Top 10: Recumbent Bikes
Trikes, too! No quads in here, though. That’s something we shall have to remedy, in future.
Transportation
Belt-Driven, Hubless Rear Wheel Bicycle
The aim was to use a hubless wheel to create a compact bicycle, with the benefits of a large wheel and belt drive.Hubless wheels have appeared in bicycle concepts already, and were first invented by Sbarro. However, few concepts have made it to prototype and when only used for aesthetic purposes, the disadvantage of extra cost out weights the visual gain. Lunartic uses the hubless for a reason; to house the working parts, reducing the wheel base but not sacrificing conventional riding geometry. Lunartic is supposed to be as compact as possible without folding or being awkward to ride, however there is the potential for the front wheel to fold up into the rear or for that space to be used for a laptop back, motor or dynamo.
Time Lapse: Lego Ship in a Bottle
This build from Julia Morley took “a week of planning, three days of building, a large number of expletives, and some interesting use of very long tools.” And you can enjoy the whole process (minus the expletives, which have been replaced with soothing music) in three minutes of 32X time-lapse bliss here. [via The Brothers Brick]
Top 10: Gears!
We have done both gear- and gear-making-related roundups before, but our gear world has turned (bam!) quite a few times since then, and we’ve covered some even hotter gear action in the interim. Someday there’s going to be a gear-roundup roundup. But for now, here’s our top gear content as it stands today:
How-To: Ship An Obelisk
In the 19th century, three ancient Egyptian granite obelisks—each weighing north of 200 tons—were shipped from Egypt to London, Paris, and New York. Postcolonial-era questions about whether ancient Egyptian obelisks shouldn’t perhaps be left in Egypt aside, how it was done is quite an interesting story. This, BTW, is just the first of what I expect will be many gems from my newly-discovered treasure trove, No Tech Magazine, a sister publication to Kris de Kecker’s Low Tech Magazine, which we rave about here all the time.
Homebrew Luge Track Comes Complete with Electronic Timers
Ryan Micallef and friends put together a backyard luge challenge that they call the Mario Cup, but were having trouble making accurate measurements of participant’s tract times. Fortunately, they are also hackers, so they threw together an automatic race timing system to help make precise measurements. Their system consists of two parts: A countdown timer/control […]
Jetpack + Skis, A Bond Prop or Maker Project?
Troy Hartman was building a jetpack that he planned to use to fly out of an airplane at 8000 feet. But before leaping from a plane into thin air, he had a great idea: Why not test it out on skis first? Hartman tells PM how his jetpack ski test worked, how fast he went, […]
