Human Powered Misadventures

The new bike seems to be coming together, less than two weeks before competition. That’s supposedly relatively early compared to the past year’s progress, actually. Mind you, we’re not keen to repeat their mistakes.

Saturday, I truncated my usual ritual of motorcycle shopping to work with my team on some of the vehicle components in the lab. We were machining parts for the steering and drive train. We’re not trying to make everything from scratch, though. We ordered some of the parts. They’ve been arriving in a steady stream over the last week.

One of those parts was the braking system for the new bike. Last year’s team had some difficulty with the brakes not being broke-in, so we decided to do just that. We installed the brakes on last year’s vehicle, Krypton (yes, we name them), loaded up, and headed up to Skyline Drive. As the name implies, there is a significant hill involved.

Well, one of my teammates got into Krypton. Another teammate had brought his bike to ride along. The rest of us just drove chase vehicles. I was in the rear, and got behind. However, not very far down the road I came upon the team stopped, looking at Krypton.

Well, the story was that Krypton’s rider had been booking it down the hill, and the tagalong was working really hard to keep up. Then, Krypton’s rider really tested the brakes and stopped very fast. Tagalong was busy trying to catch up, saw too late, and hit the axle (Krypton is a three-wheeled vehicle), going right over.

Apparently, it was hilarious. Until Krypton’s wheel fell off. Oh, shit. The damage was pretty impressive (bent ¼ inch aluminum), but shouldn’t impact the new bike.

The day was not done, however. Later that evening, another teammate made a mistake with the mill, and it seemed that he’d screwed it up royally. The frightening prospect of explaining this to the machine shop technician kept us working on it. A guy from another team was the hero of the day, when he figured out how to fix the problem.

Then, when that drama was over, the part he’d been trying to work on got milled on the wrong side. It had to be redone. Seriously. At least, it wasn’t a complex part.

The team finally left the lab around 2:00 a.m. I remember thinking it was after last call. Probably should have called it a day a little earlier...