Posted Jul 1st 2008 6:40PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: transportation hacks
The land-speed record for steam-powered locomotion has been holding steady for 88 years at 127mph, but a team of British engineers and stunt drivers will attempt to break it with the
Steam Car.
The Steam Car works by burning liquid petroleum fuel at 750° F, which heats 10.5 gallons of water, converting into steam. The steam passes through lagged pipes before it is injected into the 360-hp Curtis turbine at extremely high pressure and speed via compressed air hydraulics. It spins the turbine at over 13,000 rpm, powering the rear wheels, allowing the car to reach speeds higher than 150mph. The car itself is 25 feet long and uses about 1.86 miles of tubing. All of the hot pressurized steam is ejected from the exhaust, which means the car is only capable of running for about 3 minutes, and requires an 8-minute warmup.
The attempt to break the speed record will occur in late August at Bonneville.
[via
Newlaunches]
Posted Jun 25th 2008 11:15PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: transportation hacks
[Ben Nelson] didn't even know how to ride a motorcycle when he started on this
electric conversion of a 1981 Kawasaki KZ440. The engine wasn't a loss since the bike was nonrunning when he purchased it for $100. The permanent magnet Etek motor was $500 and each of the four yellow top batteries were $160 (only three pictured). He says that the majority of the conversion work only took two weekends. The resulting, still street legal, ride averages 20 miles per charge with a 45mph top speed.
More electric motorcycles on Hack a Day:
[via
Ecomodder]
Posted Jun 22nd 2008 7:28AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: transportation hacks, daily
[Dem_z] modded his Honda VTEC engine to use a set of
individual throttle bodies from a 2001 Suzuki GSX-R motorcycle. The fuel injection bungs on the throttle bodies were epoxied shut and the bodies were only used to provide individual butterflies for each cylinder. This one doesn't quite make our to do list, but it's definitely a hack.
[bender386] caught
my blunder first, so I'll be sending him a bit of Hack-A-Day swag. In the meantime, here's a little bonus: Check out this home built
anamorphic lens. Native 2.35:1 projectors have started showing up, but they're insanely expensive. By adding some image processing and a lens to stretch the projected image, you can get full width projection and use all the pixels on the projector.
Posted Jun 19th 2008 2:30AM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: transportation hacks, news
We're big fans of
scratch built transportation and got some great news earlier this month: After a long hiatus,
thepriceofhistoys.com has returned and is ready to serve up all the news about kit cars and home-built cars that you could want. For those who don't know, kit cars are sets of car parts that require assembly often lacking drivetrain components, which must be acquired from donor vehicles. Aside from kit cars, home-builds, and the occasional custom job, many of the cars the site discusses are also for sale.
Kit cars can be pretty fun on their own, but many of the builds featured on the site spice it up further by adding varying levels of customization. This
Tornado McLaren M6 GTR Replica, for example, uses a 3.5L V8 Rover engine and some custom body work to improve visibility. Another fascinating and rare kit uses a Beetle's chassis and features
a body that looks like a Beetle crossed with a Porche. Of course, none of these are as practical
cutting a Geo Metro in half for improved milage, but to car kit builders, practicality holds a very low place on their list of priorities.
Posted Jun 16th 2008 2:15PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: transportation hacks
[Doug Heffron] modified this 1989 Geo Metro way back in 1993. Gas prices had just started breaking $1.00/gallon and he wanted to show manufacturers how to build a fuel efficient vehicle in such troubling times. The car already got 58mpg (Prius: 46mpg), but [Doug] decided he could do better with some aero modifications. The car was converted to tandem seating and stripped of any extra weight. In its final form, it got 75mpg, but then gas prices stabilized and it was laid to rest in a shed. You can find out more about the car and see
photos from the build on its site (painful resizing).
[via
Autoblog]
Posted Jun 11th 2008 7:30PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: transportation hacks, news
We've been talking a lot about
alternate modes of transportation lately. The
360 inline skateboard immediately caught our eye for its simplicity and hubless wheel design. The usage seems fairly straightforward, but the videos posted by designer [Francesco Sommacal] don't make it look exceptionally fun; more like they're daring you to use the thing. What we find most jarring about this is how similar it is to the
Bushpig. Did the commercial gas powered version really predate this unpowered device?
The design is simple enough to understand, but we're not really sure where you can easily source hubless wheels like this. Any ideas?
[via
Gizmodo]
Posted Jun 9th 2008 8:30PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: transportation hacks
We've served up dozens if not hundreds of machines with a practical purpose, but we are always interested in machines like those [Steven Laurie] makes, which serve no other purpose than looking impressive, spewing smoke, leaving tire marks, and making a lot of racket. We'll give you the scoop on Steve's motor art after the break.
Continue reading Steven Laurie's Art of the Motor
Posted Jun 6th 2008 5:00PM by Juan Aguilar
Filed under: transportation hacks
Perhaps you've
seen this image before: a young kid tooling around on a pair of inline skates, pushed forward by a weed whacker cycle. While the instructions for this device would seem fairly obvious (attach wheel to weed whacker) the writeup appears to be nonexistent. If you have any information, do let us know, but in the meantime, enjoy these other weed whacker powered projects.
Continue reading Wheels and weed whackers
Posted Jun 1st 2008 12:51AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: transportation hacks, daily
It might seem like we're on a vehicle hacking kick this weekend, but [Rex] built an excellent
custom digital tach for his race car. It uses the classic seven segment displays, a PICAXE microcontroller and works with most engines. He's released full source and PC board designs to boot. This looks like a great little tachometer project for you microcontoller fiends out there.
Posted May 31st 2008 9:35AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, transportation hacks
The
Digidash project is an open source digital dashboard designed just for the megasquirt EFI system we mentioned in our diy
EFI motorcycle post. Unfortunately, the site doesn't link the hardware design. From the description, I'm assuming that it's essentially a graphic LCD driven by an Atmel microcontroller that talks to the Megasquirt to get the display info.
Posted May 30th 2008 11:00PM by Sean Percival
Filed under: transportation hacks
There are several very nice 3D mice out there for navigating services like Google Earth or
Second Life.
3Dconnexion for example makes a whole line of devices for 3D navigation. Their compact units offer 6-8 degrees of freedom with several customizable options. The company has an SDK available and many of their devices are natively compatible with Linux (or available for access through an XInput driver). So while that is all well and great, lets look at some alternative ways people are navigating 3D spaces.
Continue reading Alternative 3D controllers
Posted May 29th 2008 7:03AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, transportation hacks, daily
[dcb] posted about his work on the
mpgduino mpguino. The project uses an arduino with a LCD display to monitor fuel consumption based on vehicle speed and the pulses of the fuel injectors being fired. It's definitely an interesting project given current fuel costs and the passive nature of the project. You can easily tap the wires needed for the monitor and remove it without voiding your warranty (not that we really care).
Posted May 7th 2008 10:16PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: transportation hacks
Adding extra battery capacity to hybrids is becoming pretty common, but
this one is better than the average lead acid trunk fest. The pack was built from three prius NiMH packs picked up from salvage yards. These batteries can't simply be bolted together, but with some research and effort you can save some nickel from the junk yards and cut your fuel bill.
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