You can't buy a CycleKart and, even if you could, the racers wouldn't let you participate. You have to build your CycleKart. It's one of the many reasons this is a very cool hobby.
Rocketgarage Magazine, Engine Fuel & Passion since 2007. cafe racer, scrambler, bobber, flat track, motorcycle, lifestyle, endurance, restomod
ROA Motorcycles have created 18 impressive builds over the past three years and the latest – a new take on the classic BMW R80 – could be the best yet.
The artist and engineer usually come at their work from completely different ends of the creative continuum and often go
In 1933 The RAC let women drive at Brooklands on equal terms with men. It meant that the nineteen-thirties became the heyday for women racing drivers.
If you’re into BMW café racers, you probably know the BMW Café blog, run by Dutchman Michiel de Molenaar. This BMW R80 is the bike that originally got Michiel hooked on building and riding old motorcycles, and shows what can be done with a small budget and a lot of inspiration. He started with a crashed 1988 model, which means it should have a 797 cc version of the classic boxer twin. But the previous owner had changed the original engine for a one-liter motor of unknown provenance. Then the gearbox packed up, so Michiel retro-fitted the transmission and kickstart
Motivation, hard work, and a whole lot of passion pays off. A big thanks to @ironandair. Excited for the opportunity. Stay enthused! @littlehorsecycles @nexxnorthamerica #enginethusiast #fairingfriday...
RAHT RACER amplifies pedal power up to car speeds, giving the cyclist the same workout, but at greater speeds.
A few years ago you couldn't sneeze without hitting a custom Honda CB. But the baton has now been passed to the BMW R-series. And with good reason too—old ‘airheads’ are easy to come by and bulletproof. With a simple layout and a removable subframe, they’re great for customizing. The Spanish workshop Café Racer Dreams doesn't just customize BMWs, but it's racked up an impressive portfolio of boxer-powered builds—including a couple of newer models, like the R1200S that led our recent Top 10 best customs roundup. Orders for classic BMWs from CRD are streaming in. “It’s what our customers are
The Slegoon
Guide | How to have Fun Do the Twist | Floor it All in One | Bi-Plane | F1 Racer | Motorcycle Morgan Three Wheeler | 3 Wheeler | Roadster | 2.0L V Twin Harley 115 hp | Top Speed 185 kph - 115 mph |...
Racers know that moving the genoa fairlead outboard on a reach improves boatspeed, but many cruisers overlook this and wind up sailing longer passages as a result. Whenever the wind is abeam or farther aft, it is best to open up the slot between the genoa and mainsail. When a boat bears away from a close-hauled course and its mainsail is eased, the mainsail boom moves away from the
See that title up there? The one that starts with the name 'Scott Halbleib'? There will two groups of people
This delicately beautiful cafe racer uses a Laverda trellis frame and a late-production, modified Commando 850 engine. It was built by French violin-maker Daniel Delfour, one of a group of enthusiasts that runs a classic racing festival. The festival is at Circuit Paul Armagnac in the south of France, but Delfour's bike is now in the USA: it will go under the hammer at the 2009 Daytona Classic Motorcycle Auction in Florida on March 7. The excellent image, by the way, was taken by Benoit Guerry.
The other day, a friend asked how I want my life situation explained. He wanted to honor my privacy. I smiled. I too am a vault for many people. And I respected that he wanted to clarify exactly wh…
wow, what a great thread! Not sure how I stumbled onto this one, but I love these cars! Sound awesome too!
bringing together more than 500 items, the exhibition is the first major overview of the subject of childhood as a means for modern design thinking in the 20th century.
TGR Staff Bosozoku ( 暴走族 , literally "violent running tribe") is associated mostly with Japan's own version of outlaw bik...
