Hasta La Gadget!

David Damshek's Diamove Concept is cute but flawed

David Damshek’s Diamove manages to tick most of the boxes on the concept bike clichéd feature list. Take a look:

• Hubless wheels ✔
• Weird folding design ✔
• Concealed cabling ✔
• Clever looking but unspecified drive system ✔
• Weak, non-triangular frame ✔

The Diamove may have a tiny, thin head-tube taking all of the bike’s structural stresses, a seat that is adjustable by a mere few inches, and a handlebar-stem that looks as if it would snap off in seconds, but it does have some good looks. Those bull-horn handlebars look great, and fairly comfy, and the penny-farthing (p-far) design-motif is clearly the Next Big Thing. And the front-wheel-drive eliminates the risk of wheely-ing on the short wheel-base.

But given that this bike looks pretty unstable, and that even when folded it is bigger than the Bromptons and Dahons you can already buy, we wonder why you’d bother. Oh, and there’s also the small point that it would be impossible to ride in anything but a straight line: Imagine pedaling whilst also steering with the front-wheel-drive setup, and then imagine the resulting fall and subsequent impalement on those bull-horn bars.

Single Motion Folding [Yanko]

See Also:

• Retro-Looking Penny-Farthing Freak-Bike
• Behold! The Car-Crushing Monsterbike
• YikeBike: Cute Electric Penny-Farthing
• Gorgeous Folding Bike Places Form Far Above Function

The CycloClean from Nippon Basic

CycloClean is a Japanese designed bike which purifies water with pedal-power. Aimed at the developing world, the bike can suck up, scrub clean and then store water from pretty much any source. Then all you need to do is ride home.

It works like this. You park up next to a muddy river or dubious looking lake. Lower a hose into the water, hitch the bike up on its stand, and climb back on. The rear wheel is kept off the ground, and the pedals now power a pump. Water is forced through a primary filter before moving on to an activated carbon filter, like the one you may have in a Brita jug at home. Finally, the water passes through a “micro-filtration membrane filter” before being stored in the vessel of your choice.

The CycloClean can process three tons of water in ten hours (you might want to take turns riding it). That’s enough to supply 1,500 people for one day. some smaller figure may be easier to understand: you’ll get five liter (1.3 gallons) in a minute. Filters should last for up to two years.

The bikes have already been deployed by the maker, Nippon Basic, from Kawasaki, outside Tokyo. They cost ¥550,000 each. That’s around $6,650. As you can see, they’re not going to be selling to residents, but the company has shifted 200 of them in five years. The bikes themselves are made to last, with non-puncture tires and redundancies so that you can still use the bike for transportation or pumping when the filters have expired, for example, and one great use for this sturdy beast is on the ground at disaster sites.

I love it (except the price). Not just because it will save lives and prove a money-spinner for some smart developing world entrepreneur, but because it yet again shows how awesomely flexible bikes are.

CycloClean product page [Nippon Basic via Physorg. Thanks, Chuck!]

See Also:

• Fast-Flowing Water-Filter Fills Bottles in Seconds
• Water-Bottle Filters As You Drink
• Water Bike Pitches Pedal Powered Purification
• Cheap Carbon Cloth Can Zap Toxins, Kill Bacteria

This is The Beast, and rarely does a product so clearly deserve its name. The 33KG (73-pound) monster is a hybrid electric bike, which means the motor kicks-in to provide extra power as you pedal, instead of using a throttle-style switch to run on the motor alone.

Despite its back-breaking weight (you won’t be carrying this up the stairs to your apartment), the Beast is fast, reaching up to 77km/h (48mph) with a pedal cadence of just 120. To keep this thing under control, the maker – M55 – has thrown some motorcycle parts into the mix. The disk brakes, for example, are from Brembo, a name not often seen on bicycles.

