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If you’ve got an open face helmet which is great, but just doesn’t have that je ne sais quoi, you can try to spice things up a bit. Turn a few heads, scare a couple of old ladies…
The Silly Helmet Covers will certainly make people stare at you. And why wouldn’t they, when you ride past with a spiky helmet that looks right out of Conan the Barbarian? (You might not be Arnold material, though.)
You can see the covers and decide which works best on your helmet on the Silly Helmet Covers website and buy them from eBay for $36 a piece.
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Even if you’re one of the lucky cyclists living in a country where this is a commonplace means of transportation, this doesn’t automatically ensure safety. Drivers are more used to sharing the road with bicycles, but accidents still happen. Same goes for motorcycles.
A Swedish company, Autoliv Inc., has designed a new type of airbag to deal with this problem: an airbag that deploys from the A-pillars and extends over the hood and part of the windshield.
This could save many lives if used on a wide scale - a study cited by the Dutch Cycling Federation said that external airbags could help avoid 60 fatalities each year, and could also eliminate 1,500 serious injuries a year.
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Source: Automotive News (requires subscription)
Impressive? You won’t ever see this motorcycle on a road: it’s a PC case mod by Russian Dennis “Xooler” Ilyin.
This design was entered in a case modding sponsored by NVIDIA and won second place. Did it deserve first place? I’m not sure, you can check out the entries here (the site is in Russian, unfortunately).
One more photo after the jump.
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SanDisk and Ducati have teamed up and released an official USB drive. The SanDisk Extreme Ducati Edition USB Flash Drive offers 4GB of storage and its design parallels that of a Ducati MotoGP motorcycle.
You also get a lanyard to match the drive, but I’m not sure if that makes the $125 price tag worth it…
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Speakers on a motocycle don’t make much sense… But perhaps you want to listen to music while standing still. If you feel this is the accessory your bike was missing, check out the View Gate VMP-300 Motorbike Speakers. They have a 25W output, have built-in 15W amplifiers and are powered by 12V DC. They come a handy attachment kit for quick mounting and they’re 81×90×101 mm in size.
They can be connected to any music player with a standard connection - but it would have to be pretty sturdy to stand the bike trip. They are available for about $100.
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Some might say that the danger is part of the appeal of motorcycle races, but protective bike clothing manufacturer Dainese has been thinking about a novel way of improving the safety of bikers for close to 10 years. The result of that research is the D-Air, which is basically an airbag for the drivers. The system was first tested during a Grand Prix race in Valencia by Marco Simoncelli (250 cc division), Simone Grotzky, and Michi Ranseder (125 cc division) and it was a success.
Although you won’t be able to buy the product until 2010, you can watch it in action right now, after the break.
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This impressive motorcycle is the work of Tom Sepe, who converted a 1967 Tote-Gote, one of the first off road motorcycles, into an electric steampunk work of art.
The motorcyle was fitted with a 15 hp motor, the kind used in electric motorcycle racing, and a steam boiler made from a fire extinguisher tank. The boiler isn’t connected to the wheels however, and it’s only used for visual steam effects. Says Sepe: “But on the other hand, if I crank it up really high, then you get flames shooting out the back of the bike. Which is cool.”
After the jump, a movie of the motorcycle in action. For more details and photos, check out this interview with Tom Sepe.
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These ingenious toy cars and motorcycles come from several parts of Africa, and they are only made from scrap metal, tins, wire and pieces of leather. Nothing much to say, so we’ll leave you with some photos.
The wheels are made from spray cans. Made in Ghana.
Wire motorcycle from Kenya.
Tin cars from Ghana.
You can see more on the AfriGadget blog or in the AfriGadget Flickr pool.
An enterprising person called Leah Buechley came up with an ingenious solution for cyclists or bikers: a jacket with turn signals on its back. She used the LilyPad wearable e-textile technology developed by herself, which is especially designed to have large connecting pads so that the LilyPads can be easily attached to clothes.
The jacket uses a LilyPad Arduino Mainboard and LEDs, and the signals are controlled through wrist-mounted switches.
According to comments on Buechley’s Flickr photo, there is already a patent for a similar type of clothing: High visibility safety garment.
You can find all the LilyPad products here.
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Sometimes vehicles aren’t only designed for transportation - they’re used for expresing an idea. This is the case with “The Thunderbolt” Scooter Concept by Henrik Björkman. This electric scooter doesn’t bring anything groundbreaking in terms of power sources, but it makes a stand against traditional engines.
Its most striking feature is the hole in the middle, where the engine would normally go. In this case, the electro-magnetic power train is inside the rear wheel, thus leaving room for the “anti-engine”. It has a decent range: 70 km on a three hour charge.
More pictures after the jump.
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