Feeling depressed because you can’t afford a turbine motorcycle? Don’t despair, you can have a pulsejet bicycle instead. It may not be quite as impressive but if you tell folks you have a jet bike without giving them too many details, they’ll think you’re a real rocketman.

Robert Maddox builds pulsejet engines. Pulsejets, for those of you not up on your aviation history, were the power used by the infamous German V1 buzzbombs in WWII. The buzzbomb got its name from the buzzing sound of the pulsejet engine and the engines Bob builds, true to form, sound exactly like you would expect.

He’s selling the engines and the photo here shows one attached to a bicycle, though he’s attached them to go karts and all sorts of other things. This version puts out 50 to 60 pounds of thrust, enough for 75 mph or so on the bike but he builds bigger ones, too, up to 1000 pounds of thrust, for your larger projects.

He has some videos and it’s very cool how they glow red when running, you might want some heat protection on your pant legs but there’s a pretty high cool factor here. Experiment at your own risk.

Link: Pulsejet

Recently I asked if motorcycles were the future of performance. With increasing CAFE standards and the rising price of gas, cars are turning into high mileage clean air pumps which, unfortunately, underperform, especially when compared to the cars we used to drive.

I thought about this again while looking at these photos from Paolo Tiramani. He thought we might want to see his new GSX-R1000. He bought it last month and thought, “Hmm, … nice bike, a little short on power.” So he packed it off to Velocity Racing to see if they might be able to tweak it a bit, you know, so it could at least keep up with traffic. The boys at Velocity took a look and prescribed one of their turbo systems and now it keeps up with traffic very well, there’s even enough power for passing. With 258 hp at the rear wheel, the turbo, with a manageable 8 pounds of boost, begins to assist in the area of 6000 rpm and continues on to the 13k redline. But what you should keep in mind is power to weight, the horsepower to ton ratio for the Bugatti Veyron, until very recently the fastest street legal production car, is 240, a Formula 1 car 582, this bad boy is in the high 600s.  (Correction: The numbers above for hp per ton are wrong. The bike is 1290 to 1500 depending on wheel or engine hp. The F1 car is 1143, the Veyron is 475.) Think about that. This motorcycle, while a very high performance machine and very well done is not unlike other similarly equipped bikes.

While your neighbor’s Prius may get a few more miles per gallon, nothing, except another motorcycle, will come anywhere near the performance offered by a bike like this. You can buy a new bike, add a turbo, still get great mileage, have performance that rivals anything on wheels and not spend much more than you would for well equipped economy car. What’s not to like?

How many projects begin this way? You see something that looks cool and think, “I bet I could build one of those” and next thing you know you’re making sketches. Steve, a motorcyclist from Melbourne, Australia, watched a motorcycle dyno shootout and figured he could build his own dynamometer, how hard could it be? Well, it took him 3 years but he did it, he finally had his own homebuilt motorcycle dyno.

When I say he built his dyno, I really mean that. He wrote the software in Visual Basic, used a Basic Stamp microcontroller so the software could communicate with the hardware creating the data acquisition unit, had the drum built to his specs, put together a trailer to hold the whole setup and learned enough rotational physics to make the whole thing work.

The dyno he built is an intertia dynamometer, which means it’s the more common type where a drum is accelerated by the motorcycle’s rear wheel. When you record how fast the drum is accelerated through the rpm range, a measure of torque, you now have both torque and rpm throughout the range. With those two numbers you can calculate the horsepower at each point.

A very cool project overall, I like it.

Thanks for the tip, Andy!

Link: Steves DIY Dyno via Hackaday

Show up at bike night on one of these and guaranteed, you’ll be the center of attention. This is the same model Y2K turbine powered bike you’ve probably seen Jay Leno riding in a video and here’s one for sale on eBay.

