Spokeless Bicycle Built by Nine Mechanical Engineers
Nine mechanical engineering majors from Yale developed a prototype model for a spokeless bike last semester. As you’ll notice in the photo, only the back wheel lacks its spokes. This is because the group had limited time and money. The students said, seeing the back wheel was a success, they could easily install a spokeless front wheel. One of the nine seniors wrote a short article that you can read over at Reddit.
Here is a portion of a comment he added to his article, telling how the bike was built:
It’s a single speed setup. We used two cranks and two bottom brackets in the front to gear up the ratio. It goes from (IIRC) 53 to a 13, which is connected to the second crank and another 53 which connects to the rear hub. The rear hub is just a normal ratcheting rear hub that we mated to our belt pulley. Not sure if all these bike terms are right, but that’s the general idea.
The front wheel would be almost exactly the same as the rear wheel except that it could be a little lighter. Some of the aluminum can be shaved off since there’s no powertrain to connect to.
[ Reddit via CrunchGear ]
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