Imagining Bikes - HPVS

If you've never ridden in an HPV you should. Just about all of the ones I've ridden in had an internal framework with a body(fairing) added over it. Most seem to run in the fifty pound range. Also, most seem to be not quite workable for the day to day trips and run into big bucks. There seems to be a few ways of working around the two wheeled HPV problem of "how do I do this by myself!?" of standing still or getting rolling?

Also, there is a problem of noise control while inside and rolling - the lack of. Does anyone else notice this? Just with a front fairing(clear bubble) there is this booming sound when you hit a hole or bump. It is either in the connection points, lack of stiffness or something similar because when you take a heat gun and lose some of the smooth bubble, it lessens.

Once, I took a heat gun to some discarded imperfect bubbles and made them into bug thoraxes. Even spray painted a few with contrasting colors. The booming went away and the colors really caught people's eyes. When you're on a tadpole trike, you need for people to see you. Doubled up, they also served as good bumpers!

Mentioning tadpole trikes, when I worked at making parts of the Dragonflyer trikes with a couple of guys, I mentioned to the (what should I call him?) designer that the trike had a problem of pedal steering and this needed to be overcome. Brushing off my comments to possible fixes(we parted company shortly thereafter) he later just appeared with gussets off of the main tube to the connecting tubes between the front wheels. Maybe the final straw came for him when I said out loud that this won't fix anything! And, it didn't. Anyway, others later on have pointed to this situation as just part of the problem with two wheels in front and so forth. But, I beg to differ. Just as we've been able to straighten out the frame flex problem of the LWB recumbent, so too will this tensioning member straighten out the frame steering problem of the recumbent tadpole trike.

I watched some wonderful videos of the HPV racers out in Nevada on Youtube. I'll have to find and list that here. One of the things which caught my eye was one vehicle that seemed to succumb to pedal steer and didn't recover.

One of our work projects over at Dave's was making a foam and plaster HPV plug for attempting to pull plastic vacuum molds. It didn't go well with the person doing it, so we ended up taking FRP off of the repaired forms. During this episode, another Aha! moment came when we were cutting all of the openings for this and for that. I had been following a guy from New Zealand who had perfected his way of getting around the expense of turning out faired FRP multihulled sailboats. Called the KSS method, it is my thinking that using his method of construction on a smaller scale, one could break down the HPV shell into components and bend the components over a form and join them together clamped into place doing away with the molds all together.



Another way would be to form them into yet smaller pieces and let these pieces slide on small tubes like fish scales which would interlock and you could then pull, or tension them to a rear part of the bike allowing one to make a convertible HPV and/or a side hatchway.



But, why stop there?

Why does one need an internal frame in an HPV? Why not make the frame the fairing? Take a piece of flat FRP formed using the KSS method and draw it together using a high strength stainless steel cable. Take one of similar size and mirror image and use another cable to bend and shape it along a longitudinal axis. Joining the two halves together at the ends basically would give you an aerodynamically shaped form. Put a bubble on the front end, join a front wheel steering assembly along with a crank assembly joined to the tensioning cables, place hard points for sliding up a rear wheel assembly, slip on your chain, fasten your seat to the tensioning cables,,,. What frame? What plug?

Think about it. Could we dare go another step forward and make the HPV totally able to be disassembled and assembled on a whim? Could we make it fit within a suitcase? Why not?

We can fly objects to Mars, land and go exploring but we can't revolutionize a form of transportation that has been around for over a hundred years?

I saw a guy go down in an HPV doing at least thirty miles an hour and I mean he went down hard due to a mechanical failure. The important thing here is that due to it being an open shell design, he did get some scrapes to one elbow before he pulled it inside of his fiberglass/foam shell but little else. He ended up next to the curb on the roadway but basically little worse for wear. If he had not been in his shell, he would have had some nasty road rash and worse. The shell? The fiberglass was a little worn in some places but easily fixed.
I feel that if I can get the weight/complexity problem sorted out as well as the production method, HPVs could be a viable form of transportation. Of course, that is saying that the problem of being able to stop and start without assistance gets solved. There is more than one idea for doing just that with available technology.