Old VS. New, Motorized Bicycles

Chances are, if you are over Forty, you will vaguely remember seeing something like this and snickering;



That one is brand new, for $600.00.

Courtesy of WildFire Motors.



Say hello to the latest upgrade.



Pretty wild design.

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The first picture I found courtesy of Mother Earth News, after doing some browsing from an article on a little three wheeled truck that gets 72 MPG.

I guess my point here is, I am trying to kick myself in the butt and find a low cost, fairly simple mode of hauling groceries.


I will be the first one to admit that even for being so skinny, I am over weight and WAY out of shape. I am not into pedaling, but I could be if I hooked up a motorized bike and a little trailer like that.

I am extremely fortunate to live, virtually, in walking distance of THREE small shopping malls, complete with a Dollar store, two laundry mats, two banks, a car wash, a McDonalds and a Taco Bell, a DMV and three cocktail lounges.
If they put in a liquor store in one of those malls, I am good to go.
I am not into walking though.
I walked miles and miles and miles when I was younger. Yeah right, uphill both ways.
Seriously, I did and I am getting old and crippled up. I had my lower back fused twenty five years ago and now I am having hip and knee trouble, on top of my back killing me all the time, the fusion wasn't all that successful and I have lived in misery ever since.
Something like that set up, I waste more gas getting in the truck and getting to the street than one of those little critters would use on a round trip to the farthest point out of that circle!
I don't know yet.
I don't have the money to plop down for a motorized bike, yet. I can have the little trailer built for virtually nothing, just some parts scrounging and maybe a 20 dollar stick of tubing.
We'll see,I keep thinking about it, it would be a perfect setup for some one like me who has so many conveniences close by, at five bucks a gallon for gas.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention I am five blocks from the Columbia River, it would be perfect for a part time fisherman.

This Is Exciting, I Just Punked Myself!

No batteries, gas, oil, or coolant.
A regenerating super efficient electric motor, with an automatic behind it.
You can use this thing to make electricity for your house, barn, you name it.
This is fantastic.


H/T to my buddy Dale, my Dad's oldest friend.


Cross posted at Ornery Bastard

Update
I've had Bullshit called so take it at face value until I can look into it.
I put it up right after getting it.


Update two
OHHHKAY, I see where I screwed up now. A nice gentleman pointed out the way I said regenerating violates the second law of thermodynamics.
Gotta love Google, I didn't have a clue.

Second Law of Thermodynamics - Increased Entropy
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is commonly known as the Law of Increased Entropy. While quantity remains the same (First Law), the quality of matter/energy deteriorates gradually over time. How so? Usable energy is inevitably used for productivity, growth and repair. In the process, usable energy is converted into unusable energy. Thus, usable energy is irretrievably lost in the form of unusable energy.

Thus the word regenerative would imply something along the lines of a perpetual motion machine, my bad.
I did find a reference to Mr. Reed and his remarkable engine here;
Conspiracy Central.
It concludes that attempts to locate Mr. Reed were unsuccessful.

Update 3.

Turns out he never did have a self sustaining motor and the video is bogus.
Nice.
Thats what I get for getting excited and putting it up without thinking critically.

My sincere apologies.

Go here for what happened and where it stands as of right now.

H/T One Fly for pointing me to the error of my ways.
Thanks bud.

More on Mr. Goodwin

Fixer hilights Mr. Goodwins high performance aspects below.
Here is more of Mr. Goodwins story, including the reference to Chinese food;

Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"

"Yeah," he said.

"No way," they replied.

He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"

One engineer turned and said, "GM said this wouldn't work."

"Well," Goodwin replied, "here it is."

And the best part;

His latest project?

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the [jet] turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"

And here's the punchline:

Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use."

Article stolen and reprinted from Daily Kos.

Bonus, there is a video now at the bottom of the article of the Impala
smoking the Lambo.


The original article is worth every bit of time and consideration spent reading it..

Alternative Engine Equals Direct Current Here.

To start, a tantalyzing snippet;

Motor

Some people find it hard to imagine our car’s Lamborghini-beating acceleration comes from a motor about the size of a watermelon. And while most car engines have to be moved with winches or forklifts, ours weighs about 70 pounds — a strong person could carry it around in a backpack (although we don’t recommend it). Compare that to the mass of machinery under the hood of $300,000 supercars that still can’t accelerate as quickly as the Tesla Roadster.

