Hello Visitors & Loyal Friends,

This is Roland with no update from the road. It has been a frustrating couple of months waiting for the new Robin Subaru transfer case. Our machinist has needed to change designs on us at the last minute. Looks like the project is still in the works and will not be ready for testing until the beginning of February.

As you may know, Larry and I have been planning a cross country trip from Mexico to Canada along Historic Route US 89. Larry took the month of October off from work, and I hyped this up to friends and family. We had a great route planned out with lots of sideline stories about sustainability in the West and the need for energy conservation. But, seeing as how this type of technology takes time to develop, all we can do is cross our hands and wait for the mad scientist engineer to do his job.

The new engine transfer case will need testing, therefore, a road trip is still necessary. We have big hopes for this new line of motorized bicycle engine, and I hope that you can stay updated with this blog page. A revised trip, if it happened in the middle of winter, probably means that I will be hitting the road by myself adventuring around the perennially warm spots of Arizona.

I guess until that time comes, let me share with you some neat ideas we have been kicking around. The Robin Subaru transfer case has gone through a few design changes since we first filed for our provisional patent. At first we were thinking of implementing a Whizzer style V belt. As we thought about it some more, V belts can be hard to adjust, expensive, and sloppy. Living in the desert, V belts remind us of smelly swamp coolers, running constantly in the summer. The next re-design phase looked using small Kevlar timing belts. Remember that we are looking for optimal gear ratio for our new engine that would balance out the low torque and low horsepower of the 33cc engine. A timing belt seemed like the most high tech answer, but as we started to source out the materials needed, it began to seem as if the timing belt sprockets were too costly to either machine or purchase. Now we are back to chain. Spooky Tooth bikes have a long history of being chain driven. Sprocket assembly is simple. The chains are inexpensive, provide 100% traction, and are easy to maintain. The final stage of prototyping looks like we will be having an 18:1 gear reduction with a top speed of 31 miles per hour. The cool thing about switching back to chain is that we have designed our seven tooth output sprocket to be interchangeable with either a six tooth or eight tooth sprocket. This means that you can change gear ratios on the fly by swapping out sprockets, changing one tooth size, and increasing or decreasing top speed by four miles an hour.

This trip is an excuse to play around with new ideas. One idea that has been floating around in the back of my mind is the concept of gas/electric hybridization. Last year we imported some electric brushless front hub motors. It was just kind of a fluke, but we noticed that a charge-back would occur while coasting. Brushless motors work on the principal of an electromagnetic field (EMF). The controller modulates the EMF in the motor, and it was purely accidental when we found our motors throwing back an EMF charge. This is kind of, but not really, the same as regenerative braking; we call it regenerative coasting. EMF charge-back varies greatly depending on speed. We have seen that by pedaling or coasting downhill, the electric motor would give you a third of your travelled distance back to you. Meaning that if I coasted downhill for 3 miles on a dead battery, the electric motor would send a charge-back giving me 1 full extra mile. The question then becomes, is it possible to run the electric motor with a gasoline engine and avoid thermodynamic losses? These are the same principles that go into making hybrid cars. I am not really sure what we are going to necessarily do with this technology once we’ve explored it because the world of electronics is moving so fast that the idea may be outdated by the time we think about bringing it to market. But, what the hell, it’s all for fun anyway! Oh…did I mention, that (on paper) the gas/electric hybrid would yield 325 miles per gallon? Check back often or subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of this page. And if you have not done so, please register with our website. We will let everyone know through a newsletter if there are any major updates.

Cheers, Roland