Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Roman Style

Well.....

Sorry for the good old month of freedom I took from the shop and the blog. Its been an exciting time working and living in the San Francisco bay area. It reminds me of the Twin Cities in September because its a bit colder and there is no BUGS!!! Plus to add to all the other great things PEOPLE LOVE TO RIDE!!!

I have been working at this new company as a concept fabricator and so far they are really happy with how I make it happen. The guys I work with, are my age times 3 or 4 and together they have hundreds of years of fabrication and crafting experience, so walking in to that shop everyday with my head hung low ready to learn.

So out of the blue, I recieved an email from a lady from LA asking if there was any way I could help her with an idea and if possible help her turn that idea in to something more then a pen and paper drawing.

The idea was to create a project for BurningMan coming up that would allow her daughter to be able to enjoy the weekend with everyone and have something neat to really show off and enjoy.

The catch of the project - her daughter has very very limited use of her legs forcing her to use a wheelchair for most of her day to day tasks. This build has to be very special to allow her to put the wheelchair aside and enjoy bike rides with the whole crew across the salt flats of Burning Man.

I thought really quick and the first thing that came to mind was a tag along bicycles and use hand pedals, kind of a copy of the bike I built months back for the dude that had no legs and was driven to ride a bike pedaling with his hands. After talking the lady about the project for her daughter, she decided that 2 wheels might be more safe then 1 so the next thing that came to mind was a Roman Chairot that you would sit in and pedal by hand. As soon as I said that, I could feel the smile over the phone and I knew I had brought up the right idea.

Time to Build the first project in the new Berkeley workshop.....

here is my first concept I quick drew up....
just kidding I didn't draw that.





about 2 hours in at this point, most of the chassis is done

the chariot will look like a tag along bicycle from the side profile in how it attachs to the bicycle in front.

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