Santa's Workshop

After this last round of finals I was happy to be doing anything besides studying, so it felt extra good to get back in the garage. I thought it would be fun to make all my gifts for Christmas this year.

This summer we went to an art fair which is where I first discovered bolt people. Pretty much exactly like it sounds, people... made out of bolts. Looked easy enough, the bolts, nuts, washers, and cotter pins are easily found at any hardware store. The violin bow is part of a bike spoke...ya, I have a few lying around. The heads were a little more difficult, I ended up finding these two at a specialty decorative wrought iron place downtown, then was able to order 1" ball bearings online for subsequent heads. Here is my first attempt from several months ago that I made for Maria.

side note: this eye grabber once caused a car accident

It was a hit with Maria so I thought I could do several others for Christmas gifts. They ended up taking a little longer than I thought they would but it was fun to turn the orange garage into Santa's workshop for a few days (insert joke about Santa's elf who wants to be a dentist).

Maria's mother Linda- the violinist
Maria's dad Pat- the photographer
J Paul- the cellist (ps. how should we get him to you???)

 group photo!


I was planning on making a pianist for my sister but she conveniently reminded me before Christmas that she had always wanted a set of chimes. I can remember when she was younger she would set up the chimes on a broom between two chairs and play them by herself...her husband said he wouldn't be surprised to catch her doing this with the new set.

I started by borrowing my mom's set to use as a template. My dad has a very good relative pitch and had been complaining about this set so I pulled out my old digital guitar tuner and tested each of the chimes. Sure enough, several were more than 50 cents off. Using the tuner I was able to see about where each of my cuts should be in relation to my mothers chime. I would cut long then grind it down for fine tuning. They didn't come out perfect, but pretty dang close.

Mia helping out.

Mia already had some christmasy fabric lying around so I was able to quickly sew up a carrying case.

Welder Babe

Usually I am on my own out in the garage but every once in a long while I am lucky enough to have Maria come out and join me. She will occasionally have something she is painting or reupholstering but one time she did ask me for a welding lesson. It ended with a burnt hand, but that wasn't until after she had made herself an awesome little jewelry holder.

Everything about this picture is beautiful.

Because we were working with a thinner metal the heat from the welder doesn't have anywhere to go (except into unsuspecting hands). The piece gets extra hot causing a neat bluing effect. Maria used this to her advantage, so in addition to welding the T joint, she purposely welded the back side of the piece creating this color pattern.

 This may be her last time dabbling with welding but I was really impressed with the way this little project came out!

Lazy Bike

http://www.youtube.com/user/crimpmasterc?feature=watch#p/a/u/0/yS9LB1ki-c4

A couple posts ago I talked about building an engine attachment for my longboard. My wife was convinced that the motor board was a serious accident just waiting to happen... she may well have been right. I built the engine trailer as a kind of modular unit so it could be fashioned with different attachments so it could have a wide range of applications.

Not long after finishing the longboard I was ready for the next project, preferably one that didn't scare my wife to death. I haven't covered too many on the blog, but anyone who has stepped foot in the orange garage knows that it is full of bikes. I thought it would be fun to make an attachment allowing me to hook the engine up to a bike, not just one bike, but my mountain bike, road bike, recumbent, and tandem (not the elliptical, apparently it already has the ability to break bones at the mind boggling speed of 4 mph...another story for another post .)
This is what I came up with.

So the bottom end (on the left) has a hitch that slips over the attachment on the engine, and the other end has a tube that can slip onto any seat post. This tube allows the trailer to swing to the left and right for turns, and it also has a hinge on it (interesting fact, there is a door somewhere that now only has 2 of its original 3 hinges) allowing vertical movement for uneven road surfaces (like speed bumps). The two lines coming off the end are the kill switch and throttle (the throttle was previously a gear shifter on a bike which I modified to make it move smoothly instead of clicking through its positions).

Here is the final product

It turned out to be a lot of fun. Maria and I even did the 13 mile loop at Red rock, there is nothing more fulfilling than seeing serious looking bikers sweating up steep hills, then blowing by them at speeds up to 30 mph.
One of the limiting factors is traction due to limited weight on the back wheel, but because of the angle between the wheel and where it attaches to the bike, it ends up pushing itself forward but also pushes itself into the ground creating a surprising amount of traction.


here is a quick video

http://www.youtube.com/user/crimpmasterc?feature=watch#p/a/u/0/yS9LB1ki-c4

My own little kingdom

I had a friend in high school who would always say "all you need is 40 acres and a mule."  I think I would even settle for just the 40 acres. I don't think I will be dropping out of dental school any time soon but I still liked this video.

http://vimeo.com/28676720

I just have to talk Maria into it...

Gas Powered Longboard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUymo7rTnZg

     So after last winter semester I had two weeks before starting the summer term. With Maria still in work it was up to me to entertain myself. Honda sells its 200cc horizontal shaft engines for about $350 but I found out that Harbor Freight sells a clone of that engine for $160. Right before my break that same engine went on sell for $100, and with a coupon you could pick it up for $80. I could do an entire blog post about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Harbor Freight, but needless to say, an $80 engine gets my mind working. I picked one up and brought it home and started making plans. The problem was I only had one engine and couldn't decide what to throw it on! I could put it on my commuter bike, I could put it on the recumbent, or the tandem bike, make a go kart, or throw it on our long board. They all sounded like fun so I started thinking of a way that I could do them all. What I came up with was kind of a modular idea so I could quickly change it up. I decided the easiest way to do this was as a kind of a push trailer that could be easily attached to various objects.

