My 5 minutes of fame

My xtracycle got featured as #95 at the Xtracycle Gallery: whee! I haven't posted in over a month even though I have 3 posts in draft... DOH! Hope y'all can forgive me...

Electromechanical Batteries: Electric Bicycle Dreamin'

Ok.. so this entry is slightly random, but I'm just freaking out, because it's something that's new to me, but not to the scientific community. Where the hell have I been?

Electroechanical Batteries have been in development at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories for over 20 years. According to THIS paper, they hold amazing potential for energy storage. The thing I think they're missing is the potential for vehicles that are much lighter than a car. Anyone who reads this blog knows what's coming next: electric bicycle power. If you could build a electromechanical battery using something like this Halbach array (or maybe something a little smaller) and keep the weight of the other components to a minimum, you could smash the weight/power problem that I have on my human electric hybrid SuperVato. Consider this: my current battery weighs about 26 lbs including the enclosure. The Gaussboys Halbach array weighs 32 oz. Two of em spinning in opposite directions would cancel the gyroscopic effect of the bike, and assuming they were mounted on limited excursion gimbals they could resist the braking and acceleration forces created by the bicycle. I'm guessing you could build a high capacity system for less than 10 pounds. I'm planning on going back to school in the fall for engineering, and now I think I know why: I want to build a Human/Electromechanical Battery Powered Bicycle. Maybe I've just figured out my dissertation thesis… wouldn't that be convenient?

Critics mock the electric bicycle because the products are often poorly made and poorly thought out. Electrical storage has been the Achilles heel of the electrical bicycle, but the Electromechanical Battery would have huge advantages over even the newest Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries because of the longevity and capacity. The weight differential between Electromechanical & Lithium Ion/Polymer appears to be fairly close. Electromechanical batteries would obviously cost more in the prototype phase, but because they appear to be pretty simple, I think the costs could come down significantly if production could be increased. I'd like to see a product like this made as "greenly" and equitably as possible, i.e living wages for the production crew, non toxic assembly techniques performed in energy efficient production facilities.

I can't be the first person to think of this…can I??? The designers and engineers want to make money from this by putting it in hybrid cars and in municipal systems. Most of the money for the project at Lawrence Livermore has come from corporate sponsors, so that's no surprise. That's nice for the car manufacturers, but cars still don't make a lot of sense a lot of the time, even if they DID use less fossil fuel. I'm all for putting this in municipal systems. It can't be any more dangerous than Nuclear power right?

CURRENT MUSIC: Revolting Cocks, Cocked and Loaded

-----UPDATE 7/6/08-----
I'm an idiot. Officially. Up until today I had the words "electromechanical" and "electromagnetic" used interchangeably in this article. Not ok, since they are completely different ideas! My apologies: publishing blog entries after you've been up late writing them isn't always a good idea. ESPECIALLY when you have proofread them at least twice. *Forehead Slap*

Breakdown

Well, I had my first real equipment breakage on SuperVato on 6/7/07. It was partly user error, partly bad luck. I'm not going to be able to report some of the data I had hoped to report for a while until I get the problem fixed. Here's the skinny:

YT ("yours truly" for those of you who HAVEN'T read Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash) was wearing earphones and listening to my riding mix. Normally I only do this when climbing on a MTB, but I've started doing it on the road as well: I figure "Hey, I can listen to music in a car, why can't I do it on a bike?". Well, for the most part I can, but there's one teeny problem: you don't always catch on to those little ticking sounds that indicate a problem with the bike. [ominous foreshadowing: check]

I felt more than heard the thwacking sound coming from the front wheel... I look down...DOH! The spoke that was holding the magnet for the Protege 9 sensor had snapped and the magnet was banging on the other spokes, the disc brake caliper housing... you get the picture. I came to an immediate and abrupt stop, cursing aloud. Now mind you, I'm had just shortly before picked up about 20-30lbs of Cliff Bars from the Bay Area Bike Coalition to deliver to the Marin County Bike Coalition, so I've got a loaded bike. The route is here. I noticed the spoke around mile 8.8 and stopped in front of the school. I ended up having a nice conversation with a woman named Janet about her electric scooter: it turns out she got it from the folks at Thunderstruck Motors, who were featured in THIS article in the IJ. Careful observers will note that my name comes up in the same article... about SuperVato (although it's not named as such in the article). Serendipity strikes... twice in one conversation. It turns out that Janet is a budding interior designer and is always looking for woodworkers who can build custom pieces... so I give her my Zomadic card and tell her a little about what we do. Maybe we can help each other in the future: either way the whole thing tripped me out b/c, I mean really, what are the chances? The only reason I noticed her at all in my slightly panicked/bummed state was that her scooter made ZERO engine noise… that and she stopped to talk to a fellow parent (her daughter goes to school that I stopped in front of) right in front of me, but I could have stopped 50ft earlier and never have noticed her.

After making several bail-out phone calls and realizing that no one really could help me without a big hassle to themselves, I decided (after unthreading the broken spoke from the nipple and pulling the hub side free) that I could make it home if I rode slowly. I made it home without further mishap, and the wheel is out of true, but not hitting the forks (yet). My brother has been coaxing me to do it, but now that the original wheel is temporarily out of comission, It's a good excuse to perform a wheel swap with my Heckler. I'm considering a bottle dynamo for SuperVato so I don't have to worry about batteries anymore (especially for the Burning Man trip). THIS page shows the 12v sidewall generator I'm thinking of, but at $300, it's pretty damn steep. I could go with one a SON28SB but then I would have to build a whole new wheel and I wouldn't be able to use the wheel(s) from the Heckler... penny wise, pound foolish? Hard to say here.. I really like the SON, but the bottle generator seems like an easier less intrusive solution... any one wanna chime in with opinions?

Polar F6 Data:
Exe Time this week: 6:43:12
Exe Count: 9
Calories this week: 3701
Miles Ridden: not sure…

Current Weight: 188.5 lbs

Stupid monkeys...

The Archdruid Report: Faustus and the Monkey Trap

I found the link over at Mauricio's Blog. Mauricio is a fellow Xtracyclist, and a regular poster over at Todd Fahrner's Blog. It's a great article and at the risk of repeating this point, for the third time, it points out that Biofuels are not the answer to our energy problems. Look, I'm all for using WVO (waste vegetable oil) to create biodiesel: this is giving it a second life. Cultivating crops for fuel only? Stupid stupid stupid. A line from Rush's "Territories" (released in 1987 on the Hold Your Fire album) song rings particularly true here;

The whole wide world
An endless universe
Yet we keep looking through
The eyeglass in reverse
Don't feed the people
But we feed the machines
Can't really feel
What international means
In different circles, we keep holding our ground
In different circles, we keep spinning round and round

Hard to believe that I used to quote Rush on a daily basis.. back in highschool. I can still do it once in a while. I'll be seeing them in Concord in August; already got my tickets.

Yeah, this post is all over the map... just like me.

Oh.. and a teaser: the Stokemonkey is completed. I fired it up for the first time today and it runs. There's some other details to finish (battery box placement to accomodate PeaPod, front derailer hookup, shellacing of the new cork grips, readjusting the handlebar accountrements, cable tying off loose ends), but after 8 long months of procrastination and excuses, the end is nigh. Just in time: I did my first ride to the shop in many months on my wife's bike and I was pining the whole time for SuperVato. It didn't help that the seat on her bike is NO substitue for my B17, the handlebar position on her bike (for me at least) is several inches below the seat and I was carrying a 30+ pound pack on my back. It all added up to a less than comfortable ride. None-the-less it was a beautiful day, perfect temperatures and the ride was glorius. I kept thinking to myself "why haven't I been doing this all then time?". It finally lit another fire under my ass and I finished the Stokemonkey install and started on the other finishing details. I'm waiting for the shellac to dry so I can sand and put on another coat tomorrow evening. Monday morning may find me riding to the citay.. though as Todd said, I should really take it easy on the battery the first few rides. Oh... and I weighed the entire rig (w/ battery). Sit down if you're standing (wait who stands to read this blog anyways?).. a whopping 95 lbs! I was thinking all along that somehow I was going to come out around 80 lbs, but ... no. Then add me (currently around 190), my son (I'm guessing, but probably around 35lbs) and a load of groceries (20-60 pounds) and I'm up between 320-380lbs. Does that exceed the rating of the FreeRadical? It's rather unclear. I'm guessing that I'm nearing capacity, but it's probably more about my wheels than anything else.