Welcome to my camper van! This started out as a solution to expensive Bay Area housing, but then there was a global pandemic which made it pretty hard to find a free shower… So it has evolved into a weekend and short trip adventure mobile.
I started out by getting some of the essentials in my van beforehand and then moved all my stuff down to California to keep working on it. Since it has become a weekend project when I am not using it. It would be lengthy and disjointed to walk through all the parts of the design so I’ve added some annotated photos with some comments for planned projects.
I do want to call out a few things I’ve focused on in the build so far:
This is a short wheelbase van, but I have tried to not let that compromise functionality. To do this a few things need to play two roles, such as the bed/couch combo. In this I’ve focused on keeping simplicity. I have a self-imposed “two step” rule meaning that everything needs to be quick and easy not requiring more than two steps.
I have stayed in RVs that require removing table posts and flipping cushions - but I realized this would become too much of a hassle if I were living in it full time, so I have stayed away from these. Going back to my bed/couch example, you simply need to unlatch the slides, and lower the frame. Simple. One, Two.
I have also tried to keep the living space open. This is great when two people are in the van at the same time, you both can get ready without getting in each others way. It also lets it still function as a utility vehicle for picking up big things that don’t fit in a normal car.
I have been using the van for trips over the last year and it has been a fun design experience learning the things I need to change and improve while I’m still building it. I don’t have a planned end date to this project yet, but hope to spend some more time on it this summer with the longer days.
May 2021 and it is finally done!
I’ve been working on this since May of 2019, it has been through three moves in two states. It turns out not having the proper tools makes finishing the project much harder.
This is the “evolution” version of my senior project. The bike I really wanted. I still am technically waiting for a few parts but it is together and I can start riding it! Can’t wait to see how it does, I don’t have enough saddle time for a true opinion yet.
On a road trip to northern California I found a guy who had “redwood slabs” written on the side of his shed. I stopped and bought a beautiful piece of redwood that he had cut off a stump in the Mendocino county forrest.
The wood was sanded smooth and finished with teak oil to bring out the natural color. I built some legs out of steel that were finished with a flap disk and then clear coated. I had fun trying to design the legs in a way that was unique but did not steal interest from the top.
My senior project is the culmination of many of the skills and knowledge I had gained in college. However, like all challenging projects it pushed me to learn more as the year progressed. I would not have been able to deliver such an amazing final product without the hard work of my whole project team. Chris Fedor, Ernesto Huerta, Michael Wu, and myself came together to make the project a success. We had all worked with each other in limited capacity in the past but together we made a killer team. We were all skilled in different aspects of the design and were able to collaborate when needed or independently go and accomplish task after task.
I hope to convey some of the effort that was put into the project over the nine months in which we worked on it. Our full project report tallied in at over 200 pages long so I will need to skip a detail or two…
I proposed this project to my club advisor for Cal Poly Bike Builders. The club already had amazing tools and skills which allowed students to build traditional bicycle frames with relative ease. However, there was the ever elusive full suspension bicycle, which many students, including myself, hoped to build someday. Our senior project was to develop a suspension system and tooling which a novice bicycle builder would be able to construct simply and cost effectively.
A full suspension bicycle is a horse of a different color when compared to a traditional mountain bike. The suspension must be designed in a way which the kinematics improve the performance of the ride. There are generally higher forces seen on such a bike and they are relocated to unique areas. These factors along with how to actually manufacture the final product all needed to be considered to make the project a success.
Initially the background research led us to uncover information about suspension systems, loads seen in use, and other design factors for this project. Then we selected a suspension system, a linkage driven single pivot, for which I went to design the suspension kinematics. We rolled with this design and developed a detailed CAD model off of the kinematics as well as concepts for all the fixtures and tooling necessary to build the bike. Ultimately, after a few months of effort on the linkage driven single pivot we concluded that it would not work. The design had continued to develop and was chock full of compromises ultimately resulting in a sub-par system.
