Walking Bike

After thinking up of a way to update a bike, my mind took a turn and I started thinking of some... different, ways to make the bike a little more exciting. That being said, I said to myself, why do you ride a bike? So you don't have to walk of course! Combining both, I created a bike that walked itself. The first plan of action was to take the small DC motor, figure out the exact sizes and measurements needed to secure something to it, and start designing my plan. I knew that I wanted it to have some sort of shoe aspect so using a free online vector software (Inkscape) I drew a quick profile of a shoe in my house, vectorized it, and added a custom nod to my last name with "HA" on the side. I then drew a cut line vector around it and made it long enough to be one leg of eight that would form my walking wheel.

Plywood Sheet

2 AA Battery Packs

2 DC Motors

Masking Tape

Six .125" wide Nuts and Bolts, two 1.5" and four 1"

I then drew a design online on the free vector platform Inkscape for my bike. Being that it was going to be laser cut on a quarter inch thick plywood sheet, it had to be all flat and ready to just be put together. I then planned out the size of everything in relation to the motors and batteries (which I wired up to the battery packs with a spring wire connecter by simply clipping the positives and negatives from the motor to the battery pack together) and did a lot of trail and error till I got it just right. I learned that measurements must be EXACT for it all to work out so triple check all measurements and remember how it will be put together in the end.

After getting the measurements perfect, I used a local laser cutting machine in my area and got my design cut out into plywood. The rest was easy from there, I put it together, starting by screwing the two bike frames to the motors, one on each side. I then used the small circle spacers and place one on each of the four parts of the motors that would spin the wheel. I then put the actual wheels on the axis of the motor just above the spacers, and lastly I put the screws through the middle of the front and back wheels and tightened them together so the front two wheels moved as one big wheel, and then same for the back two. After all that I had the bike with two wheels and motors connected.

Finally, I decided to just tape the battery packs to the seat and below the handle bars (this could've been done better but I liked the way it turned out, having the wires and motors super exposed. The last thing to do was turn on the motors, and watch it go! Currently, the shoe bike likes to go in big circles over and over until it runs into something, thankfully it barely ever falls over so I think one day it could be a really unique bike to ride haha.