When a guy named Skunk comes looking for a bike bizarre enough to impress the members of SCUL (Subversive Choppers Urban Legion), well, you give him what he wants. The rubber really hits the road when DS parades their newly created choppers (bikes) on a SCUL mission.
- 1) The Challenge (5:50)
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Bonus Footage
Blue Team's Process
Red Team's Process
- 1) The Challenge (5:50)
- 2) Brainstorm (1:37)
- 3) Design (4:32)
- 4) Build (4:42)
- 5) Test (5:30)
- 6) Judging (5:20)
- 1) The Bike Parade (00:40)
- 2) Tom Takes a Fall (00:31)
- How do you build a single customized "chopper" bike from three separate bikes? Blue Team designed one bike for three riders. It had three wheels and three seats.
- The two outer bikes were smaller than the central bike. These smaller bikes were used to pedal the bike. The central bike was used for steering.
- Blue Team's bike worked, but they found there wasn't enough space between the bikes for everybody's knees. They could have added more space to make room for two sets of knees on either side of the steering bike.
- Longer crank arms on the pedals could have helped adult riders pedal more easily. Also, when two people ride Blue Team's "wide load" bike both have to steer using a single steering wheel which can lead to problems.
- How do you build a single customized "chopper" bike from three separate bikes? Red Team decided to make a two-person back-to-back bike.
- They locked the handlebars of the backwards-facing rider, so only the front rider could steer. Meanwhile, the backwards-facing rider was responsible for pedaling backwards to make the bike go forward.
- The two riders had to share the same seat. Red team built the seat by taking the large banana seat from one of their bikes and putting it in the seat post that joined the two bikes.
- So, red team's bike broke up bike riding into two separate tasks: one rider had to pedal and the other one had to steer.
- In testing they found out that sharing a seat was very uncomfortable. Backwards pedaling was challenging since the feet of the person pedaling slipped off pretty easily.
- They could have had a larger seat, toe clips, and even could have let the backwards-facing rider pedal forward to move forward, if they had just put the chain in a figure 8 and used gears to reverse the direction.
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