We decided that it was time to re-evaluate the design and concluded it would be best to revert to a traditional single pivot suspension system. This was not a decision we took lightly, to this point we had about five months of work poured into this project and it was definitely difficult to decide to scrap the effort. We were also concerned that going to a single pivot suspension would lose some of the “cool factor” that our other linkage inherently possessed. Within mountain biking the single pivot has a somewhat stigmatized name due to a notable amount of poorly executed designs in the past. However, we decided to press on with the single pivot as we knew we could design the bike to have proper kinematics, look cool, and it would be much simpler to construct.
Upon making the decision to redesign we kicked it into high gear. I quickly was able to re-evaluate the kinematics of the single pivot because of how much we had learned from the initial design. We then were able to develop the detailed design and fixture and tooling concepts once again. At this point with only a few months left untill the end of the project it was time to start building, testing, and breaking things.
One of the reasons we had strayed away from a single pivot design initially was because with proper kinematics, there is only one spot where the front of the shock can mount. Right in the middle of the downtube. This poses the significant issue of the immense amount of force from the suspension being placed right into the middle of a thin walled tube. The solution was to add a doubler plate to the tube to prevent buckling. To verify and test how large the doubler plate needed to be was the task of a custom Instron fixture. We recreated the load case in the lab and tested multiple sample down tubes until sufficiently satisfied with the result.
Another key piece of design and testing for this project was what we affectionately call the boomürang. This is the key to the simplicity of our suspension system. This is one machined piece of steel containing the bearings for the suspension pivot, one end of the shock mount and “flip chip”, as well as a dropped chain stay attachment for chain clearance. This was a fairly complex single piece but we knew it would be simpler than if the same tasks were dealt with by welding together sub components.
The boomürang starts life out as a sizeable piece of steel. We wanted to reduce the weight as much as possible. This is where some finite element analysis came into play. We were able to take the computer model of this part and simulate the load it would see. From the results of simulation we iterated until we came up with a design which was as light as possible without sacrificing strength or machinability.
After our final design of the boomürang we needed to verify that our computer calculations were correct. We made a fixture to hold the boomerang and hung weights to cause the test sample to deflect. We measured this deflection with a test indicator. After collecting data we plotted the deflection curve against that of the computer model and were able to confirm out results.
It was now time to manufacture. We created three additional fixtures that would be used along with the club’s existing anvil frame fixture. This allowed for first the main pivot and seat tube bend to be positioned. Then the front triangle could be completed by locating the front shock eye mounts. Finally, a dummy shock and dummy bearing could be used to fixture the boomürangs allowing for the rear triangle to be constructed like normal.
The Boomürangs are obviously a very bespoke part of the bicycle. To make these a custom CNC fixture plate was made. This thing is a piece of pure beauty. After the first operation of the boomürangs are completed they can both be flipped over and fixtured into this plate. The plate allows for the final operations including the bearing bore and other critical locating features to be machined at the same time.
The whole project was completed by building up a test bike to be “tested”. It is so cool to play with something you make especially if it is the result of months of hard work. The Hück’s law Proto 1 was finally complete and we were all ecstatic with how it rode. Thanks to some extremely generous people we are able to keep the bike built up for future students to test and ride before deciding to take the plunge into making their own.
I wanted to add an additional note of thanks to my team members: Chris, Michael and Ernesto. As well as the professors who help manage us and gave advice and input along the way. Prof. Harding, Dr. Kean, and Dr. Mello.
Noumenon - a thing-in-itself
This is also the name which I gave to my most recent bicycle. The intent of this bicycle is to a “super commuter”, being the answer to any need of a bicycle for commuting.
The design of the bicycle is unique, from the silhouette it is easy to notice the double top tube. While other bikes have a similar detail the lower top tube is positioned to strengthen the frame from the lowered seat stays and passes entirely through the down tube to attach to the head tube and strengthen the head tube cluster.
