motor khana courses over a few beers. It runs side by side with my friends stealth bomber up to 35km/hr wheel spinning up to that speed. The greenspeed slick is a very squeally tyre, overtaking stern lycra wearers on the cycle paths just smoking the front tyre is fun but my new/old tyre is now only canvas.
I cut down some 2nd hand spokes and rolled on some new thread, and laced up a 16" rim with a disc for the front wheel, and disassembled some old crap suspension forks, and cut down the stauntions and made some new heavy wheel lugs to be welded into the bottom of the forks. I have made a foam wire cutter to make some bits as well. I have sat in the timber tub and it feels snug but comfy. Sorry this is a bit slow I'll pull my finger out and try and get some more work done.
Zappy

Nice idea and project!

subscribed!

Doc

Progress has been a bit intermittent. I had some time over the weekend. This is the top half of the body work. I have fiber glassed the inside of the bottom shell, not very well it was a bit of a rough job, but it is a very stiff structure. It maybe a little overbuilt but i'm a bit worried about this bikes road manners and i can see this thing sliding down the road sometimes not on its own wheels. So a little extra glass is OK. And i have strip planked the top half, I still have to make a head cone etc and maybe try and blow mold an acrylic dome screen. I know this this looks exactly the same as the bottom half, well because it is.

After all is said and done, do you expect to have any room for storage, maybe with a small door?

Cargo, groceries?

Click to expand...

This was never meant to be a station wagon! Sitting inside the pod it feels very very small with not much room for anything. It feels like climbing into a kayak but all the way up to your neck, the 16" front wheel and forks almost pokes through the bonnet area (it's that low) and the steering between your knees has only 160mm lock to lock. It has only 60mm of ground clearance to keep the aero draggy wheels tucked up inside the body work and the back seat rest is only 10 degree from horizontal.
I'll try and fair and glass the top shell in the next couple of nights. Then i can take it off the buck and trial fit the 2 halves and see if i actually fit in this aerodynamic coffin!
Zappy

This weekend i faired the paulowina planking. It took about 1 1/2 hours with a 7" makita sander polisher to knock off the the worst of the plank facets on the tight radius bends bits. Then i used a planetary sander with 80 grit disks and a hand torture board and a quick go over with the random orbital 80 grit. I then glassed 2 layers of 200g 0/90deg cloth old school bucket and brush with epoxy resin. This timber is very nice to work with and a lot more consistent than cedar planks in grain and hardness and to fair up something this big in so little time so easily is almost enjoyable.
I also have a new batch of A123 cells to assemble. I was thinking of using an 18fet 4115 controller with my 20s and a new 24s pack so 44s of A123 and just knock the float charge off before i use it. Has any one got any real world advice on max voltage for these controllers? It maybe a bit too a high voltage, What do people recommend?