New England Human Powered Vehicle Rally

I finally got around to uploading the pictures off the camera from last weekends Human Powered Vehicle Rally at the Portsmouth, NH Sustainability Fair. As usual I took more pictures of hardware than people. There were some nicely done home builts that I might want to copy. Thanks again to Ethan Davis for organizing the event.

Car Free on Earthday

I had the pleasure of celebrating Earthday with a photo shoot and interview about my velomobile for the New Britain Herald our local paper.

Tasmanian homebuilt velomobile pictures

I recently found this great set of pictures of a homebuilt coroplast velomobile on the BentriderOnline message board velomobile thread. The builder lives in Tasmania, Austrailia, but thanks to the internet we can see the whole process. The pictures document the build and start with the finished product. To see how it was built start at the end and work back to the begining.

For the last 6 months I've thinking about how to build a tandem recumbent trike using what I've learned from the last couple of projects. I started with some 1.75 inch square aluminum tubing salvaged from the renovation of a doctor's office. The tubing was the frame of an interior glass wall above the reception counter. The tubing was just sitting there waiting to get taken to the dump so I asked if I could save them the trip.

Here's a picture of the cut tube laid out on the floor of the back porch. Off to the right in the dark you can barely make out the back end of a 20" suspension mountain bike. The white circle shows the placement of the front wheels. The beast is long, almost 13 feet. I've designed it so that it will come apart in the middle so that it will fit on the car roof for transport. There's lots to do, but it's always nice to see how its going go together. Like the past projects, the the tubing will be riveted and epoxied together. The seats were purchased from Andrew Carter whose Recycled Recumbent website is quite interesting.

Lots of pictures of Velomobiles

I just stumbled on a Flicker Group called Velomobiles It's the biggest collection of velomobile pictures I've found to date.

Rebuild of Mike's Fairing

While a nice concept, our attempt at a front fairing out of a recycled coroplast political sign detailed in the Nov 16th post was not a success. The attempt to bring together the strips of coroplast into a nice smooth curve in the front of the two top sections just didn't work.

So back to the drawing board for a much better design. This design used a 4'x8' sheet of orange coroplast and an 18" by 8' section of left over yellow coroplast. All of it 4 mil as we haven't found anyone to sell us the thinner 2mil stuff.

This time the fairing uses a much simpler two pieces on each side with a middle channel to improve forward vision. The picture below shows the fairing almost finished .

It still needs some tape to cover the seems but other wise came out pretty well. Lacking an obvious place outside to mount the headlight, we cut a hole in the front of the fairing and mounted it inside by attaching it to the aluminum frame visible in the first picture above.

Here it is from the side. The back ends still need to be trimmed after the tail box is done. Entry is enabled by tilting the fairing forward. Next step is a wind shield. More pictures click here

Progress on the fairing

Mike and I made substantial progress on the new fairing design. More Pictures
This fairing is being built for Mike's Catrike Speed. The Catrike poses a particular challenge for coroplast fairings because of its reclined seat position. Its usually hard to see over a fairing that doesn't hit your knees.

To solve this dilemma, we put a sight channel down the middle that lowers the fairing by 3.5" between your knees. The nails in the picture are just temporarily holding the coroplast to the aluminum frame. Besides dealing with the sight line issue, our other goal was to build this front fairing out of a single 4x8 recycled political sign.

The final challenge was to see if we could successfully copy Ethan Davis's fairing mount. Ethan developed a very clever design that has a jaw that clamps down on a bracket attached to the fairing frame. This makes a secure mount which with a push from your toe releases the fairing for transport or in case you just want to ride unfaired for a while.