This is the sixth frame I have built and it is all chromoly steel. I was able to take everything I had learned from building my other frames and combine it into this, my Magnum Opus. I am so excited with how this bike turned out. I find it extremely complementing when people ask me “what company makes this bike?” and I get to say that I built it.
The bike is equipped with beautiful components like the pinion gearbox, gates carbon drive, and supernova lighting for ultimate reliability and weather resistance.
Bicycles. Why don’t they fall over? Most people think that it is due to the gyroscopic effect created by the spinning wheels… well this is wrong. According to the majority of bicycle stability studies a bicycle depends on a concept called trail to stay upright.
What exactly is trail? A measurement of where the contact patch of a tire is in relation to the intersection of the steering axis and the ground. Think of the front wheel of a shopping cart, the wheel always follows where the shopping cart is being pushed because the wheel contacts behind the steering axis of that wheel. In short this is what helps your bicycle stay up, the front wheel always wants to return to inline with the direction of travel.
This was my experiment to see if a bike could be made with infinite trail, meaning that the steering axis was horizontal and never intersecting the ground. The concept was that you would steer and the front wheel would tilt, therefore causing the bicycle to lean over. The lean would result in a centripetal acceleration hence making the bicycle turn.
I knew that this concept was a bit of a stretch, but I thought it would be worth the investigation. I built a prototype frame and tried to ride it. The result? It’s impossible to ride. But I found the background and concept interesting and I even felt that it had some promise. If you are interested in more about this project let me know and I can send you my full report.
Welding is pretty amazing. It is quite literally hot glue for metal. you can make virtually any shape you want out of pieces of metal. I had bought myself a fancy new welder and it needed a proper home. As I was still in college and renting a house I wanted to make something portable and something to make it easy for when I moved.
My welding table holds my TIG welder and it’s water cooler. The whole table is on nice locking castors and it fits up the ramp of a u-haul. It also has storage for all kinds of different welding rods. In TIG welding you need different diameter rods so I 3D printed dividers to further sort my filler metal.
I was able to find practically all the metal for this as scrap, which at the time I thought was a great idea. However, it was all rusty and the time and effort to clean it all before welding may not have been worth the lack of cost, but you have to learn somewhere. The table turned out great and fits my needs perfectly. I had to get creative to store the water cooler below the welder because I wanted to keep the table top at the same height as my toolbox and other workbenches.
Carbon fiber seems to be considered a magical material. People think that it can be stronger and lighter than any alternative. While in many cases this is true an important part of carbon fiber is manufacturing it. Unlike metals and woods you cannot go to your local supply store to pick up a preshaped sample of carbon.
In this particular case my friend Michael and I wanted to define a method to make carbon fiber tubes. We worked under a professor at our school and tried different methods to successfully produce a tube section.
Initially we started by making a two part female mold. This was done by making wooden mold bucks and then creating the actual mold out of tooling carbon. After weeks of work, this ended up not working. The bucks lifted from the tooling plate and therefore the mold was misshapen.
It was back to the drawing board. This time we tried getting an HDPE cylinder to use as a mandrel. We chose HDPE because it has a very high coefficient of thermal expansion and a relatively high glass transition temperature. The idea was we would wrap the mandrel in pre-preg carbon and then cover the outside of the tube in shrink tape. When the autoclave would heat the carbon to the curing temperature, the shrink tape and expanding mandrel would compact the carbon together as it cured. Then after taking the tube out of the autoclave the mandrel would shrink back to the original size and allow for the carbon to be removed. And this worked! We made a tube, kind of. The mandrel must have gotten too close to the glass transition temperature and became slightly misshapen. So although we made something somewhat tube shaped, it wasn’t perfectly straight or round.
