The Quest for the Ultimate Electric Bike.

I few years ago, I began the quest to build the ultimate electric bicycle.  I wanted it to pedal like a mountain bike, go like a dirt bike, have finesse like a trials bike, and handle commutes like a scooter.       

Here are some early sketches I did using MSPaint(with early component specifications):

In a way I succeeded in meeting those goals with the drive train test mule bike that I built. 

Here's a video tour of the bike: 

And some videos of it doing what it did/does? so well, making people smile! 

The guy on the bike doing little donuts founded the first trails for the Redbull Rampage and said he had a blast!  Several veteran baja racers and one pro stunt motorcycle rider rode it and all came back white as ghosts from the acceleration!  

And I built a solar powered mobile machine shop to build it all in!

Thread here: https://steemit.com/diy/@apocaloptimisto/solar-powered-mobile-machine-shop

The end plan however,, until finances and health issues interfered, was to build a frame that would house the batteries, motor controller, motor, reduction, slipper clutch, NuVinci CVT hub,

Hammerschmidt 2spd cranks

Awesome downhill mountain bike suspension and brakes

and combine everything so it can interact seamlessly using Gates Polychain GT2 belt drives.

using industrial one way bearings as freewheels for silent coasting and durability

The single sided swing arm would house the final belt drive and be slightly pressurized by a fan driven by the belt so no dust or water could get in.

The coolest part though, I think at least, is the frame used some parallel links to suspend the seat and function as the upper rear shock mount that would allow for what I called on the fly variable ergonometry.  I didn't put in the paint layouts because I still believed in intellectual property to some degree at the time and was showing the sketches to potential investors and didn't want the idea stolen.

Pulling the seat height lever and standing up would result in the air shock suspending the seat linkage to push the seat up, raising the bottom bracket for ground clearance when offroad and climbing and decreasing rake and wheelbase for better manoeuvrability.  I have the cad files for the full frame geometry and component location from a side view and top view but get very bad headaches and no longer have a computer that will run CAD/3d  software so the drawings need to be fleshed out.  As I get more time and access to internet, the plan is to build up a dropbox shared folder or some better alternative if there is one, and upload everything, open sourcing it.  I just discovered steemit and have a bunch of content to offer so getting the computer/internet situation taken care of is my top priority.

I hope that you find what I've shared so far interesting or educational. I'd love to see the bike in my head and in my CAD files built someday so will be following this post up with more in the future.

I really feel like the Steemit crowd are the forward thinking, risk taking, early adopters that could really take this idea to the moon so if anyone wants to collaborate in any way, I'd love to hear from you and wil respond as promptly as possible.

Thanks for reading!