Black cold-rolled steel. From the front stock and downtube to the swing arm and motor mount, Preston Clover has one sweet bike.
“It’s real minimalist,” he says. “So I thought it would be cool to keep the lines as straight as possible. I may end up upholstering it, but for now, I’ve lacquered it.”
Clover is pointing to the flat wooden saddle on the electric motorcycle he designed and built for Mechanical Engineering 203: Manufacturing and Design. Yes, electric. Yes, wooden. He knows every square millimeter of the customized beauty—his girlfriend calls the bike the “other woman” in his life—and he’s thrilled when passersby approach him on campus to ask questions. “They stop and look and say, ‘Did you make that?’ I really like that feeling.”
With four 30-pound four-volt batteries and a 20-pound floor-buffer motor, the motorcycle weighs in at about 270 pounds. At 6-foot-4 and 290 pounds, Clover banks it with ease. A senior mechanical engineering major who plays center on the football team, he’s been riding dirt bikes since he was a little kid. At his family’s getaway home in the Arizona desert, he divides his time between a Honda CR 500 off-road bike and a 1950 Willys CJ3A Jeep. “It looks like an old World War II Jeep, and my dad, grandfather, uncle and I rebuilt the motor. That’s where I got a lot of my knowledge, because it’s in constant need of repair.”
Clover saved up for $1,000 worth of customized parts, including a 1983 Honda XL600R donor bike from Craigslist (for the brake assembly, front fork and suspension). In the Product Realization Lab, he learned to tig (tungsten inert gas) weld, and began his project by making a wooden prototype. “I bought a bunch of two-by-twos and two-by-fours and started screwing things together. I made cardboard cutouts of the motor, and boxes the same size as the batteries and controller for a rough estimate of clearance and packaging issues. To see what fit.”
Ten weeks later, Clover had an electric motorcycle. He can ride it at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour, for a distance of about 25 miles (“If you rock it real hard and crank on it, you do less”). Then he has to pull over, lean the bike against a wall with an electric outlet (he doesn’t yet have a kickstand) and plug it in for about five hours.
For Clover, who spent the summer working with mechanical engineering associate professor Chris Gerdes on the X1 drive-by-wire electric car, the future is electric vehicles. “The only reason people don’t use them is range,” he says. “You can’t fill up instantly, so we have to figure out quick battery-exchange technologies. But there are so many different ways you can charge them: make your own windmill, or use solar panels, or get a high-efficiency propane generator.”
He pauses, catching his breath, as a youngster approaches with a more immediate question: “Are you going to pad that seat?”