At this point, however, we knew we were on to something. We researched lower curing resins but this didn’t seem to be a viable option so we then looked into alternate mandrel materials. We ultimately decided to use aluminum as the mandrel. This had a big coefficient of thermal expansion and was not going to get anywhere close to deforming due to the heat. I was able to turn the mandrel down to size on the lathe and included a slight taper to aid in the tube removal. This was only a few thousandths of an inch over about a three foot mandrel so it would be imperceivable in the final tube. We then sanded and polished the tube to a mirror like finish.
We layed up another sample tube and wrapped the whole thing in shrink tape. After a few hours of curing in the autoclave we let the mandrel cool and the tube slid right off. We were ecstatic. The surface finish on the inside of the tube was impeccable and the outer surface only had some slight ridging from the shrink tape, which was able to sanded smooth. The tubing was made of 11 layers of carefully oriented unidirectional carbon. Needless to say, the whole process is rather labor intensive but we had figured out a way to make tubes out of carbon fiber on our campus.
The coolest part of this whole this research project was we had a goal to use the tubes to build something once we figured out the manufacturing method. We worked with our club the Cal Poly Bike Builders to build a full carbon fiber road bike frame. A library of mandrels was built up and a set of lug molds were machined. The lugs were made of carbon using a different method called trapped rubber. After all the pieces were ready we assembled the lugs into the tubes and bonded the whole frame together.
The final product was a full carbon fiber bike frame made entirely on campus by students. Needless to say we were pretty stoked. Michael and I couldn’t believe that our little research project we started two years before resulted in not only a method which could be used, but ultimately a final product that we were able to show off at the North American Handmade Bike Show.
I wanted to build a cyclocross bike. In my opinion cyclocross bikes are some of the most beautiful and versatile bicycles out there. I went to college in beautiful San Luis Obispo, CA but I was from equally beautiful Boulder, CO. This meant, that when I went home for breaks I was left without a bike, because it was too hard or expensive to transport the bike home with me. To remedy this I built Gulliver.
Gulliver uses the extremely clever Ritchey breakaway couplers. This allows the bike to disassemble into two parts and get stuffed into a suitcase. This means I can check my bike on the plane and not need to pay any overage fees. The Ritchey Breakaway couplers are the best option because they function as they should and they do not detract from the aesthetic and profile of the bicycle.
I was able to secure a True Temper tube-set to build the frame out of. And not just any tubing either I was able to get OX Platinum. This means that the bike is supremely light. Including the frame couplers and all the components the bike weighs a mere 17.4 pounds! That is lighter than some carbon bikes! The way this is done is because the butted tubing goes down to a mere 0.016” wall in the center. Thats just four piece of paper thick. I just need to be careful not to drop an Allen wrench on the down tube when I work on it…
The week after finishing Gulliver, I built it all up and did a light touring trip from San Luis Obispo to Long Beach California. A quick 250 miles over two days down the breathtaking pacific coast bike route. The bike did great and since has taken me on many adventures.
I was lucky and my freshman year of college when I started to work at a machine shop on campus. I was able to learn from a great mentor and take classes at school to learn more and more about machining. I started with basic machining and then took CNC programing classes for both traditional 3 axis machines and eventually modern multi-axis machines. I learned to use both MasterCAM and HSMworks.
Over my five years at Cal Poly I continued to work in the same shop to machine parts for other students’ projects and for myself. Looking back I would only wish to change two things. First, take more pictures of the parts I made. Second, spend more time making chips fly. You sometimes don’t realise what an awesome oppurtunity you have until it is gone. Reguardless, I plan to someday, hopefully soon, buy my own CNC mill so I can continue to make my crazy ideas come to life.
I present to you the cargo bike. Although this bike has been ridable since October 2018 it is still a work in progress. I think that is the coolest thing about making your own stuff and testing it out is you can use it to figure out the best ways to continuously improve upon it. I still am working on a cargo basket and durable kickstand before I paint the beast.
My friend Buzz gave me the partial frame and extra parts to start off this project. He had fizzled out on it, but I was lucky enough to pick it up where he left off.
