Alright, back to work on building bikes #2 and #3 with electric bicycles inside. Here’s the platforms we are mounting the body to.
More work on the bodies over the last couple months. Hard for us to get together these days.
And new vac-form engines. It’s getting close to time to mount them back on the bikes.
In process of getting the bodies back on the bicycles and we have the engines assembled. Engines are flat pieces with 3 raised screws on top. Those lock in place with long L-bars that have key-slots for shelves.
Vac-formed thruster covers are attached to the big flat horizontal piece we cut from the original template. It will slide on/off for transportation.
And color…
Starting with aluminum, masked damage similar to screen reference. Before washing off masking, we’ll blend some almond/khaki maybe nutmeg. Then a flat clearcoat. After washing off masking, a mist of flat black, and some washes of acrylic black and dark brown to dirty it up.
Here’s a couple more vac-form parts on the front fork.
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And here’s where it’s at in October of 2020, the electric motor works well and it’s a lot of fun to ride. There’s still some major pieces missing: intake on right side, rear engine detail, control panel details, wheel covers, etc.
The steel cable really helps keep the PVC pipe forks from sagging. It does bounce when you hit a bump, which can be scary. The steering vanes (front panels on the fork) are made of PVC sheet (not sintra), which is pretty flexible, so if the fork bounces too much, they can hit the ground and not break or wreck the whole bike.
The bulb-shape in the nose is a casting of an old souvenir drinking glass from a cruise ship. The original broke too easily, and since I had 2 of them, I made a mold of the 2nd so we wouldn’t have to worry about that again.
After doing one parade on these things, we realized some changes needed to be made. A mountain bike is designed for an adult to fully extend their leg when pedaling, so obviously putting something on top of that makes it even higher, so it’s impossible to reach the ground to balance when stopped without tipping the bike sideways. In a parade, going the same speed as people walking, it’s not exactly easy to balance without putting a foot down occasionally. So we needed to get smaller wheels.
Next we made panels out of black ABS, with mirror window film, to hide the wheels. These come off easily to make it easier to transport the whole thing.
It worked much better for the next Xmas parade that we tried. Didn’t get the mirror film or the panel below the front forks at the nose of the body finished for one of the bikes here. We also took to the streets on New Years Eve.
The new controller box for the 250 watt wheel had outputs for brake lights. With a bicycle headlight on the front, red xmas lights under the rear flaps, and a brake light in the middle of the back, I feel ok riding this on the streets downtown day or night. I’ve got some little mirrors on the handlebars, but they aren’t out far enough to really safely see behind me.
There are still some problems to address that I think are going to require a new base e-bike inside. The lack of shocks make it a very rough ride. This means some piece of wood or plastic is going to brake almost every time I take it out. It’s also very under powered. It only gets up to 15 miles per hour and struggles a little going uphill.
I also took one out for a charity group bike ride in the summer. They made me ride in front so I wouldn’t accidentally trip up other riders with that long front fork. This pic shows the kick stand solution I ended up with.
