Drill-Powered Bike

The purpose of this project was to create a bike with a drill as a motor for our team’s component design class. We chose to enter our bike in a hill-climb competition, which meant that it had to carry more weight up a hill than all the other team’s bikes. We constructed the bike’s frame out of square steel tubing and used wheels from cheap bikes that we found on Facebook. I welded the frame together at the Idea Forge, which is a makerspace on the CU Boulder campus. We cut out a plate for the drill to sit on with a waterjet. Even though it wasn’t necessary, I painted our bike in a military-esque green and stenciled it with a serial number that was based on WWII Jeep serial numbers. In the end, our bike won 3rd in hill-climb. We did not place in the drag race competition, but our bike was able to hold its own, even with a fairly high gear ratio.