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Posted by hipstomp / Rain Noe | 19 Feb 2010
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Comments (17)
For a class project, nine mechanical engineering students at Yale devised a working bicycle with a hubless wheel. It's suspension-free and they only had the time and resources to go hubless on one wheel, but it works:
Why do it? As one of the students explains,
First, it looks cool. Second, we only had a semester so we wanted to pick something that was both feasible and challenging. Also, you can do a lot of things with the space that opens up where the spokes use to be. You can stick an electric motor in there. You can install some sort of gyro balanced storage basket. Finally, the fact that we couldn't find pictures of a real spokeless bicycle online really sealed the deal.
via reddit
Comments
Its nice to see that this mans invention http://www.natuba.com/photo/FPtil8/ is being incorperated for other forms of transportation. It is a decent prototype and good idea for a school project but un practical for the public. The weight alone is a turn off and the cost of materials to make it light would be a turn off the. The fact that it needs 2 gear systems to generate enough rpms shows that their is alot to be done on the project.
Argh. ATTENTION DESIGNERS. Stop with the hubless wheels. They don't look that cool, once you realize the look equates to heavier, less durable, less reliable, etc etc etc.
Normal wheels are cool because they outperform hubless stuff in EVERY category.
Its not hard to say no one else has built it, if you dont bother looking.
The Monocycle
http://www.benwilsondesign.co.uk/
I have read all the reasons not to persue the rimless wheel however I with your help and guidence I would very much like to develope my own prototype.If you could help me find information as a way to manufacture a spokeless wheel I would greatly appreciate it.Having said that we do not know eachother and therefore you do not owe me a thing if you don't want to help no hard feelings.
Hey, hi please can any body pls aid me in how to build a hubless wheel. i have that as my project and i need vital information on it and how to manufacture a Hubless Wheel. Pls can anyone help me out, its urgent! Thanks!!!
lol, the ONLY point of a hubless wheel is to make a vehicle look cool.
now if you use a hubless wheel and still manage to make the vehicle look horribly ugly, you have failed on an epic scale.
why do people drive 300k supercars if they can drive VW Golf MkII, or 60k GTR's if looking for speed ??
Simple people ask "WHY ?", designers say "Why NOT ?"
Back in 2004 my friend Andy Tibbets decided to build an art car for Burning Man designed around a large hubless wheel. In 2010, this is what we had built (Hopefully the link works). What a wonderful project to be a part of :)
http://lostmachine.com/projects/pirateship/index.html
What a bunch of debbie downers here. The point of exploration is expansion of knowledge. The attitude of "screw it-WHY NOT?" gets a lot more done than poo poing ideas because some random person has attempted the same....
Bike looks bad ass.
It may be a neat idea.. But the friction is increased in that design and damn. They didn't take aesthetics into account whatsoever. What an ugly design all around..
There are actually a number of reasons you might wish to employ a hubless wheel. A wheelchair design a friend and I had linked from the WSJ was hubless...and the reason for that design choice was to remove the possibility of articles (or the chair user's hands) becoming snagged/tangled in any arrangement of spokes. Use your imagination a little before you knock down someone's idea.
Billy Lane has been doing this since the 90's with his motorcycles.
Kudos to the team for creating a hubless wheel. It looks quite complicated but also extremely heavy. As a cyclist (mountain and road), I disagree with the need to prevent articles from becoming entangled in the spokes. This is not a valid argument. Every wheel on earth has spokes to some degree because they work well. It would be better to see this technology applied to a more fitting application. Bicycles do not need hubless wheels, but perhaps power generation or medicine could benefit somehow.
Hubless wheel
http://sbarro.perso.neuf.fr/technique/roue_orbitale/roue_orbitalegb.html
What do you mean hub-less? it has the biggest hub I ever seen, it is as big as the wheel.
Hmm. Looks pretty cool, but in the practical sense, here is one killer question, "How well does it handle going over curbs or bumps?"
From the looks of it, a bit of trapped dust will destroy the gearing in the wheel system. It also looks unable to handle a decent bump in the road (shock absorbers are critical as roads get worse in this economy). It also looks unable to withstand any sideways shearing forces (such as a light kick to the side or a slight twisting force in the back wheel).
I'll be kind and not even bring up the issues of gearing speed variances for desired force multipliers.