New Pics and Equipment

Check it out.  Eddie replaced the wooden placeholder suspension pivot with the billet aluminum one James made for us.  He then attached the rotary dampers.

Attaching the rotary dampers caused even more weight to hang below the roll-center of the bike, which is already higher than the stock roll-center by the nature of the design. The increased weight below the roll-center caused an increas in the pendulum-like effect our front suspension has regarding on-center balance.  This pendulum effect allows for feet-up stops and even more, as evidenced in the picture above.  We noticed this when we first had it on it's wheels and it not only helps the bike balance at on-center, but also allows for the bike to be supported by the rider's legs at a much larger lean angle when sitting still.  There should be no problem picking the bike up from its roll-stops if it is accidentally dropped.  This unintended consequence of our low center-of-gravity/mass-centralization design philosophy is pretty sweet.  The balance is easily upset by very small input, so hopefully it won't negatively effect our turn-in responce too much.

We still need to get our steering linkage parrallel and equal o a-arm length before it will be ride-able, but otherwise, just time and money stand in our way.

Turns out we got 3rd Place in the design competition.  Sucks, but no biggy, as I heard the Fed-Ex guy got a bad grade on his parcel delivery business idea while in school here.  They told him his idea of central hub airports was unrealistic, parcel delivery was a natural monopoly left to the governement, and he should have done an experiment about bearings instead.  Okay, maybe I made the last one up, but still thats the story.  Maybe our incorrect steering geometry caused this, but seeing as how even the PhD's didn't pick up on this during the entire lead up to the contest, I don't feel stupid for not noticing it sooner.  We expected some steering mess, but were unsure of how much of a problem it would be until we got a physical prototype to see in action.  A pair of left and right parts to go on the spindles should rectify this problem easily.