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Build Your Own Monowheel
glengineer writes "Just when you thought it was safe to buy a Segway, Popular Sci has an article on the Monster Monowheel, an 1,100 pound single wheel 'scooter'. From the article: '...works on the hamster-in-a-wheel principle: Move a wheel's center of gravity forward and the wheel turns.' It has an 80cc four-stroke Honda scooter engine and 80 pounds of lead for ballast. Scary part: the driver's seat is in the very front, and the seat scrapes the ground when braking really hard." The builder's website is theriotwheel.com.
Someone linked to this when we had the article about the Bombardier Embrio, another cool concept employing segway-type gyroscopic action.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
... is that they have a version that is licensed as a motorvehicle in California.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
I'm not so sure that it's a good idea to ride a vehicle that, if it fails at high speed, will run the driver over. All it takes is for something to seize up a little bit.
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When I read the summary, I thought "Oh, like the one on Monster Garage". For those of you who didn't see the one they featured (briefly), there was a monowheel with a Caddilac engine, and the rider rode on the inside... at high speeds it was unstable until the designer added Stabilizing fins...
But, for those of you who don't RTFA: You ride in FRONT of the wheel. It's *really* fuggin' cool looking.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Check out www.zekewheel.com too, if you want a non-motorized wheel to ride inside of downhill.
There's a vehicle out there that really IS a monowheel -- it has no axle at all. It's a one-wheeled motorcycle with the driver inside the wheel...I've seen it demonstrated at motorcycle shows. The frame, holding the seat and engine, runs on a circular steel monorail with a tire around the outside of it, about 6 feet in diameter.
It's also a very retro-looking thing, built sometime around the early Thirties.
rj
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Here's a video link from a link from the article. It's described as what "must be the first operational V8 monowheel."
Nifty! Though I do like the RIOTWheel too...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Except that low-speed stability would be very poor, especially on bumpy terrain. Maybe a very large two-wheel single-axle vehicle.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
This is kind of off the subject, but it's a three-wheeler also.
T-Rex.
I've seen a few of them here in Montreal, especially during F1 season.
Apparently it's a road rocket, but given the low seating position and view that the rider/driver (as compared to a bike) has you'd have to be extra super careful when piloting it. Very cool, though, it never fails to attract more attention than the usual Ferraris and Bugattis.
One episode of Junkyard Wars (Scrapheap Challenge its original UK title) was to make the teams BUILD a monowheel and race it.
Their designs were based on the rider being inside the wheel. Picture a round cage with a seat. The seat is off-center so that it is near the bottom of the inside of the wheel. Thus the rider's weight is not in the center of mass (this is deliberate). When you accellerate the wheel, the torque swings the inner cage forward, making the rider's swing to the front, and when you apply the brake, the rider is swung backward. This is nicely stable because this is slightly countered by the tendency of the rider to get "left behind" when the vehicle accellerates, or get "thrown" to the front when it decellerates.
One effect of this is that the maximum amount of accelleration or decelleration force is mostly a function of the rider's mass. If the vehicle is accellerating, then the rider is perpetually "falling" from the front down to the bottom, and this "falling" force translates into the Newtonian
equal and opposite reaction" against the engine spinning the wheel. (Without this, the wheel might stay put on the pavement while the inner cage spins around.) So, the fatter the rider, the more push the vehicle can have (but, of course, the more push it *needs*, so I don't know if this is really helpful or not).
Anyway, it was a cool episode right up to the moment they started actually trying to race the vehicles. Then it was comically SLOW. I think the teams actually made good vehicles, but they didn't have the driver skill to use them, and so they were too frightened to make them go. I suspect it was something akin to trying to use a unicycle.
The vehicle is steered by the leaning of the driver, and it balances a bit like a unicycle.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I work in shipping, and had a lightbulb today. Why not fill bubble wrap bubbles with helium. On large packages it wouldn't make much difference, but on small things it would probably save a few bucks. Not sure how feasible it is though... Pat. Pending... :-p
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
For a humvee to be truly considered an ATV it would need to carry a supply of high explosive to remove gates, trees, rocks and a digger arm to widen the road where necessary.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.