Powered by a 320 hp Rolls Royce-Allison 250 Series Gas Turbine with 286 hp at the rear wheel and a top speed well over 200 mph, it’s not something you’ll want on your average weekend ride but it would be a hoot to crank one of these up at least once.

If you have deep pockets and the need for speed, check it out.

Link: Y2K Turbine motorcycle

With gasoline rapidly becoming a luxury item, the EFuel100 MicroFueler might be just the ticket. You just set this up next to your garage, plug into 110 or 220 volts, route to a wastewater drain, add sugar, yeast and water and in a couple of days you pump ethanol into your tank at a cost of about $1.00 per gallon. It makes 5 gallons per day. Hmm …

The MicroFueler is $9,995, but federal tax credits can cut the price to $6,998. $16 buys yeast for 560 gallons of ethanol, each gallon requires 4 gallons of water. You need a permit from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to make the stuff and you can’t run E100 in your motorcycle or car, it’s illegal for some reason, so you put in some gas at your local station then drive home and top up from your ethanol pump to make E85 or thereabouts. There is also a distillation only mode which you use to recover ethanol from discarded liquor and beer. (Who discards beer?) This is crazy cool.

E-Fuel Corporation makes this little refinery which will begin shipping at the end of the year though you can pre order now. Maybe it’s just me but if this works as well as described, I think they’ll sell a ton of these. VERY cool!

Link: E-Fuel via Wired

This is what the designer, Branko Lukic, calls the nUCLEUS, an alternative fuel motorbike concept. He thinks motorcycles shouldn’t mimic one another but instead should do things differently. His nUCLEUS (Why do designers write like they hit the caps lock?) is a “square against the air” which looks like a slab from the side but from the front presents only blades to confront the wind.

The bike squats down resting on the body when parked and rises up when ready to ride. Its appearance isn’t what I would call appealing but it certainly is different and as we look into the future, everything is worth at least some consideration, so here it is.

This is in no way a finished idea but only a concept and it’s sure to evoke an emotional response in some viewers, especially if they’re used to what might be called a “normal” motorcycle. Of course, once you get away from the usual internal combustion engine, the shape and configuration of the motorcycle may vary widely from what we’re used to seeing. Fuel cells, batteries, and who knows what else may not be the best looking technology and covering it up might be the way to go, an idea I’ve mentioned before, plus they may have little need for exposure to the air for cooling like your average engine, either way, things may look a bit different in the future.

Designers like Lukic often push the envelope specifically to get people thinking outside their comfort zone, their ideas may have merit, they may be silly, but at least it gets you thinking.

There’s a video at their site showing more angles and how it rises up and parks. More photos and the link below: Read the rest of this entry »

If you remember Project M85 Freeride, you’ll see the same idea in this new concept bike from Derbi, the Derbi DH 2.0, a mountain bike sized motorcycle with a small engine and very light weight. It has fuel in frame like a Buell, an automatic transmission, a 100cc air cooled 4 stroke engine, underseat exhaust, inverted fork, air monoshock out back and a dry weight of 88 pounds! That’s a lot closer to mountain bike weight than motorcycle. The DH in the name refers to downhill mountain biking. (They explain even the brand name Derbi originates from DERived from BIcycle. I didn’t know that!) And if I read things correctly, the engine can even be quickly dismounted for a fast downhill with less weight.

This is a pretty high tech little machine which also shows the guys who built Project M85 Freeride might be on to something. Cool.

Link: Derbi via Motoblog.it
Related: Project M85 Freeride

We’ve mentioned many times how the major motorcycle manufacturers have been looking at the market in India which, though protected by high tariffs, could yield substantial sales. Ducati today announced a partnership with Precision Motor to import the Italian bikes for the Indian market.

According to the agreement, Precision Motor India will be the exclusive importer of Ducati motorcycles in India. Precision Motor India also sells brands like Porsche, Audi, NetJets, Fendi, Dolce & Gabbana in India.

Link: Business Standard
Related: Harley Davidson Just One of Many Headed for India