The gears are for a bike, though, and come courtesy of Rohloff, in the form of a tandem Speed Hub. Front and rear suspension comes from Fox, and the aluminum frame, handlebar and crank are custom jobs. The handlebar is more like a cockpit, with switches for the gears, lights and controls for the motor.

As you can see, the batteries are inside the frame. They’re Tenergy cells, more commonly found in hybrid cars, and can be charged to 80% capacity in just 15 minutes. Sadly, nowhere on the site is the bike’s range mentioned, a rather serious omission considering the price.

And speaking of price, how much do you think this Beast might cost? $5,000 (more than enough to buy a gas scooter like a Vespa)? Nope. $10,000, or enough for a used car? Nope. Try $33,500. For comparison, that money would buy you a Nissan Leaf, an all-electric car, with $500 left over. A beast indeed. Available for pre-order now.

The Beast product page [M55 via Cycle EXIF. Thanks, Adam!]

See Also:

• Monstrous Grace Pro E-Bike Defies Description
• Electric Bike Runs (Almost) on Water
• Gocycle Black, The Non-Electric Electric Bike
• Volkswagen Electric Scooter Charges in Your Trunk
• Yike Bike Electric 'Mini-Farthing', Just $3600

This is the Robo-Rainbow by artist Mudlevel, and its purpose is to brighten your day – whether you like it or not:

There’s not much to explain that can’t be gleaned from watching the hypnotic video, a piece of production as beautiful as the robot itself. Powered by a cordless drill, the torque is transferred to a counterweighted arm which lifts six paint spray-cans in an arc.

What looks like an Arduino circuit-board controls the speed of the arm as it traces an arc across the wall of your choosing, and triggers the servos that spray the paint. Even the spray-can mount is ingenious: six cans around a circular hoop that keeps everything lined up as it makes its circle, and at the same time gives the cans space whilst keeping the nozzles close together.

And best of all, the whole rig packs into a bike trailer.

It’s hard to find anything about this that isn’t awesome. The only problem might come from the cops. After all, you may be able to make a quick getaway on your bike, but with a long boom rattling paint-cans behind you, you’re going to be pretty easy to spot.

Robo-Rainbow [Mudlevel / Vimeo via Adafruit Industries and Hack an Day]

See Also:

• Rainbow Apple Sticker: The Ultimate iPad Accessory
• Plastic Flash Filter Kit: Is That a Rainbow in your Pocket …
• Gun Camera Adds Graffiti to Other People's Photos
• Halo: Light-Writing Graffiti Spray-Can
• Paint Whole Buildings with Light Graffiti

True story: I once asked my parents to buy me a Porsche 911 for Christmas. Amazingly, they did, only it was a lot smaller than the one I wanted. They bought me a toy car. I should have just made one, like this amazing pedal-powered Porsche, the Ferdinand GT3 RS, aka the World’s Slowest Porsche.

The car-bike is an art project, perpetrated by Hannes Langeder of Austria. It took a year to build, and cost as much as a real car: 13,000 euro, or $17,700. Inside, as you can see from the extensive photos (there are even more on the project’s Flickr page), the main structure is steel. This was then built out using a toy 911 as a model, covering the skeleton in plastic tubing and then skinning the whole thing with packing-tape and gold foil. Thanks to these simple materials, the entire car weighs in under 100 kilos [220 pounds]. That’s not exactly light for a bike, but you probably wouldn’t want to take the Ferdinand out for a spin on a windy day.

The car debuted in June 2010, as Autopia’s Keith Barry reported, but we got our hands on some additional photos, and the project’s pretty outlandish, so we think it’s worth a reprise.

The car looks fantastic on the road. Even though there’s a bike inside, it has the presence of a car. I’ll bet the rider gets a lot more respect from car drivers just because he looks like one of them. Even if he is tootling along at just 10 mph.

Ferdinand GT3 [Ferdinand Johannes L via Core77]

Ferdinand GT3 RS BikePorsche/Flickr

Artist Creates the Slowest Porsche in the World [Daily Mail]