THE FUTURE OF INEFFICIENT TRANSPORTATION by Paul Chase
The Winded Dutchman. 3% efficient. 102% awesome.
For a long time now, the title for the least efficient velocipede was held by Wilbur and Orville Wright, having narrowly snatched the crown from Buster Keaton’s hobby horse. Fast-paced modern times have lost sight of the importance of inefficient transportation, but the visionaries at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, have attempted to liven things up with their Kinetic Sculpture Race. While the race isn’t running this year, Nova Labs has got you covered!
Left: Buster’s walking with style. Top: The Wrights famously attempted to build a bicycle but ended up with a series of wheelless wonders that were exceptionally bad at touching the ground.
I present to you the anthroelectric hybrid pneumaticycle: the Winded Scotsman, which is truly one of a kind. The pedals of this mad machine are not connected to the wheels at all – instead, they drive a 3D printed pulley that drives an air compressor. While a bicycle achieves upwards of 95% efficiency, this air compressor is maybe 60% efficient – here we convert all that superfluous energy into heat and a lovely popping sound. That’s not all, though! Once the air’s in the tank it’s routed to a pair of dual-acting pistons doing their best impression of a piston steam engine, with an efficiency that’s certainly in the single digits - yes, the efficiency of this system is something like three whole percent! Cam-controlled valves keep the cylinders 90 degrees out of phase so that one is always pushing or pulling when the other is fully extended or withdrawn. The end result of all this is something like an enormous spring sitting between the pedals and the wheels – it’s a wonder that it works at all! After pedaling for 10 minutes to travel roughly one block, I decided to turn it into a hybrid with a pressure-control-switch and a large lithium battery, increasing the range from “downhill” to several miles! One glaring issue remains, and that is the heat generated by the compressor. Page 26 | May Newsletter | Nova Labs
