Drill Powered Bike

The Drill Powered Bike Project was assigned as part of my Component Design course at CU Boulder. In this semester-long project, I served as the manufacturing engineer, responsible for communicating manufacturability considerations, creating technical drawings, and managing the manufacturing schedule. While the project presented many challenges, it provided valuable experience in effective communication, structural analysis, strategic planning, and hands-on manufacturing skills such as MIG welding and milling.

In the early stages of brainstorming, my team and I thought of creating a 3- wheeled bike that had controlled steering using tie rods. Unfortunately, the parts to make this bike, especially the brake knuckle we customized, would take too long and made it inefficient to make in our school’s machine shop. This lead to a number of redesigns and severely delayed the manufacturing timeline I had created.

After many redesign attempts, I finally put my foot down and prioritized design for manufacturability and feasibility under strict deadlines. I assigned responsibilities plus deadlines for different components being manufactured. I also kept a binder consisting of drawings to take to the shop and annotate, as well as a log to show how many hours each member has put into the shop, to feel proud as well to ensure no one is being over or underworked.

In the end, we finished our drill-powered bike in time for our maneuverability race deadline. In fact, we had extra time to customize our bike with paint and decorations. I am very proud of the time and effort my team and I put into this project.

Learn more about it here: