 Welcome to Tendry. This is the talk, how I made my own diesel motorcycle. With me on stage is a guy who drove on his diesel motorcycle almost all the way to Schaar. It broke down 10 kilometers in front of us and he got very friendly help from police and a few other people. But I will let him tell you that story again. So please give a very warm round of applause to Russell. Hi, I'm going to go through the basic stages of construction that I went through to produce the diesel bike that's parked outside. And because I was hoping to come on a different diesel bike that I've been building, but I had to leave it at home because I only really got it running 10 days ago. I didn't trust it enough to travel between countries on it. So really the presentation should be how I built my diesel bikes. Because I'm going to cover the main engineering parts that I went through for this one and then move on to the next one because I did a talk about this at EMF last year. So to start with, the most common questions people ask me when they see it is, why did you go ahead and do all this? There's a lot of work, you know, and the main one is the technical challenge. It's an engineering challenge. I'm an engineer at heart, although my main specialty is electronics. And secondly is the novelty. It's a bit fun to have something different and it's unique. And mostly it's because of the exceptional economy you can get, which I'll go into in sort of numbers later on. So basically it was the technical challenge, the novelty, the uniqueness and most importantly to me is the economy. The bike outside has a small cabuta engine in it and I can get a reliable 145 miles per gallon, which equates to about 1.95 litres per 100 kilometres for another measure of economy. The second bike I'll be talking about in a moment is one that's based on a Volkswagen 1900 engine that I haven't had on the road for long enough to get a good miles per gallon number out of it. It is still running very badly but even then it's still giving me 70 miles per gallon and I hope to get that up to about 110 as an estimation. Briefly, is it a new idea to build diesel bikes? Because most people who come up to me at garages or outside of the road and say, hey, I've never seen one of those, it's not really. It's an idea that these engines have been made in India since the 1970s. It's the only place where they've been in any kind of mass production in India. But when I tried to check that out, I heard from someone that the legislation over there has changed, which means that the fuel, not the fuel economy, the emissions are now too great so they've had to stop making them. The other big producers have been a company in Germany called Sommer and they have made 500, sometime last year, they hit 500 targets. The most professional looking one is something called the Trax and they made approximately 20 bikes that had an 800 cc engine out of this smart car in them and then he chose to close his business much to the disappointment of a lot of people. So all of the bikes that are in production or have been made have been short runs or personal projects. I try and attend as often as I can. Some annual meetings where people exchange ideas and get together and the English one is called the big knock and that has approximately 40 bikes attend every year and that's near London and the second one is the German diesel motor treffen where approximately 50 bikes turn up and that's been going for quite a long time now, a great number of years. So that was a bit of background so I'll look into how I did it and firstly is what tools I used and we all start off saying well I used a big hammer and when I had a bigger problem I used a bigger hammer obviously spanners, axles, angle grinders for the more demanding cutting, a pillar drill of course things got to be welded together so I have a welder and I switched over I stopped using MIG a while ago and I now use a DC stick welder because I find it more convenient and equally as good welds. The latest tool I bought which is about 18 months, two years ago as I bought a lathe so I can do round things and that enabled me to do all the turning work that you'll see pictures for in a moment rather than go and visit a friend of mine and have to negotiate when he's in he's over there waving now, a friend of mine with a great big lathe who actually the flywheel that's on the bike parked outside was cut down on his lathe and then of course you need somewhere to do it so I have a shed in the back garden so I have a typical photo of my glorious shed, the hive of mess and activity I don't have a motto, a tidy desk is a desk where nothing happens and then if you turn around in my shed you have the lathe and some storage so you can tell from the sort of closeness that I do have a very small shed and the other thing is the house I bought has no rear access so everything has to come down and fly to steps and that's me having the lathe delivered by a guy across town who I bought it from and we used a chain hoist and inched it down the steps so before you start building something like this you have to go through a few technical problems before you actually get your hands dirty and one of them is power and choice of engine, speed you want to travel at how you're going to transmit the power from the engine to the rear wheel with the gearbox and of course what chassis it goes in and for the bike parked outside I used a cabuta engine which is the smallest in its kind of class of 500cc diesel engine it's a twin cylinder, it's water cooled it's currently in production because there's a