This style of cargo bike is called a Long John, Front Loader, or Bakfiet. And in my opinion is the best type of cargo bike when done correctly. First of all, they look cool and they allow you to place the cargo low to the ground leading to very stable handling. This particular example is a foot or two shorter than others which means it handles very similarly to a traditional bicycle.
The key to proper handling on ta Bakfiet is the steering linkage. When done incorrectly, you can turn further one direction than the other or the steering rate is different than it is at the handlebars. These errors result in a not only difficult but dangerous bike to ride. The steering linkage also needs a bend in it to clear the front wheel when making left turns.
This bike is really fun to ride and although its meaty appearance it only weighs 51 pounds. Which may be a lot compared to some bikes, but it is on point or lighter than other production cargo bikes of the style. The key of this design is the large 2” x 3” steel box section that makes up the majority of the frame. However since steel is incredibly strong this is only 0.035” thick keeping the weight in check.
This bike has carried everything from boxes, to other bikes, to people and dogs. I have loaded it up with over 300 pounds on the cargo tray with no worries what so ever, other than the encounter of a hill I need to bike up.
Anodized aluminum is something I have always been interested in. It is amazing to me that a metal can take a color that is so vivid, yet incredibly durable. What most people, including myself at the time, don’t realize is that it is actually a fairly simple chemical process.
The word anodize is suspiciously similar to the word anode and that is for good reason. The process to anodize aluminum involves setting up the aluminum you want to anodize as the sacrificial anode in an electrolytic bath. You turn on the current and the aluminum develops and oxide layer which can be filled with color.
Over winter break one year I researched how this whole process worked and when I got back to school I tested it out. I set up the multiple chemical baths needed on the workbench in my garage and ran some tests. I made a bunch of sample plates to test different times and finishes on the metal before running the process. I did a few trials on the process and dialed in my setup to use for cool aluminum parts in the future.
Have you ever found yourself wanting a new bike? That’s rhetorical of course, the answer is always yes. But on this particular occasion. I found myself wanting something that was not only impractical, but also hilarious and hard to ride. Therefore, I present, the mini bike.
I designed this bike to look proportionally like a normal sized bike. In fact, when people look at pictures they often think it is a commuter type bike. However, it is not. The mini bike rides on 20” wheels attached to a frame with a wheelbase of only 27 inches. Thats 2” shorter than the one wheel on my mountain bike!
Despite its small demeanor the mini bike is really fun to ride. You just need to keep in mind the toe/front wheel overlap. I laced the rear wheel to a 3-speed internal geared hub so you can climb up a hill and then speed down the other side. No bike would be complete without some incredibly overkill Magura MT2 disk brakes to send you over the handle bars if you want. While it may be hard to ride around a parking lot It actually feels stable at speed due to having the proper amount of mechanical trail for a bike of this wheel size.
Harking back to the infancy of mountain biking the shred sled is my homage to the amazing bikes that developed the sport.
This bike holds a special place in my heart. This is the first bicycle I built from a tube set. I need to thank my friend Chris and the Cal Poly Bike Builders for teaching me and letting me use the tools. After building this frame I was hooked and stuck around in the club for the rest of my time at Cal Poly building more frames and helping others learn and build their dreams.
The original inception for this bike came when I was at working on another bike at the bike kitchen in downtown SLO. This was a community bike shop which sold used parts as well. I bought a 1999 Marzocchi Bomber fork for a whole $10. So clearly I needed to make a bike around it.
From there I took design cues from some of the great classic mountain bikes like the old Yeti F.R.O.s and the many early creations from Marin County legends. However, I modernized the geometry to make it incredibly fun to ride. I in fact can ride downhill faster on some trails on this than I can on my modern full suspension bike.
The rest of the bike was pieced together with parts from throughout the decades of MTB technology to make the coolest hardtail out there. I refinished the original Bomber fork in a candy purple and added a few other accents to make a bike that brings a grin across my face every time I see it.
