Not sure if this is the right sub to be posting this. If not, please direct me to the right one. My highschool auto shop/technology teacher tasked me with designing and building a walking bicycle using Jansen’s Strandbeest linkage to replace the rear wheel. I was given 2 months to completely design and build one. I will be making the legs by cutting up an aluminum fence and welding pieces together, but that’s about all I have planned. My teacher showed me these videos to use as reference:
https://youtu.be/fXXJ1LOqHEk?si=TS6A6Tf3Jrkh8g7D
https://youtu.be/YA6GSD4OOkw?si=mdOO8uH500-AsPPj
I know nothing about engineering or design. I was just shown this video and told good luck. Every year this teacher picks one random student to make one and no one has ever been successful. I want to be the first one. Please give me advice on how I should start and proceed with this project.
by Significant_Book_408
6 Comments
You’re not gonna be able to weld aluminum fences into something rideable if you don’t have any design or engineering experience.
Aluminum is one of the hardest materials to work with even for professional welders
The first video shows you how much the bike is involved. It provides the seat, pedals, handlebars and a 1/2 in pitch chain. The legs are all on you.
One key is to notice that you are building four identical linkages, one for each leg. They are driven at different phases.
Look for old heavy steel clothing racks those can be cut up and rewelded.easily
This is an extremely non-trivial problem to design a solution for, and assuming you can design it (or steal a design), then it’s an extremely non-trivial problem to engineer a viable working model of, and on top of that you say you appear to have no fabrication experience and have chosen an *unforgiving* material to fabricate with.
Either the teacher is taking the piss, in which case you should ignore them, or they are setting you up for failure, in which case you should confront them.
I would say /r/BicycleEngineering is a better sub for this topic, but it’s not. It’s too quiet there and, frankly, the bicycle part of this is only a small fraction of the project.
I would look at the Velocipede Salon or the Custom Framebuilding Forum for fabrication advice, or otherwise seek out engineering and fabrication expertise elsewhere. Most of us here just fix them, we don’t build them.
I would watch some more videos and then make a small working model out of skewers or stir sticks or something. Maybe use a 3d printer if one is available. Steel conduit may be strong enough for this, though may be tricky to weld because it has a thin wall. Good luck!