habit from a lot of self builders of using an old engine they got cheap from somewhere and then something goes wrong and you can't get spares so this engine is in production, it's used a lot in industry so I found that a lot of main dealers are very well stocked even the smallest quirk is parked from the engine by Returner Post this particular engine has 13.5hp according to most of the spec sheets and a top RPM of 3500 rpm which is enough to get the vehicle up to about 70mph on a good day with no wind for this bike I chose the BMW R80 frame because it had a gearbox and a shaft drive rather than a chain which I wanted and then when I looked at the gear ratios for the speeds I wanted to travel at and the expected top speed is it fitted in with the speed of the engine using the existing gear ratios so that worked out quite well for this build and you can't see it at the moment but the bike has a very small peanut tank which holds one and a half gallons which normally is unusably small but because I get such high mileage it's actually about right briefly everyone has to deal with the law when you put a vehicle on the road and I won't go into much detail but for this particular build where I haven't altered the identity of the vehicle all I needed to do was to pass the annual safety checks at the MOT if you do a complete dry build you have to pass something called the MSVA which is the motorcycle single vehicle approval scheme and that's a comprehensive test that takes all morning and it would say it's expensive it is like I think 300 pounds which isn't much on the grand scale of it and of course if you change a vehicle engine you have to make sure it's in the right tax bracket for paying your tax as I said I've made some other diesel bikes so to briefly say there's this which is again built on a BMW frame with the existing all the standard gearbox and transmission I had to chop and lengthen the frame for this one and then when you paint it up nicely the MOT man can't see that so he thinks it's standard and this is using I can't pronounce the name so I won't try and do it it's using a East German V-Twin air-cooled diesel engine it's 800 cc it weighed about 120 kilos all by itself and was made in 1974 it was very advanced for its age I didn't realise how old it was because it looked like a modern engine rather than a much older engine and I had that on the road for eight or nine months before it went wrong like three or four times in a row and because it was made in 1974 I couldn't get spares so I retired it I have the chassis and the attic and everything else has gone in fact lots of the things like the gearbox and the transmission and wheels and bits are probably on the bike outside or some of them then related to the second bike I'm going to go into details about today is this which is the second one I made and the chassis for that was a Russian Nippur MT-11 which is a really big sturdy strong frame and quirky enough that nobody knows whether you've cut it up and welded it back together or not because there's fewer of them around and this has a Volkswagen 1900 engine in it naturally aspirated and this was on the road for I think eight months before I had a catastrophic oil failure and the sides blew out the engine when the comm rods broke and I retired that after that but this is interesting because it has only the clutch and then the transmission shaft to the rear wheel so there is one gear and a clutch and because the engine is just so torquey and large for the weight it's moving that you slip the clutch a bit and that gets you going and once it's doing 20 mile an hour you're fine in the traffic so that was quite fun to ride by far the roughest one I've made in image but yes there's one that was on the main title slide which I'll do some details about and then the last bike I've built is again based around a 1900 Volkswagen engine but this one has the turbo on it and a gearbox and I'll go into that in much more detail in a moment I'm not sure I put that slide in it's a random slide I've been really busy so I only wrote this presentation at the weekend here at Schaar so the main engineering problem with the bike outside was the fact I've got one engine from an industrial application and the gearbox from the actual motorcycle itself and I had to mate those two together I had very limited space because I wanted to do this particular project without cutting the frame and as I said earlier I go to the German meeting with diesel bikes and they're always interested because we talk about how relatively slack it is in the UK and how relatively tight it is in Germany and they run into major, major problems if they cut or weld the frame so I restricted myself by trying to build the one out there and I managed it without cutting, welding, extending the frame or altering it in any way to see if any people over there would be confident enough to copy the idea and save themselves a whole raft of legislation and paperwork so because of that, mating the gearbox and the engine together was done at the flywheel there wasn't the room or the space to make an adapter so what I had to do was to take the flywheel over to my friend Richard's house and turn it down on a lathe so it matched the profile of the flywheel that was on the original engine and if you're not aware the diaphragm spring, washer spring that's in the centre of a single plate clutch like this has a very narrow movement of operation so the depth and distances that had to be turned down to on the lathe had to be really quite accurate and I managed it and there it is with the clutch of