But more important than the motor’s size or weight is its efficency. Without proper efficiency, a motor will convert electrical energy into heat instead of rotational energy. So we designed our motor to have efficiencies of 85 to 95 percent; this way the precious stored energy of the battery pack ends up propelling you down the road instead of just heating up the trunk.

snip
Here is the link for more about the drivetrain of this electrical demon;
http://www.teslamotors.com/engineering/how_it_works.php

Zero to sixty in four seconds. No blower, turbo, carb,pistons or gas.
It's all electric, and it is bad assed.

The Tesla Roadster.
The car is under production now and they are taking orders for the '08 model.
Two cents a mile to run ,by their estimates, it has revolutionary battery packs to store the electricity that it uses and can create its own by using regenerative braking.
This uses the electric motor to create electricity as a generator and greatly increases the distance you can go on a single charge.
For us older gearheads, remember the old days when cars still had generators instead of alternators? How did we test them?
By hooking up a battery to it and turning it into an electric motor.If it spun, it should generate when hooked up and driven by a belt.
Same thing here, just wayyyy modern electronics governing the input and out put.
Here is their home page.

Its Time Has Come.

World's First Air-Powered Car: Zero Emissions by Next Summer

This six-seater tax, which should be available in India next year, is powered entirely by a tank filled with compressed air.

Barring any last-minute design changes on the way to production, the Air Car should be surprisingly practical. The $12,700 CityCAT, one of a handful of planned Air Car models, can hit 68 mph and has a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes for the CityCAT to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units; MDI says it should cost around $2 to fill the car’s carbon-fiber tanks with 340 liters of air at 4350 psi. Drivers also will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tanks in about 4 hours.

Of course, the Air Car will likely never hit American shores, especially considering its all-glue construction. But that doesn’t mean the major automakers can write it off as a bizarre Indian experiment — MDI has signed deals to bring its design to 12 more countries, including Germany, Israel and South Africa.

Popular Mechanics has the full article.

Unfortunately,we will,as usual, be behind the curve on this.
India's biggest car manufacturer has ordered 6,000 of these to debut in 2008.
Ex Formula One engineer Guy Negre designed them and I think we should start putting the pressure on so we could see them here in the U.S.
Zero emmissions. Zero.
The little buggers can go just over 65 mph and 125 miles before a recharge is needed.
MDI, who builds them, is building another car that also uses fuel and the range on those is 2,000 kilometers or about 1.200 hundred miles.

The duel energy engine, on the other hand, has been conceived as much for the city as the open road and will be available in all MDI vehicles. The engines will work exclusively with compressed air while it is running under 50 km/h in urban areas. But when the car is used outside urban areas at speeds over 50 km/h, the engines will switch to fuel mode. The engine will be able to use gasoline, gas oil, bio diesel, gas, liquidized gas, ecological fuel, alcohol, etc.

Both engines will be available with 2, 4 and 6 cylinders, When the air tanks are empty the driver will be able to switch to fuel mode, thanks to the car's on board computer.

The secret, apparently, to this engine is an articulated connecting rod that allows the piston to stay at top dead center longer for the air to charge the cylinder.

You can see an animation of it at work.

I think it's a pretty cool idea that's time has come.

A link to the home page here.

An Alternative Engine.

Way back in the 1940's there was a gentleman named Russell Bourke who had an idea.
He tinkered around and engineered a mechanical wonder in his home workshop in 1954.
It is difficult to describe, but I will give it a shot and then point you to some links that has videos and a working diagram that will give you a more detailed idea of his vision.
His engine is a pancake design that has two cylinders . Theoretically, you could marry as many together as you wanted for any type of horse power or torque situation you could reasonably dream up.
The opposing pistons are mated to a single connecting rod with a unique triple slipper bearing. The compression ratio could be varied from 8:1 to 20 to 1! It was tested with several different types of fuel and could run on unleaded gas, diesel, Coleman lantern fuel, natural gas etc. .
The original engine was spec'd at 30 cubic inches and tested at 35 HP @ 5,000 RPM. The emissions emitted were Carbon Dioxide, and water vapor.It could be carburated or fuel injected, run a capacitor discharge ignition or use compression to fire the fuel for diesel.
He built a four cylinder version later that was rated at 400 Cubic inches and was static estimated to put out 200 HP and 500 FT LBS. of torque at only 2,000 RPM!
They were also fabulously fuel efficient, running air to fuel ratios of 30:1 and even 50 : 1 with an exhaust temperature of only 190-240 degrees!
Enough out of me, go check out the website thoroughly, it is flat out fascinating.
Here is a working diagram so you can wrap your head around the design ,and here is the home page, be sure and check out the videos.

I would love to see one of these stuffed under the hood of a car.