Not all ideas go as planned… This was certainly the case with my rally car. In highschool I was in love with cars. Specifically 5 cylinder Audi’s. I bought a very used 1984 Audi 4000 Quattro rally car. Needless to say this car was fun. The quattro 4 wheel drive, 5 cylinders of fury, a turbo charger and a stripped out interior all culminated in a car that was probably much too fast for an 18 year old to own. I bought this car a few months before going to college and I obviously decided I would drive it from Colorado to California.
I had been fixing little things on the car the whole summer before leaving but as this was a 30 year old beat up race car it was not the definition of reliable. Naively I set out on the 18 hour drive caravanning with some friends who also were going to Cal Poly. The car was doing fantastic, It climbed up and over the continental divide without skipping a beat. We made it to the flat desert of Utah and that is when things got a little too exciting.
Cruising along on the open highway, I saw the temperature gage begin to climb… I slowed down but the needle kept creeping up. I pulled off the highway as the car overheated. I let it cool down, added more coolant and went to restart the beast. Unfortunately this is when a new colored smoke appeared. As soon as starter motor jostled the engine a plume of white smoke emerged from the hood. The main battery ground had melted and fused itself to the block of the engine.
This was not completely ideal, I told my friends to go on as I got towed to the nearest town to rewire the car. I worked till sundown in a dirt parking lot and again the next day until it was ready to be fired up again. I cranked it over and it started up. Now there was a blue smoke coming from the tailpipe. The head gasket must’ve blown when it overheated.
At this point my dreams of bringing my Audi to college were dead in the water. My dad ended up rescuing me and the car from the Utah sun and I made it to college with a few hours to spare. Over the winter break I worked to rebuild the engine and continued to fix the car.
I gained a lot from this experience but the thing that stuck was being known in the dorms as the kid who’s car caught on fire.
I saw a video of someone riding a swing bike. I thought it was amazing, and knew I had to try it. There was only one thing that stood in the way, I didn’t know anyone who had a swing bike, so I decided to make my own.
I cut up two old and rusty bike frames and recombined them into a swing bike. This process is actually fairly simple and I highly recommend doing so to anyone who knows how to weld and has a weekend to spare. You take the front triangle of one bike, flip it around, and weld it to the other bike. You want the headset of one bike to function as a pivot under the seat.
This was a project I decided to tackle one day without doing a ton of planning before hand. I made sure that I welded the frame with the head tubes parallel to each other, as I thought this would be important. However, I did not think through that this would cause the bottom bracket of the bike to become so low to the ground that the pedals would hit… oops. To remedy this I just welded another bottom bracket higher on the bike and tahdah! The Swing bike was born.
I was pretty proud of my seat height adjustment method, I used an old quill stem so you could still change the seat, which is something I think many people over look when making a DIY swing bike.
I got incredibly good at riding this bike as I generally took it out once a month for San Luis Obispo’s bike night. The bike lasted me three years until almost poetically breaking in half on the last bike night of my college career.
Furniture is pretty neat. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about furniture as it is generally an extremely mundane item. But I think it is amazing. Very few products have such a clear purpose that can be resolved with so many interesting designs.
Here are a few pieces of furniture I have made over the years.
Car Couch
This beautiful black leather used to be at home in the back of an early 90s Audi. The car was being scrapped and I thought I could preserve the leather seats and make a sweet couch for my room.
Corner Desk
One of my houses in college had an odd corner behind a door. As space was at a premium I decided it would be an excellent place for a desk. I made the frame out of square metal tubing and kept a spot to put a filing cabinet.
Jewelry is an incredibly personal gift. It is also an incredibly difficult craft. When the final workpiece is the size of a thumbnail it is impossible to hide mistakes. These are a few necklaces I have made which I am pretty proud of. The are completely unique pieces made in their own unique ways. Jewelry making is something I in no way claim to be an expert at but it is a fun challenge that I think everyone should try.