the gearbox mated to the flywheel and there's the issue of then attaching the two together because you've got the shaft of the engine and the shaft of the gearbox and if they're out and then the clutch engages and they spin you'll just destroy the splines or the clutch plate so of course everything has to be parallel which is what I'm setting up here and for that I simply used straight edges and a vernier caliper to do that and checking that the two shafts are in line was slightly more complicated and I had to resort to using proper dial gauges which was quite tricky because I had to make sure that with it all aligned that I could check the concentricity of the spline this is with the clutch plate missing so we're looking at the spline of the gearbox here and then the flywheel and luckily on this build the gearbox clutch is actuated by a rod that goes down through the centre of the shaft of the gearbox and the shaft was I think 8mm the original push shaft because it's a well made BMW German gearbox the centre borehole was bored out to exactly 9mm so I bought myself some 9mm ground steel rod filed a slight turned a slight taper on the end and it dropped right down the middle and engaged dropped down the middle and engaged in the hole in the end of the shaft which allowed me to align the two together because it was physically aligned by this rod I dropped down through what was I doing here and then to test that it was actually concentric because the two the engine and gearbox were both bolted to a plate a big face plate and then I welded struts between the two but before welding the struts between the two I had to make sure that the two shafts were in alignment so I took it apart reassembled it all with the clutch in place engaged the clutch dial gauge between the two plates turned the engine shaft the engine crank and then when it was out of alignment these two plates moved round as I turned it by hand which I looked at the dial gauge and then tapped it with a hammer until I could turn the main crank without the top plate moving and then once I was convinced it was all in alignment I welded it up and it stayed like that forever and yes there's another dial gauge photo making sure it was all concentric so that was probably the most challenging engineering part of it because without that it wouldn't have driven for more than a few miles and I know other people who've done similar operations and got it just a bit wrong they have a lot of fun because they have to take it all apart and remanufacture it then it was aligning it in the frame there's the frame with the gearbox now mounted to the engine and I have to get it so it fits fits in which is it's not quite apparent in this photo or the next one but I've had to tilt the engine over by a few degrees and it's also raised up by a few degrees so as it misses all the frame tubes and also with it moving round I had to make sure that the output shaft or flange of the gearbox mated with the shaft of the shaft drive to the rear wheel and to give an idea of how tight it is the front part of the engine casing almost rubs on the frame there and you can see where the paint is scratched from just moving it round getting it into alignment so it really was a very tight fit and almost didn't go and there's the one on the other side and you can see the nut here you can get a few sheets of paper through it as clearance because if I didn't get it within the frame like that I'd have to cut and alter the frame which I'd have got away with but it would have defeated the whole design plan of getting it going the next part was mounting it so once I very carefully placed it in using chocks of wood to hold it in place I then temporarily put a spotter weld at the bottom of the chassis to one of the mounting plates on both sides and then at the top of the engine and what that did is it held the engine in place temporarily whilst I made templates out of card that went between the mounting plates of the engine and then the original holes where the original engine was mounted and again I could have easily welded tags to the frame which would have sorted me out but the idea of this build was to do it without altering the frame at all and then obviously those templates were transferred to sheets of steel mounted up in place, it's a two parts there with a line then welded up and of course with welding there's the obvious hazard of fire so it's the old fire and the shed was so small that I did a lot of the work down in the shed and then assembled it all up in my spare room where it caught fire so you have to be quite careful and have fire extinguishers on hand and buckets of water and the rest of the bike is really just a lash up of spare parts but just concentrating on the engine conversion and then that produced the bike outside which I've had on the road for four years I mean admittedly I've had to put a couple of new engines in because I've had catastrophic engine failure but I think that's just a function of buying cheap secondhand end of life engines to start with at least I'm saying it is and as far as reliability is concerned when I first put it on the road I had a different alternator that had a lay shaft and some badly made bearing housings and the bearings would fail and the belt would snap or the bearings would just seize and that kind of initial problem went away when I redesigned it away rather than tried to repair it since then I've used it every day to commute I do a round trip of about 70 miles every day which for the last four or five years you've sort of stacked up to quite a staggering amount