Among the most famous Stephens creations are Ranger, the majestic J-classer co-designed with W. Starling Burgess that left all America’s Cup competitors miles behind; Finisterre, the three-time winner of the Bermuda race; Vim and Intrepid, both breakthrough 12-metre designs that proved close to unbeatable in their eras
. Those lovely folk over on the SFMUK site have started up a couple of new group builds, one of which looks to make the creative juices flow: http://www.scifimodels.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=99:group-build-boonta-eve-classic-podrace&catid=11:groupbuilds&Itemid=19 Basically, build a Star Wars Pod Racer, using anything you like, as long as its to 1/35th scale and no more than 2 foot by 1 foot big. How could i resist? Starting to haunt DIY, hardware and kitchen sections, looking for donor parts
A lot of bicycle technology was incorporated into early automobiles; ball bearings, pneumatic tires, the differential and the list goes on. The efficiency demonstrated by modern human-powered vehicles should be an example for potential improvements in car design. While the two art-piece cars on view below are seen as jokes by the car community, they serve as a departure point to discuss a possible directions for aerodynamic improvements for that most popular commuter vehicle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaQB_tgS7f0 I don’t recall how I stumbled on the pedal-powered Porsche. After discovering it I asked the machinist at work, who is a Porsche devotee, about it and he just laughed. It seems it is a big joke among sports-car buffs. The people at Top Gear knew all about it. Driven by Richard Hammond, it holds the record for the slowest lap on their test track. And there is a follow-on Enzo-Ferrari-like vehicle which appears to be slightly more aerodynamic due to the fact that the Enzo is based on a formula one (F1) car layout. More about the F1 layout later… http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ISEGDWpKAeY Now clearly, both these vehicles, created by Hanes Langder, should be categorized as art pieces. Weighing 100kg and having a huge aerodynamic footprint compared to any enclosed recumbent tricycle; the vehicles cannot be expected to be even as fast as an upright mountain bike. Nevertheless, the human-powered vehicle builder in me is bothered by the laughter associated with the vehicles. Pedal-powered vehicles can be viable transportation alternatives, especially with a small power assist, but the vehicles need to be ultra efficient for 1/3rd of a horsepower (250W) to be able to move the vehicle at anything greater than a walking speed. http://grynas.delfi.lt/tv/article.php?id=51610123 In contrast to the Ferdinand and the Fahrradi, RJK pedalectric velomobile is intended to be a viable commuter vehicle. I have no idea of the weight, but the cross-section of the vehicle appears to be smaller than Herr Langder’s creations, even if the open cockpit incurs more air drag. Of interest is the RJK has front-wheel drive and rear-wheel steering, which may result in a weight reduction from a shortened drivetrain. However, the vehicle’s speed in the video, with one peddler, does not seem to be very fast. A minimal weight, minimum cross-section, maximum streamlined recumbent bicycle, such as the Varna Tempest, can probably cruise at about 50mph given a 250W input power. Unfortunately, low visibility, difficult entrance and egress, limited steering etc. prevent such a vehicle from being a practical for commuting. The posts on this blog have spent probably an excessive amount of verbiage discussing how to optimize a vehicle that would use the bike lanes for commuting. See “Rx for a Healthy Commute”, below. But how could the lessons learned from human-powered vehicles make a more efficient car? These lessons are minimize air drag, minimize weight and minimize rolling resistance. This discussion will primarily focus on efforts to reduce air drag. Weight reduction is assumed to come through use of lightweight materials, space-frame and/or monocoque construction techniques and optimization of load paths that route the payload weights as directly as possible to the wheels. Narrow profile, high-pressure tires would reduce rolling resistance. Air drag is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the vehicle, the drag coefficient of the vehicle’s shape and the cube of the vehicle’s velocity. The goal in streamlining the vehicle is to reduce the form drag, the product of the area and the drag coefficient. If the form drag gets very low, then skin drag gets significant, and it is beneficial to reduce the total-wetted surface area of the vehicle. The conventional-rectangular four-wheel layout for cars does not lend itself to being enclosed by classic streamlined shapes. The difficulty lies with the wheels. Early cars left the wheels exposed and concentrated on enclosing the passenger and engine compartment, the fuselage. Since the top of the wheel is moving a twice the velocity as the vehicle, a rotating wheel has more drag than a static one. When the aerodynamics of the vehicle became more of a concern, the logical approach was to use a streamlined shape (teardrop) for the fuselage and enclose each wheel in a streamlined wheel pant as well. The structure that attached the wheels to the main fuselage also needed to be streamlined, often with wing-like sections. This approach minimizes the vehicle cross-section but results in added interference drag where the various streamlined elements came in contact with each other. The typical result is similar to the 1938 Hispano Suiza Xenia shown below. Or the contemporary Enzo Ferrari … This aerodynamic layout, enclosing with the fuselage and wheels separately originated with early motorized carriages. I like to think of it as the F1 layout, even though F1 cars cannot enclose their wheels. The alternative approach is what most contemporary cars employ, enclosing the entire vehicle in one or more streamlined shapes. The upside is that interference drag can be reduced while the downside is the cross-sectional area of the vehicle is increased and the aero shapes are less conventional and less efficient. If the vehicle area must expand excessively to allow the use of a shape with a low drag coefficient, the resulting vehicle may not benefit from an overall reduction in form drag. The Schlorwagen, below, has a low drag coefficient of .15 and looks very streamlined from the side view. But in the front view, the cross-sectional area of the vehicle appears to be rather large. The track (transverse wheel spacing) for the rectangular-wheel layout is determined by the width of the fuselage and the roll-over resistance of the vehicle when cornering. If the passenger compartment can be kept narrow, for example if the seating is reduced