Sam Hochheimer, ’13, MS ’17, made the rig his senior year in the Product Realization Lab’s popular bicycle design class with the epic trek in mind. While classmates welded frames for speed and mobility, Hochheimer chose thick tubes and a long base as he imagined crossing 14,000-foot passes in the Andes saddled with gear.
Bicycle manufacturing at the PRL (see main story) goes back decades to a student whose son has since passed through the lab. It has become something of a rite of passage in the lab as well as an initiation into the demands and glories of performance design.
“If performance is your goal, physics, God, nature creates beauty in the results,” Beach says. “Look at aerospace devices, look at space devices, they’re all gorgeous not because the people doing them are sculptors, but because the people doing them understood how to get the maximum performance out of them. And bicycles are in that same category.”
It took Hochheimer two years to finish the journey. He rode a bus through the northern desert in Chile to meet a friend in Santiago for Christmas. But otherwise he went unassisted?—?and unmolested?—?from the desolate North American West to the sweaty and social tropics and into the majesty of the Andes, camping much of the way.
Most impressive, as far as Hochheimer’s PRL work is concerned, was the encounter with a bull. He was climbing a mountain road when he turned a curve to find three farmers screaming about “an angry cow.”
Hochheimer dismounted and got off the trail. The farmers’ bull picked up the bike and tried to toss it down the hill. But its horns stuck in the spokes and both beast and bike went somersaulting down the embankment. “They were just lying there in a pile,” he says. “I thought I might have killed the bull.”
Luckily, neither was too worse for wear. Hochheimer’s bike had a bent wheel, a bent brake disc and a small ding in the frame. He trued the wheel and was on his way.
He saw many things on the trip?—?including many other cyclists. One thing he never saw: another rider on a self-made bicycle.
