Sunday, December 11, 2011

First steps

Last week the HubJohn took its first shaky steps into physical reality. It included a couple of stumbles.

Setbacks included Søren running into a tight dealine at work, forcing us to postpone our shopping trip to Metalcenteret. Secondly the nice man at SKF revealed that the bearings we'd hoped to use for the front hub steering mechanism cost 1300 dkk / $230 a piece, which is about what we hope to pay for the entire frame. In order to make any sense the hub must be both cheap and easy to build, so it was back to the drawing board. We are now considering both off-the-shelf car-components and a CNC cut bolt-together sandwich assembly with roller bearings. Concept sketches for the sandwich are shown below. Let's see what happens when these new ideas hit reality.






Since we were not able to get the aluminum for the full scale bike this week, I picked up some balsa wood at the local hobby shop, which Søren turned into a 1:100 scale model of the lower frame. Balsa is a very soft and bendy wood, but the model proved to be nice and rigid. This seems like a good sign of the strenght of the Czech Hegehog assembly method that we are using.


Czech Hegehog


Based on the N55 XYZ SPACEFRAME VEHICLES building system - www.n55.dk


On tuesday we'll be at it again:)

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