(Pics) A Real Working Spokeless Bike

A group of nine mechanical engineering students at Yale have created a an impressive spokeless bicycle as a class project.

The bike was first revealed in a thread at Reddit, where one of the students explained the undertaking:

I just wanted to elaborate on why we went for the spokeless bike. First, it looks cool. Second, we only had a semester so we wanted to pick something that was both feasible and challenging. Also, you can do a lot of things with the space that opens up where the spokes use to be. You can stick an electric motor in there. You can install some sort of gyro balanced storage basket. Finally, the fact that we couldn’t find pictures of a real spokeless bicycle online really sealed the deal.

…

It’s a single speed setup. We used two cranks and two bottom brackets in the front to gear up the ratio. It goes from (IIRC) 53 to a 13, which is connected to the second crank and another 53 which connects to the rear hub. The rear hub is just a normal ratcheting rear hub that we mated to our belt pulley. Not sure if all these bike terms are right, but that’s the general idea.

The front wheel would be almost exactly the same as the rear wheel except that it could be a little lighter. Some of the aluminum can be shaved off since there’s no powertrain to connect to.

[Reddit via Neatorama]