Most of the parts I needed could be found from gokart supply stores, but ended up being a lot more than I was willing to spend on the project. The only part I ended up buying was a centrifugal clutch (it disengages the chain under a certain RPM so the engine can idle at rest). The centrifugal clutch has sprocket teeth on it that are made for a wider chain so they had to be ground down. I put the clutch on the engine shaft and fired it up, I now had a makeshift lathe! Using a grinding stone on the angle grinder I was able to uniformly grind the spinning teeth down so they would fit a bike chain. My cousin Mark Hsiao was nice enough to give me some extra wheels he had lying around, I used one as the actual wheel and ripped the hubs out of another two wheels and fab'd some adjustable mounts for them so i could use them as bearing mounts for the live axle. I made my own simple frame to hold it all together and welded a bike sprocket to the axle for a simple drive line.

It has a trailer hitch on the front that can easily be attached with different configurations. I wanted something original so I decided to start with the longboard which ended up looking like this.

The handle has a throttle, brake, and kill switch. 

Put it all together and this is what you get->

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUymo7rTnZg

It made for a pretty exhilarating ride. The engine probably has enough power to get someone going over 60 mph, but the way I did the gear ratios it limits it to about 30 mph. If you don't think 30 mph sounds fast trying doing it on a squirly longboard. I asked Maria what we should call it and she just said "dangerous," understandably she was never a big fan of this particular project. I am still open to suggestions for a cool name, I am pretty sure we can do better than "gas powered longboard". Anyway, the back tire doesn't really get enough weight on it so traction is limited and makes it that much more squirly. Regardless, it is a blast to ride and there is just something special about bombing a longboard uphill.

Egg Bike

          So this is a project that I planned to start months ago. The idea is that you have a bike where the rear wheel hub is slightly offset from the center so it wobbles like an egg, and if you pump your legs just right you can propel it forward. So there is no chain, no pedals, no crank hub, no seat, should be quick and easy right? The tricky part is making a wheel with an offset hub which means making new spokes, each with a custom length, maybe by cutting and re-threading the ends or by welding segments together. But how long would each spoke need to be? I sat down to do the math... and i sat... and i sat...turns out I haven't taken an actual math class since 11th grade about 9 years ago and it was totally over my head. The math included variables for the inner diameter of the wheel, but also the outer diameter of the hub, and the fact that left and right sets of spokes are not co-planar so you have to consider the hub width. Anyway, I have been known to pull out my old TI-85 on projects occasionally, but this one had me stumped. Fast forward several months and i decided to email my brother-in-law Matthew, one of the most overqualified people i could think of. I sent him the measurements and this is what I got back the next day:   http://maffoo.net/EggBike/   Thank you Matthew for the idiot proof app!

    That taken care of, I proceeded to do what I do best, chop up old bikes. I started by stealing spokes off of a larger wheel. Spokes are actually threaded at the ends where a nipple(basically just a special shaped nut) bolts them to the rim, they require a special tool that i am sure you can buy somewhere but it was a simple fabrication job so i made this up real quick

These are also useful on normal bikes that have a bent wheel, you can adjust the spokes accordingly to straighten or "true" the wheel.

Using the Matthew's app i was able to make each spoke just the right length, i decided the easiest way to do this was to measure it off with it clamped in the vice, then hammer it over so it bends down right at my measurement.

   With the spoke threaded into the hub, i would then bend the spoke the rest of the way over so it was locked in, i could then trim back the excess.

Now time for the bike frame! I found a front fork off of a larger bike that was deep enough to accommodate my lopsided wheel and decided to simply attach it to the front end of a small bike. The frame of the smaller bike had a very thin gauged metal, and most of its structural strength comes from its shape. I didn't want to lose the strength of the larger tube by welding it directly to the smaller stem of the front fork, so i used this square section of steel as an intermediary. The other difficulty of welding thin gauge steel is that it doesn't have the mass to absorb the heat of welding. When you try to weld it it gets so hot that it simply gets blasted away. By using the thicker square section it acts as a heat sink making for an easier and stronger weld, it also makes for a nice surface to hammer the bike frame onto for nice adaptation.

The "front" fork is now ready to be added, nothing complicated here

Voila! It has that 3 different colors Frankenstein look, but a coat of paint could go a long way.

It takes a bit of practice to ride, you have to be able to feel the rhythm, but the neighborhood kids love it and have been over every day to play on it.

Here is the finished product in action

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUKmhPg9knw

The Orange Garage

The day will come when no level of organization will be able to contain the junk in my garage and I will have to start thinning things out. I thought I would start documenting some of my creations in preparation for that inevitable day and maybe take comfort in knowing that they still exist in some share-able form. It makes me think of other creations and projects from my youth that have long since been clutter controlled by my mother and are probably buried in a landfill somewhere. This will also be a nice way to share what I have been up to for those who occasionally ask "what have you been working on lately?".
I thought it would be fun to post current projects along with some description of the processes and methods used in building which may at least be of interest to the technically curious. In addition I think I will start sharing older projects I have completed. Some were well documented and may still be lying around somewhere, others (the landfill variety) are nothing more than old blurry photos at this point but still may be worth sharing. For those with zero interest in anything that happens in a garage, I will probably still be sharing pics from recent adventures and whatever else my lovely wife and I have been up to, even though she has that pretty well chronicled on her own blog http://miafran.blogspot.com. With any luck I may be able to inspire a few to ditch their computers for an evening in the garage and begin their own creations, and hopefully spark some discussion for improvements and new ideas. Thanks for reading!
-Rich