CPHBS: Legendary

Twas the Wednesday before finals week, and what do I see but but a bunch of M.E's on their S.T.V's.

Single Track Vehicle design is class offered every year by the Mechanical Engineering department here at  Cal Poly.  In this class they spend a considerable amount of time gaining a theoretical understanding of lean to turn vehicle handling characteristics.  After writing scads of MAT Lab code, tedious hours of homework and laboratory inertial testing; they get to build their own bike, and today was their final day to show them off.

Some of the more polished bikes were able to use the SLO Bike Kitchens frame prep tools and many others made use of our bargain basement frame supply.  Amongst the crowd were bikes of all varying levels of completion and construction quality.

Now without further adieu, here are some of the standouts.  All of these pictures were taken by Rory Aronson, and can be viewed here.

Blaire's fully bamboo bike, only sporting metal bits in the BB, headtube and rear dropouts.  I believe that it weighed in at about 23 pounds.  This might have been my favorite project as he ended up with a beautiful project and did not have to sweat waiting for the on TIG welder available at any given time, which was limited.

Rory's cargo recumbent, which was another back yard project.  This bike was surprisingly stable, especially at low speeds, due to the low center of gravity. The only design issues that still need resolving are the steering linkage and chain line off of the jack shaft pass through the cargo compartment.

A student riding a ghetto wooden bike.

A beautiful 70% wooden bike, this was another of the projects prepped at the SLO Bike Kitchen.

Me goofing off on my triple tall.

Once the professor had ridden their bikes, many of the students bolted to finish the design reports that were due by Friday.  Good luck gentlemen.

Firsts

Brant has built his first Rohloff wheel. 

We want to ride durable, built to last bicycles on our trip. Brant is working with a local bike builder on his dream world touring bike, which is revolving around a Rohloff hub. Lauren hasn't found her perfect rig quite yet, but would like to have the same hub. 

In an effort to see what we are getting into, Brant is almost finished building a Rohloff configured bicycle for Lauren to ride. This hub is on loan from the campus Human Powered Vehicle Club.  So, Lauren gets to be the lucky girl with a Rohloff bike for a month or so. 

Here you see Brant putting anti-sieze on the threads of the cog to ensure that it comes off again someday.

Below is a view of the hub with its cog removed.  This requires a special tool that has already been purchased.  The interesting thing about the Rohloff cog is that it is reversible, meaning that you can wear out one side, flip it, and wear it out all over again.  The problem with the tool, like so many others in the bike world, is that it does not have a large wrenching surface.  This leaves your wrench prone to slipping off under high load potentially damaging the tool and yourself.  Brant thought of a brilliant solution, to put it in the vise.  Unfortunately, the cog is also the seal surface and he dumped the oil that remained in the hub after years of being in storage.  An oil change has since been performed.  Brant hopes to reproduce a custom tool, concieved by Aaron Lisco, and engineered and machined by Evan Anderson.

Here is the external shift mechanism showing the cable pully and the transfer gear, which must be properly aligned before installing the axle plate.

Installing the cables in the grip shifter.  The system uses two cables to pull in both directions, eliminating a spring from the shifting equation.

Fussing with the shift cables.  This system is significantly different from anything else I have encountered, so care must be taken to first peruse the owners manual.

Ah, a thing of beauty.

More to come.