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 Wednesday, June 19, 2002
I'm keen to build Woodbike, and I now have a settled workshop, but I need
to get some resources happening. To that end, I've setup a donation link
thanks to PayPal. The donation is purely optional, but I will frown dourly on
anybody who downloads the plans and doesn't make a donation or email me any
revisions they've made.
Nothing to report on the bike itself (I'd be keen to hear from anybody
who has downloaded the plans and tried building Version 1.5).
Tuesday, June 12, 2001
OK people, sorry I havn't got back to this for so long, I've had, a bit
of a crap year. I won't bore you with the details.
Nothing to report on the bike itself (I'd be keen to hear from anybody
who has downloaded the plans and tried building Version 1.5), just moved the
site to a more permanent home here. The old site will keep referring here for
a while, but best to update your bookmarks.
I'll keep you up-to-date once I can established a more settled workshop
Friday, June 2, 2000
Revisons: V1.2 is scrapped!
OK, a triangular prism is stronger than a sheet (you don't have
to hit me with a brick), and is therefore lighter for the same
strength. As a result, the tailbox (heavy, complicated structure)
and triple laminated seat and front spars (heavy!) are gone and
have been replaced with a triangulated box of 12mm sheet and
a simplified seat spar.
This has made the head simpler, as the 2 sides
of the box form a triangle with the rear axle, leaving enough
room for the head tube between them. The end result is hopefully
going to be much stronger and lighter than v1.2.
I'm glad I had this brainstorm before constructing
1.2! Using this design, with the parts precision cut and assembled
using stitch-and-glue construction, I should be able to keep
the steel parts to rear axle brackets, head tube, fork and front
bracket, plus a few nuts, bolts and pulleys here and there.
I still hope to do a wooden fork (Son of WoodBike?)
but I want to prove the main concept first. To that end, I'll
probably use a BMX fork.
Tuesday, May 30, 2000
Well, after a hard disk crash which cost me
only the WoodBike files (everything else was intact! <phew>),
and a mountain bike crash which has cost me time off work and
the bike due to a fractured collar bone, I've got version 1.2
up. This is pretty much the shape of things to come, but it's
vastly different to version 1.0, which was merely a sketch of
an idea. The full drawings will soon be available (I hope) from
the "Design"
page in PDF form. The basic preliminaries are there already (also
in PDF).
I've had some design issues to overcome. The
steerer head is posing problems as to how to do it in a SWB 'bent
without losing strength and rigidity, but I think I'm on the
right track. I may also abandon off-the-rack ply for my own laminated
wood design. Still essentially ply, but with the grain running
in the best directions for each location. This will also enable
me to build the steerer head to better tolerances.
However, because of my experiment with the
laws of gravity, I doubt I'll be cutting or gluing any timber
for a while. Power tools are best weilded by people who don't
have one arm in a sling :-)
Thursday, April 27, 2000
I've pretty much just done this web site and
finalised the initial drawing. Next I plan to move onto getting
the materials for the frame.
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