Originally Posted by
indyfabz
And yet it does.
But you do you.
Argh , well I’ve been hoisted by my own petard...
the crux of the issue is, the IHPVA has virtually disbanded. The editor of the IHPVA/MIT Press journal “Human Power” passed away last year, and with the shift to the Internet, the print version of the newsletter had become insignificant.
It seems I have very few peers in the upright streamlined bike field. Everyone seems to have gone recumbent.
The undeniable evidence is the sprint speed, speeds which would be impossible if the bicycle did not have aerodynamic advantage.
University of Toronto provided this cgi image
I hope someone can start a group to preserve the technology of upright bike streamlining, since I’m so old, I could die at any minute...
Probably the best Streamliner would be faired in carbon fiber and polycarbonate, without any cargo space, and with a higher top gear , like 84:12 for instance . Without a big dish chainring, I’m not getting the top speed to demonstrate irrefutably the aerodynamic advantage... I can only point to a theoretical extrapolation.
I hope to share my knowledge and experience with a younger generation of experimenters, who unfortunately do not have Industrial Arts in high school. And while bicyclists are more intelligent than motorists (as we all know...) there remains the fact that only <1% of high school students get into aeronautical or aerospace engineering.
So I’m making templates, which will work with Coroplast, and probably acrylic. Better results could be obtained with a molded composite fairing, but we run into an unforeseen obstacle, the fact that today there are thousands of models of bicycles, each only produced in small production runs. We grew up with only a few dozen makes and models of bikes, but each model was often produced in mass produced numbers, the tens of thousands of Schwinn Varsities is a good example.
Todays market would force the builder of the Fairings to also produce the complete frames.
I am aware that I could make a smaller product, but I choose the largest size in order that I may test, cargo capacity, aerodynamic speed & stability, weather protection, solar power, instrumentation, and USB powered accessories. I may yet turn a profit if I produce a few hundred specialty e-bike’s, or e-bike accessories.