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14 comments:
Squarsh.
Damn. If you're only going to have one wheel, I think it should be round.
It's a trike. We made the frame out of cyclone fence posts. No idea how this happened but clearly a homemade seven-foot-tall tricycle is going to have weak points. The owner's comment when she posted her own photo on FB was, "Who does shit like this?"
Ouch.
Ooooohhhhh . . . . all three wheels in the picture belong to the same vehicle. Hmm. Looks kind of wanky, engineering-wise. Obviously too much sideways torque was able to be imparted to the front axle.
Yes, that is a problem. Bicycle wheels on custom vehicles get what they call potato-chipped all the time. But how such a sideways force was applied remains a mystery because that is a steered wheel and it's very difficult for a trike to push itself sideways like that. Maybe one of the few motor vehicles in the yard drove over it early in the morning whan no one was sober enough to notice. Or too much weight was hung on the right-hand handlebar. Ooh, that could be it. Some lummox tried to climb on or off the wrong way and the thing got yanked down and sideways. You're supposed to climb up one of the rear legs.
'Swhat happens when an E.E. does M.E. work ;-)
I like "potato-chipped."
We always called it "taco-ed."
Hungry!
Just realized that the bicycle wheel is one of those barely-engineered items. They work because they almost never, ever, encounter sideways torque--the bicycle leans, and the force on the wheel is almost always straight down, relative to the wheel. I thought about spoked car wheels, which do seem to work, but they are much wider, and the triangle formed by the left spoke, right spoke, and the inner rim is much wider and therefore more stable. Of course, all of my engineering observations must be tempered by the fact that I don't know what I'm talking about it. Just sayin.
Cart wheels also are being pulled so sideways force remains rare. Bicycle wheels are designed to be light, and so four-wheeled vehicles made out of bicycle parts experience a lot of taco-ing, unless they use tougher wheels. I don't know how the figure that out. Tricycles are simpler.
Maybe a tricycle could have upright trailing wheels in back, (as always) and so, most of the time, be sujected to little sideways force, and in front the steering mechanism could be designed so that the wheel tilts appropriately for a left or right turn of any and all degrees of severity, keeping the force in line with the wheel's . . . uh . . . vertical cross section. If computerized, the whole thing could be optimized for degree of turn and speed at the same time, to truly keep the force aligned.
Of course one must correct for the eleventh dimensionality deviation of the flux capacitor if it is engaged while in motion. And I don't need to tell you what that means.
That's why there's a rake angle to the front fork: To angle the wheel properly into the turn.
Of course the flux capacitor is now computer-controlled (and there's even a debug port into the black box), so 11-dimensional deviations are largely transparent to the user. Problem is, once the alkaline dust of the extinct lakebed used for field testing gets past the seals, unexpected behaviors result, including momentary dimensional shifts which correspond disconcertingly with sudden changes in altitude.
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