Electric bike with 2 whell drive is a reality in Alberta

Electric bike project from Bill, and his last name is Craft!Hi, my name is Bill Craft and I read your blog pretty much on a daily basis. It's good to know that there's so many people out there who are that creative. I live in a very small town in Alberta and I find there's not much to do with my spare time but make things with what I can find around here or order over the net. I made an electric bike to get around here. This is actually my second one, I should have taken pictures of the first but oh well. This one has a range of 20-30 km. and a top speed of 65km/hr. and the weight is about 60 pounds. I'm not sure if thing is actually legal to drive but like I said it's a very small town.

The bike itself started as a $150 walmart special. Within 30 minutes of getting it home I had stripped everything off the frame. Then bolted on 2 brushless hub motors rated for 500 watts. Next came drilling some holes through the frame and bolting on some sheet aluminium panels to hold the electronics. There are 2 battery packs( 36volt 8amp nimh cells ), 2 36volt 3 amp charges for them and 2 speed controllers. Both speed controllers are tied to the throttle grip and you can switch between front wheel drive, rear wheel or both. 2/wheel drive is a lot of fun when you go offroad with it. And the side covers and tank where made from scrap pink insulation core then covered with fibreglass cloth and epoxy resin. I was trying for a Thunderbirds look, maybe I need to make wheel disks.

Motorbike uses all surface area as solar battery

Powering a car with solar panels is a relatively easy task, but on a motorbike it's a lot harder to find flat surfaces to catch the sun.

That means that a solar powered motorbike has got to look rather odd in order to provide enough surface area for the panels: hence the snail shell-like design of SunRed's prototype solar powered bike.

When (or if) SunRed completes a real world prototype, the bike's surface area will be 25 square feet, allowing the bike to store enough of the sun's energy to ride for 13 miles at speeds of up to 30 MPH. The motor is integrated into the wheel too, so there's no transmission.

Once these "green" bike thinkers sort out the problem of running a bike without oil, we hope they'll move onto making them a little less fugly. It seems like a precedent is being set here.