of miles I've kind of done on it despite the fact it broke down ten kilometers from Char and I had to get some friendly help getting here which was great because if I'd have called my recovery agent I'd have gone home on Thursday night and missed everything including this presentation the other things people notice looking at the bike is I have a tow ball one of the things I tow around is my dog in the barrel she's got a harness on and strapped in and occasionally I'll put goggles on her so it's a vehicle I use all the time which is the bike outside so I was hoping to get through that a bit quicker but I'll move on to the second bike which is the one I wanted to ride on which is the one I've made over the last 18 months and it is a much more much more of a self-build than a conversion and the parts I used for that was a Volkswagen TDI 1900 CC four-cylinder engine that are very common you can pick them up reasonable amount of money and that has a a everyday book power of about 110 horsepower which is then tunable for the engine control of that I've used a DIY electrical control circuit basically ECU computer which I'll go into not much detail but slightly more detail at the moment I've based it on the Nippur MT-11 frame from the previous bike right at the beginning of the presentation the reason I did that is I've already registered that as a diesel motorcycle with the DVLA with the government so if I use that same frame it's already got the paperwork changed on it only this time I've heavily modified it it's not to circumnavigate that it's just that the numbers match I've also used the actual gearbox and the clutch from the original gearbox that was made to go on the TDI engine and I did that because of the amount of effort and work it was building the flywheel and doing the conversion that you just saw so the first thing I did was to get hold of an engine which meant going to a scrapyard and they were all hilarious they found it hilarious that I turned up on a little tiny motorbike which is the diesel bike with a trailer and you can't see it now with the engines loaded on the back and they'd never seen anything like that so that was quite an event out and the main thing I did was basically cut the frame open so it's got the three parallel beams in it and they end the engine and went through a process of aligning everything and lining it up and checking the layout and the look so I can visualize where all the parts go and here I have the engine with the gearbox lightly bolted to it and part of the frame the transmission just to lay it out and get a feel for it and the alignment as well is something to take into consideration a lot because I don't have a jig I think for the next bike I'll build we'll have a jig that will hold the front wheel and the rear wheel absolutely in position then you build everything around it whereas what I did with this is I put guidelines and straight lines and spirit levels just to make sure they're in alignment and what I've done here is because it's such a heavy machine I wanted the engine in the center so quite conveniently there's some bolts on top of the cylinder head I put some risers on and then I've got a pole that goes right the way through and that was my centerline of the bike which again can be seen in the next slide here and I could take measurements from that to make sure it's pointing in the right way and then once I was happy that the engine was sat squarely in the frame I welded or made these little tangs up that were then welded on and one of the things I did here that was quite fiddly but proved enormously useful is there's I think 8mm spacers between these mounts so as when you pull the bolt out this spacer drops out of the way which is fiddly but what that allows is it means when you unbolt pull the bolt because it's sort of built around the engine the frame is then loose so I can then jiggle it to bring it away from the bike sorry, bring the frame away from the engine because there's overlaps there's things like a tag here you can see that you have to get the frame around to get it off and the last thing I wanted to do was to build a frame around an engine and then go oh no the engine's stuck forever I'll have to get the frame in half to get it out and again I've met people who've done that when they built things so the next major sort of operation was making all the frame tubes so I decided where on the engine the original engine mounts would go there was one there so I'd make a plate up and then eye up where the tube would go and then using a very crude pipe bender bend the pipe offer it back up to the frame and then put it on the pipe bender put it back up to the frame put it on the bike bender put it back onto the frame and do that all evening until I've got the bend where I want it and it looks like there's a single bend up in that but it's not it's a double bend so it goes up and then across so it's quite a complex bend to get right then get it where you want it and then because the engine is kind of lopsided because of the pump I have to make another one that went round to the other side and it needs bracing up near the top because there's a lot of stress and strain on the headstock where the front wheel basically is bolted on you need bracing and I did that by making cardboard templates which are then transferred to sheet steel using a pen and then an angle grinder cut them out removed it all so I could weld it removed it all from the engine but made sure it's after tacking it all up in place but because if you're not aware when you do a big weld on something the weld