You Can Now 3D Print Your Own Custom Motorcycle
Who needs welding skills?
Love those custom bike-building shows on cable, but short on welding skills to fabricate your own frame? British engineering student Jack Lennie wants to liberate you from welder tyranny with his design for a bolt-together bike make of 3D printed parts and pieces borrowed from a donor bike.
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The Tinkerbike is for people whose desire to tinker may exceed their access to welding equipment. Lennie’s design is downloadable and can be programmed into regular waterjet cutting tools to produce the components from a sheet of 15 mm stock material.
Total assembly time for the bike built in the demonstration video? An hour and six minutes. With that kind of efficiency, one of those bike-building shows could almost do the entire job in real time, no fake “emergencies” needed to provide drama.
The frame’s design is intended to accommodate a variety of donor bike engines, so you aren’t locked in to a particularly power plant. So download the plans, fire up the waterjet cutter and break out the tool box. You’ll be on the road in no time at all.
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