The Smoothie Bike Project
My sister-in-law Elaine asked me to make a Smoothie Bike for the South of England Show
Joanne agreed on my behalf, so Elaine sent me some pictures of what a Smoothie Bike is. For the uninitiated, it's a bike with a blender. There are tons about, just google!
Having looked at the pictures and done some more research, I decided that I could do better than that myself!!.
This Youtube video is of the end result....
And here is a picture
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Here follows some photos of the build process
Start with some bikes:
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Do some cutting & shutting with bikes and some exhaust tubing:
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Modify a mobility scooter transaxle by locking the diff, trimming the halfshafts and welding a sprocket to the shaft (to make a generator):
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Fit a cooling fan motor from an LDV 200 series to the Kenwood Blender. This gives us a 12V Blender:
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Mount up the generator:
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Check it fits in the Range Rover....:
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Start building up the seat:
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In fact I changed the seat in the end to have two runners.
Make a tensioning device for the generator chain:
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Check I can sit on it!:
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Random brackets:
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Build up a seat from chipboard, foam (kneeler) and vinyl seat covering:
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Starting to get an idea of how it will look:
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To enable smoothies to be made without moving the bike, the easiest answer seemed to me to modify the 3-speed back wheel to have 2 speeds and neutral. This turned out to be relatively straightforward, the first picture is a complete Sturmey Archer 3-speed gearset, the 2nd picture shows the parts you remove to convert 2nd gear to a neutral gear:
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Now to start the gearsticks (one for the brake and one for the rear-wheel gears which have been modified to be 1,Neutral,3 instead of 1,2,3):
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Mount up the blender now the chopping board has arrived:
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Do the stand. This was problematic (and took a few attempts) because I wanted it to be rock-solid, but still fold away:
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I decided that I wanted the rear wheel hub in a mountain bike rim, so I needed to mix/match two wheels:
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The long chain from front to rear needs a tensioner on the slack side to stop it flapping around. I modified a Derailleur mechanism:
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Then some guarding around the chain at the front was required:
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Getting close to being finished now:
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So lets take it all to bits and paint it!:
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And put it back together again:
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Some more YouTube
First Smoothie (or is that Lumpie!)
So now you know what's involved in building a Smoothie Bike!