to two people in tandem, and the vehicle is allowed to lean like a motorcycle, that the cross-sectional area can be additionally minimized. See “The Drymer and Varna Lean Forward” below. Going to a three-wheel layout can bury one of the wheels in the fuselage and thereby improve the drag coefficient, especially if the steered wheel is buried. The downside of this approach is that, for a given rollover resistance, a three-wheel vehicle must be approximately 50% wider track than a four-wheel vehicle. This adversely increases the cross-sectional area. For simplicity, this discussion will concern itself with the more-conventional four-wheel rectangular layout. The design team at Edison2, who won the Progressive Automotive X-Prize for a four-wheel, four seat vehicle that bettered 100mpg, have been refining the F1 layout with the second iteration of their Very Light Car. Interestingly, the top view of the Very-Light Car Mk2 looks a lot like a modern version of the Hispano Suiza above albeit with a much greater degree of fender seperation and more streamlining. Edison2 is probably at the leading edge for efficient vehicle design, both in aerodynamics and lightweight vehicle construction. One means of reducing the air drag even more than the Very-Light Car is to narrow the passenger compartment by going to two-passenger tandem seating, similar to the Messerschmitt car from the 1950’s. It is of interest that the earlier Messerschmitts were three-wheeled with the single-driven wheel in the back. This is a later version which employed a larger engine. The rear seat of the Messerschmitt could hold a second person or haul cargo. An interesting design feature (shared by my friend Jerry Onifer) was that the center of gravity, c.g., of the vehicle was located in the rear-seat compartment. The idea was that the vehicle’s dynamic performance would remain independent of the load that was being carried in the rear seat. So the vehicle I envision is similar to the So-Cal Bonneville streamliner in the photo at the beginning of the article. I would use narrower tires enclosed in wheel pants and the structure connecting the wheels to the fuselage would fit within horizontal wing shaped enclosures. Assume a vehicle height of 40” (that of a low sports car). If the c.g.is lower than 20”, for a one-gee rollover resistance the track could be 40”. This is less than ½ the track of a typical car. There could be some additional benefits to having such a narrow vehicle, since it takes up less width on the road. Once you have a design for a vehicle that is aerodynamically efficient and light weight any source of motive power will benefit from the vehicle’s efficiency. I do not believe that electric propulsion is the magic bullet that solves fossil-fuel consumption problems. If the vehicle design allows for an extended driving range with batteries, the vehicle will get exceptional gas mileage with an internal-combustion engine as well. The above being said, I envision the tandem ultra-efficient car being propelled by a hybrid power plant. The power source would be a small gas turbine driving an electric generator. The electricity from the generator would, in turn power an electric motor located in each of the four wheels. There would be onboard batteries to provide for increased power for acceleration and regenerative braking. There will be a weight penalty for using four motors instead of using one motor with four times the power. Having a motor in each wheel also violates the suspension principle of minimizing unsprung weight. On the other hand, having motors in each wheel that can be controlled independently eliminates three mechanical differentials as allows for unprecedented traction optimization under microprocessor control. Volvo used a turbo-generator and wheel motors in a concept car during the 1990s and Jaguar used twin turbo-generators more recently. The X-Prize-winning Very Light Car weighed 830lb., was powered by a 30kW IC engine and had a drag coefficient of .16. Could a tandem two-seat version maintain the same drag coefficient, significantly reduce the cross-sectional area, weigh less than 200lb and be powered by a 7.5kW turbo generator? And would a pair of pedals get you to a gas station if you ran out of fuel? Hephaestus
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. 34. Southern heart | English eye | California
If you are in your mid-fifties and love motorcycles, you likely grew up with pictures and posters of Ago or Mike-the-Bike pinned on the wall of your bedroom and the Continental Circus was the windo…
Rocketgarage Magazine, Engine Fuel & Passion since 2007. cafe racer, scrambler, bobber, flat track, motorcycle, lifestyle, endurance, restomod
This is truly the moped to die for.
The photos in this gallery aren’t particularly crisp and big. They won’t blow up well to hang on the wall in your kitchen diner. But as photojournalism showing us how we used to live their high value is apparent. This was an era of war, when sugar was good for you (just look at … Continue reading "A Child’s Life in Wales 1939-1962"
At 17 years of age, the Great One began his career skating for the Indianapolis Racers of the World Hockey Association. He would be sold to Edmonton early in the season. The following season the Edmonton Oilers, Hartford Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, and the Winnipeg Jets would be the only WHA teams to become NHL franchises. The Whalers would eventually move to Carolina and become the Hurricanes. The Nordiques became the Colorado Avalanche. The Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes. (The Jets returned to Winnipeg last year with the purchase of the now defunct Atlanta Thrashers.) Only the Oilers franchise has remained uninterrupted since the NHL expanded to include the WHA teams. Rumors of the NHL returning to Connecticut have been denied by both the NHL and the Connecticut Governor. Quebec City is currently building a $400 Million arena in hopes of the NHL returning in 2015. The NHL, however, has made no such plans publicly.
Build a Billy Cart: There is a lot of building going on at Scitech at the moment with the opening of our new feature exhibition Ingenious. All that hammering and gluing took us back to our childhood and we just couldn't resist the temptation to build a billy cart. A b…
The stunning Midual Type 1 is the first production model developed by French manufacturer Midual. “Inspired by classic European cars and bikes from the ’30s …
Just how close a pair of custom-built racers came to unseating the kings of Reno.
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Alfredo Bianchi & Mario Revelli di Beaumont, Chimera 175, 1956. By Aermacchi.
That famous line uttered by Catholic Priest Patrick Peyton quickly had a word change when it entered the common vernacular
