Bicycle Power

Bicycles are an important source of transportation that is largely overlooked in North America. I used to oftentime see Mormon Missionaries riding them, and in some areas the Amish. Bicycle paths are becoming more common in many large cities but still it was in China that I realized how under-utilized they are in North America. There in China I traveled through a sea of thousands, more like tens of thousands of them, perhaps even hundreds of thousands while on auto trips. I could see them moving like a mighty river from my high hotel room window.

Bikes were/are used to transport things there that I would have thought unimaginable. I have literally seen a rider with a piano strapped on his back although I do not know if it contained all its guts. Nevertheless, bikes piled high with cabbages, several feet higher than the rider - were a common sight. Bike (or really trike) rick-a-shaws were another common sight. We just don't use the bike anywhere near to that extent in North America. Or we didn't. After the war we may change our attitude about it.

We have used bicycles at Ark Two for many purposes. We use them to mechanicallly run air blowers, grind wheat, and they can be used for many mechanical purposes such as running a small printing press. Below you see pictures of a bicycle attached to a blower. And we use them for generating electricity.

		Here I am in our garage workshop, pedaling away on our first bike powered generator. Hung around behind me are 8 twelve volt florescent lights which I am lighting by pedaling on the bike. This generator is hooked to one of several old exercise bikes we have but we also have ten old multispeed bikes waiting down at the shelter. We also have air blowers and wheat grinding mills that we can hook up to them.

		We have the system set up so that the florescent lights come on only if the bike is being pedaled. I am lighting all eight lights that you see (plus one more 50 watt Halogen that you can't see) to take the picture. The only light used for the picture was that which I was pedaling. No, I wasn't lighting the heater! That is on a separate circuit. Ed fixed up a neat system so that any extra power that I pump will go into a battery and not blow up the florescent lights. But the battery doesn't light the lamps.

		This is Ed in our garage. Ed has been a major expert on getting all this going. In the background are the clear basswood boards that I had cut and kilned this summer in preparation for making the blades for windmill propellers. And behind the bike you can see stacked up a number of the brakedrums we were working on.

		After we got all ten of the brakedrum generators completed and tested we took one of them to the WLP Picnic to run the sound system amplifiers. The best way to work any of these systems is to pump the power into the batteries so that it will be available whenever you want it - but sometimes we ran the sound system directly off the bike just to show that we could do it. On the previous low RPM generator web page I link to other pages with more detail about building the brakedrum generators and other low RPM generators and there are lots more detailed pictures of the generators themselves.

Bike 2: The David Butcher Pedal Powered Generator

The central idea that you want to get from this presentation is the value of a heavy flywheel to smooth out the generation and ease the operation. David also gives a lot of other good information about expected performance.

SEALED The David Butcher Pedal Powered Generator
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won't be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.

Bike 3: A Quick and Dirty Bike Generator System

Forcefield has lots of experience with low rpm generators.

SEALED: A Quick and Dirty Bike Generator System

This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won't be opened until after the End of Armaggedon.

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