is hot, it's molten essentially and as that chills it contracts and if you do a big weld round here then something here maybe half a metre away will move by a considerable amount certainly enough to ruin the build so before I welded it up I welded a big solid metal plate between everything to hold it all in place so it's not distorted as much when it's welded up and that allowed me to get these brace parts in making sure they fit really well on all sides and then weld them up again with a stick welder and the whole build was really just putting things up in place and taking them away and putting them up until it was all right so this is the layout making sure the ergonomics are right I got the seat in even though I didn't use this seat I got the seat in about the right place and the wheel reel is further enough away that it doesn't chafe on the tyre which allowed me to then write order start working on the rear chassis and subframe so because I can't use the back end of the bike because it is no longer anywhere near anything I can modify I have to build a new one so I had to make the rear suspension which involved turning some hubs threading them because I had to tap the right size so I didn't bother with single point turning so I ended up with some parts here and what these are is the bearing the spacer the original pin I didn't make the pin the pins from again a BMW which threads into this slug here and then this one is the one that will rotate which should be obvious in the next slide so those parts form both ends there's two pairs then a shaft in the middle and this one in the middle obviously spins for the suspension and then the outer two are the ones connected to the frame which I should have put this slide up which is obvious here so the frame tubes come around the back of the gearbox and they bolt on using the gearbox mounting bolts which are strong enough to take the load that it will be experiencing and then the rear wheel will be bolted onto the shaft to allow suspension and that's how I got it around the engine and the gearbox with it being as compact as I possibly could and it's also copying the layout of the tubes and this bracing support directly from the BMW frame and chassis outside and I thought well if it's good enough for them and that didn't fall apart then it'll be good enough on here and I copied the idea and again that's the rear subframe just as a shot to show the bike kind of coming together and then I had to move on to the the actual swinging arm so again some much thicker tube because it's not on both sides so that's 50mm tube with a 5mm wall thickness really quite chunky and luckily my little hydraulic press was able to bend it round and again it was an operation because you can't make jigs really you know it's not the sort of thing I'd ever 3D model and then try and make it so it was just started off with a long bit of bar and bending it and offering it up and taking it away and bending it and until I had these two rather cute bends and curves which were then welded into place to have a rear swinging arm that sort of curled around to allow space for the tyre on it and of course support the bevel drive which is the next part there are there's three or four diesel bikes made with the TDI engine or not TDI the 1900 Volkswagen engine and they've always used an industrial sort of sawmill type bevel drive to turn the shaft rotation through 90 degrees and when I've spoken to them and said hey how do you go on with that they've said that it's weak and one day when they were testing it they pulled away quickly and basically broke it so I put a lot of effort into thinking what can I use as a strong automotive kind of strength bevel drive and after much searching around found out I shouldn't have been looking for bevel drives as key words on search engines I should have used the word transfer unit which shows up thousands of well not thousands but many different cars that have a gearbox and on it some 90 degree transfer unit that then takes the transmission from a two wheel drive car through to the rear of the car to turn it into a four wheel drive car and I did some searching and found one that was looked fairly compact and was freely available because I don't want to build a bike that I can't get spares for after and found out that the Audi TT S series all have this little unit bolted onto the gearboxes like an after design and I found a nice cut away and what that does is it takes if you're familiar with the car engine it has the differential that then drives the right wheel and then the left wheel and the addition of this unit then takes power out and that way so you end up with two bolt on flanges that you would assume you turn one and you turn the other there's a slight complication is the red output shaft connects to a different part of the differential to the yellow gear on the transfer so because of that I then had to go out and buy because I bought just the bevel unit I then had to go out and buy a whole gearbox so I could then take the differential apart and remove from the differential one of the little gears and turn off turn down one of the end of the gearbox because I've not shown it here but both those parts go into separate splines within the within the unit because those two parts when they're welded together then connect the two flanges which was an unexpected thing I had to do I thought it would just work with turning one and the other would spin so that was an unexpected part of it other things I had to make was the link the shaft sorry that connects the output of the gearbox to the