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Group 13: Rowing Bike Design

Abstract

The rowing bike is a bike on four wheels that can powered by rowing the handle bars.  Melissa Draper wants this for the kids in the school to get exercise and have fun while doing so.

Seal Team 13: Matt Bolden, Caleb Fish, Tyler Seal, Thad Simerly

Problem Statement

We need to get the bike to row itself forward and be able to steer.  The gear box is slipping we either fix it or redesign it.  The steering needs to be tightened.

Design Specifications

Bike has to move forward, and be able to steer.

Background Research

Researched the original rowing bike. We also researched different mechanisms to push forward.

Concept Design 1

Our concept 1 is to take the current (non-functioning) design of the rowing bike and make it functional by making the steering work and improving the gear box design by redesigning and replacing several components to make the past group’s design work.

Concept Design 2

Our concept 2 is to redesign the entire bike using the pros and cons of the current bike as a basis for building a new one so that we can more easily make improvements without major and time consuming modifications to the current bike. This style would be similar to a steam engine with a ratcheting wheel at the rear axle for safety. This design would drastically decrease the room for error on this bike by turning a complicated, non-working design, into a simplistic working design.

Concept Design 3

Our concept 3 involves a one directional ratchet design. This will be attached to the existing bike frame and axel. This will allow for the user to still have the ability to row the bike like the original design. This design though is simpler and more time and cost effective. There are overall less parts that will have to be designed.  The existing bike may have to be modified in order to house this new assembly.

Selected Concept Design

We selected concept design 1.

Overview of Selected Design

The decision of choosing a option to run with for the redesign was a tricky one. There were many components that had to be considered. Some of these included the simplicity and ease of operations that would have to be accounted for while doing this. One of the major things that we considered here is availability of time. We are all hoping to be engineers one day, which means that we all have complex schedules that do not line up very well, so we had to understand that a lot of the tedious work here will have to be done remotely, but at the same time as a group we will all have to work together to get this project done on time. Which is why we chose to redesign the existing gear box. By doing this the team feels that we will have a cost and time effective manner to meet the project deadline. We already have broken down the problems of the bike in its current state have have designed a attack plan.

Engineering Analysis 1

The goal here was to check and do calculations on previous assumed steering column inputs to check for the resulting angles.

Engineering Analysis 3

In this analysis we discuss how to fix the steering design. We simply will modify the existing steering by changing some of the existing components.

Bill of Materials

Semester