A husband-and-wife precision engineering group has set a brand new world report standing 1/eighth mile time for steam-powered bikes. The Drive of Nature is successfully a rocket on wheels, and the group says it ought to go a lot quicker within the subsequent try.
British couple Graham and Diane Sykes took their creation to Elvington Velocity Week to put down a record-breaking time of three.878 seconds for the standing eighth, with a recorded exit velocity of 163.8 mph (264 km/h). Graham was aboard the steam-powered dragster for the try, and mentioned the bike continued to speed up, passing 180 mph (290 km/h) a way after the publish.
“There may be nonetheless heaps extra energy to return, and I really feel certain we’ll run faster within the coming months,” the group wrote in a weblog publish.
The bike is a full-on dragster, and Sykes wedges himself onto it superman-style, little question keenly conscious that he is draping his meat and two veg over a high-pressure cylindrical tank stuffed with superheated water. In contrast to most drag bikes, there isn’t any want for a wheelie bar; the rear wheel is not pushed, so the bike does not need to get up.
Drive of Nature
As an alternative, when the inexperienced gentle comes up, Sykes holds on with all the pieces he is obtained and tries to maintain the factor pointed straight because the steam blasts backwards by a pair of nozzles, and the bike rockets ahead. The acceleration is completely brutal, as you’ll be able to see on this annoyingly un-embeddable Fb video.
It is the identical sort of propulsion system that Scott Truax constructed for Eddie Braun’s spectacular tribute to stuntman Evel Knievel. I used to be there to look at Braun’s steam rocket blast up its ramp and into the sky, crusing means over the Snake River Canyon and making a parachute-assisted nose-down crash touchdown a couple of mile downrange, in a lonely discipline on the opposite facet.
That machine made about 10,000-odd horsepower, and Braun estimates it accelerated him to about 430 mph (~700 km/h) inside 5 seconds – practically straight upwards. So whereas the Drive of Nature is a a lot smaller steam rocket than the Skycycle X-2, Sykes is not kidding when he says there’s lots extra acceleration left in his dragster. This stuff can get fairly nuts.
Drive of Nature
Thoughts you, as soon as you progress into rocket bike territory, why cease at steam? The quickest motorbike ever to finish 1 / 4 mile was a hydrogen-peroxide rocket bike, piloted with excessive braveness by Frenchman Eric Teboul.
That bike put out some 6,000 kilos of thrust, and thus had a power-to-weight ratio round 10:1, and final September, when Teboul threw an additional liter of gasoline into it as a ultimate bow on the finish of a 40-year racing profession, he ascended to legend standing by laying down the primary ever two-wheeled quarter mile beneath 5 seconds.
His ultimate run, clocking 4.976 seconds at 290.51 mph (467.53 km/h) could be seen within the video under. Loopy stuff.
THE FASTEST BIKE IN THE WORLD! – ERIC TEBOUL ROCKET BIKE AT SANTA POD RACEWAY
Supply: Drive of Nature
