Hybrid Bicycle Design Project

Project Vision

The development of this project was to help give birth to a technical elective that would allow students to dive deep into bike design; enabling them to explore engineering domains like mechanical design and finite element analysis.

Within the subpages of this wiki, we will walk you through all of the design, analysis, and manufacturing that was involved in this project. We will go into detail about all of the important design decisions that went into building the bike frame and jig, the key takeaways from the finite element model, and how we were able to create an automated custom frame generator using SolidWorks. 

Acknowledgments

These last 4 months working at the IDEAs Clinic has been an unforgettable experience for the both of us. It is absolutely mind-blowing how much real world, engineering experience we have both gained over the duration of this project. We have had lots of fun trying to make this project become a reality and have undoubtedly gained many valuable insights along the way. 

The completion of this project could not have been possible without the help of so many people from both the IDEAs Clinic and Engineering Faculty at the University of Waterloo. We would like to acknowledge their contributions and extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone involved. First and foremost, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to both Chris Rennick and Prof. Sanjeev Bedi, for providing us with an incredible learning opportunity and for their invaluable guidance and elevating inspiration. Next, we cannot express enough thanks to Andrew Gryguc, Reem Roufail, Graeme Adair, Eugene Li, and Brian Shillingford for their additional expertise over the many stages of this undertaking. As well, we are extremely thankful to Kevin Zhang, Roman Boychuk, Michael Lenover, and Adam Winston Caldwell for lending us their CNC Tube Notcher machine and for volunteering their time to help us miter the bike tubes. We would also like to acknowledge the technicians at the Engineering Machine Shop, Jeff McCormick and Brian Shuh, for their outstanding patience and advice in helping us with machining components for our jig as well as cutting the stays of the frame. Finally, we would like to thank the welder fabricators, Rob Kaptein and Rob Kraemer, for doing an excellent job at welding our frame.

List of Contributors: