Poll of the Day > Dude makes 'Wheel-less' Bike...

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5b0DKfhPc4

Would you ride it? (Poll Question)

Looks like he is putting in a lot of peddling work for very little forward momentum. There is a reason that the wheel has been used as the most efficient means of ground-based movement and this perfectly shows that.

Aren't those tracks pretty much the same as wheels except less efficient?

Talk about trying to re-invent the wheel and ending up with something that takes way more effort than it is worth. Hard pass.

The point of a track would be to provide stability over uneven ground, but it requires lots of power. The point of a wheel is to provide smooth mechanical efficiency at the cost of some stability.

This achieves the worst of both.

What the shit is that? And that noise it makes is awful. It also looked inefficient so no I would not.

Not all inventions work.

That's just an oddly shaped wheel

Yeah; Id say its technically still running on wheels.

It just looks like just a fun project he wanted to do. Id try it out just for kicks and giggles.

time to end it all

That is still a wheel, a dumb shaped one but still does the function of a wheel just really inefficient.

When I saw wheeless I was expecting something without wheels...

doesnt seem very practical personally id like to see a pedal operated tank track

BlackScythe0 posted...

When I saw wheeless I was expecting something without wheels...

Depending on how you define "wheels," that might not actually be possible. Gears can be considered wheels, after all, as can any other simple rotating machine (including the shafts in belt drive systems). Treads are about the closest you can get to "wheel-less" without making some kind of walking mechanism, and even with a walking mechanism you're probably going to have one or more wheels somewhere in there (plus the notion of pedal-powered walking is... exceptionally silly). While treads are not themselves wheels, they're powered by wheels, so they're still not truly "wheel-less."

Dikitain posted...

Looks like he is putting in a lot of peddling work for very little forward momentum.

That's the nature of treads in general: The wheels you're powering to move the treads tend to be relatively small, in this case roughly the same size as the gear that's turning them. That's good for high-torque systems, but not so much for speed. He's mitigated this to a certain extent by connecting the crankset to a secondary axle that fixes a smaller gear to a larger one, ultimately reducing the final gear ratio, but it's still not going to compare to the kind of speed you can get by fixing a 3-inch gear to a 30-inch wheel.

Gimme a hover bike and I'll consider it

Also that video is six minutes too long

so what does he use as a wheel replacement?

treads?

that's still effectively a wheel.

Treads are essentially just a large collection of very small wheels

It looks like he created a mobile exercise bike