Eric's SpinCycle

(Posted 9/30/08)

A few summers ago, Eric made a bunch of bicycle-like vehicles. Eric does this sort of thing just for fun. For a guy who has very little spare time, this is pretty impressive.

A few months ago I sent him a picture of a circular bicycle made by artist Robert Wechsler. Eric liked it and said it would be pretty easy to make something like that.

About a month later, I was visiting him in New Mexico and we had a debate about what the minimum number of wheels one would need to build such a vehicle. Eric used the example of two unicyclists holding arms and said that it would work with any number higher than one. I made stupid arguments and said it had to be five or higher.

To prove me wrong, Eric and I started making a vehicle with four wheels, set at 90 degree angles.

Eric started by drawing a chalk cross on the ground and using it for a heathen sacrifice to the cycle gods.

Then he lined up the corpses of some dead bicycles on the points of the cross. Eric has a lot of bicycle corpses sitting around.

Eric started welding the beams that would connect the four wheels together.

In the meantime, I started sawing apart the bike corpses.

Eric put the forks on the support beams. There was a lot of math and figuring stuff on this step. It all had to do with making the bike level and keeping the center of the wheels in line with the tangent of the circle or something like that.

Eric got to welding. Welding always makes for cool photos.

Then, it got late. It got dark. Our wives wanted to play Scrabble. So we quit for the night. The next day, my wife and I returned to Colorado and I thought Eric might let the project drop.

BUT NO!

Eric lives in New Mexico, while DLaw, Rob and I live in Colorado. So in late September, we all met at the Great Sand Dunes National Park for a camping trip. And what did Eric bring?

The SpinCycle! That's right. He drove it 160 miles in the back of a truck to a camping trip in a national park. That's funny!

The SpinCycle had come a long way from when I last saw it. It was done, working and painted all pretty. It had cool orange seats. For some reason, it had a safety flag and water bottle holders.

You could get it going so fast that you had to hold onto the crossbars or you would throw yourself off the seat.

Here's a video of the SpinCycle in action:

Whenever we go camping, we have a contest to identify the least useful item that anyone brought. Never has there been such a clear winner.

Eric's Cycle Creations | Everybody Pees | Cookie Dough Ice Cream