A place for things that make your brain run wild. Motorcycles, concepts, Cars, Bicycles, Art, and who knows what else that comes out of the brain of Jeff Tiedeken
Well, its been a while of designing all the parts on the computer and machining every part to my exact specs by hand or cnc. Now the frame table is done! I loaded up a Yeti / Schwinn Straight 8 in the table to show how it works.
Here is a pict of the base table machining and then a pict of it all loaded up.
Not bad - The overall run out on the whole table is .016 of an inch or about the thickness of about 5 pieces of paper.
Check out this rad video I found, it shows most of the steps in building mass produced bicycles.
I like the movie because it shows them making the tubing in house - this was very common, up until the late 1970s for Schwinn and Columbia. The very large roll of thin flat strips of steel shows up at the factory on train cars and the tubing mill rolls the steel strip in to a tubing shapes. The last step of the mill is to weld the seam of the steel strips closed, making a sealed tube. Some machines even finish the tube by grinding it.
The other machines shown in the first part of the movie are Swiss screw machines. The machine is the fastest machine in the machining world for mass produced machined parts. It runs on cams and gears and uses raw force to drill, cut and profile the parts. The operators had to understand how to adjust the machines by using a large series of gears, cams and belts. The cutting tools used have to be made to the outside shape and contours of the parts as the machine only travels on one axis when cutting, so it could only make one cut to make the outside shape of the part.
I found these pictures from about 6 months ago when I wanted to build an extended bike that was all electric. I received 8 of the crazy Heizmann electric hubs for projects and decided to use one on a bike to haul stuff. I received about 300 feet of Chromoly from Plymoth tube company a year or so ago. The tubing was all off cuts and such, mostly about 8 feet long. With all that 4130 tubing I decided to use some of it to build this machine. Check out the pictures below. The bike took about 22 hours to build including talking on the phone for hours, drinking beers, eating lunch and dinner, and the end project was a rad flat bed bike that could go about 40 mph with the pedal assist. I built it using all the stuff I had laying around and it worked really well. With batteries it was about 55 pounds and had a range of about 4 miles full electric @ 18 mph. my temp fixture ready to start building some of the tubes in the battery box and tubes all in. back view with a Schwinn super sport in the box nice fork and brakes makes it complete
Check out this frame, I really like the design. It is an electric bike frame but the idea is very slick and very easy to make. It could be laser cut and stamped if needed. Sorry I forgot the company that makes it.
Good People