the bevel drive of course there's nothing that will fit so what I had to do was to get two shafts one that fitted one end, one that fitted the other end cut them down and here they are aligned in the lathe so they're turned so they're a nice snug socket fit and then I covered the bed of the lathe with wood and then I was able to with it all lined up in a concentric manner turn it around and weld it with a high tensile welding rod before I could fit it to the bike and that worked quite well and again the people who've worked with cars will realise that what I have at this end of the bike is a gearbox with a differential with one output shaft coming to the rear and the smart ones will be saying well what's happened to the other end is it's spinning in free air and the answer is it's not really I've known people simply blank it off so the other end goes around twice as fast but the centre gears are differential and never meant to experience that kind of rotational speed and that project failed so what I did is I took the gearbox completely apart took the differential out and then welded up the internal gears are differential and then put it back together and that's then allowed the output to all come out on one side and get transferred to the rear wheel the next technical point was suspension I took all the vital measurements that's my working notes for the day and that's got the size of the shock absorbers I had bought some competition type shock absorbers and all the distance is the lengths of the levers in it and I rung a friend up who had done setting up and design of Formula Ford and he said don't worry I'll tell you what spring you need so I went out and found the spring that he said and it was wrong so I tried another spring and that was wrong and in the end I found a shop shutting down and I took away four or five different springs out of his scrap bin and eventually got one that worked that it was the right weight so it bounced without sagging right to the floor or sitting upright which has hit and miss more than anything and the gear change was an interesting challenge because with a car you have the gear lever and that's on a H pattern so it goes left and right and forwards and backwards how can you do that on a bike, do you have a clutch do you let go of the handlebars and in the end after much thought I separated the two movements left and right, forwards and backwards I separated them into two levers one was a tow lever so as the tow lever does the forwards and backwards which kind of flows in the way you think forwards backwards, tow lever and then side to side I had a lever to push with your knee I didn't take many photos of this when I was building it but I have one here that it's probably really difficult to see what's going on but it has some roast joints and then it has a bar here that doesn't probably not showing up too well that here you've got the knee and then you've got this lever here and push it across and I did all that with straight levers unfortunately didn't take many photos the other technical difficulties was finding a radiator that would fit in the space I had available in the frame and after looking around and failing because the car radiators are quite massive motorbike radiators are really quite small I needed something half way and in the end I tracked down one of the original sort of 1970s radiators from an original Mini for two reasons firstly it was about the right size and secondly it was made of brass and because it's made of brass you can cut it and and soft solder it so basically I cut all the and unsoldered all the ports on it turned it on its side I even made brass adaptors for a thermometer you know for switching the fan on and off you know drilled a hole into this brass end soldered in place I did all of that and only had I think two leaks I had a fan on it so I got a fan off a motorbike made a bracket to go around and you can see how many additions I've made because there's two corner tubes that are in the wrong corners that I blanked off with copper pennies because they soldered well and because it's a turbo engine I had to fit the turbo which is an exercise in plumbing more than anything firstly I had to source because I wanted an intercooler on it even though it worked without one I think I told the intercooler affects the overall efficiency and the reason I'm building this is for economy so I fitted it with a I found an intercooler that fitted within the space I had and then plumbed it in using plumbing fittings basically and also because it's the turbo I needed some sensors so I then had to make flange plates and things that fitted onto the turbo pipes that take the correct sensors and because there's going to be a reasonable amount of pressure I had to I had to swage the tube and put the the rib around it and for that I converted a pair of mole grips and I converted it by putting a round in one side and then a hump on the other and grinding them flat and doing some welding and basically just went around clamping that all the way around the tube to swage them and then get three tubes like that which are all in brass because I wanted to look nice also doing the the plumbing I had to make a fitting in a very tight space and I'll quickly say that I did that by taking a little hard drives apart melting them down in the beam with a propane torch in my shed taking the slug of then aluminium turning it down to make an adapter that fitted within this space here otherwise it would have been a mess I was going to talk about turbo is a VNT so it's a variable vane turbo and the pressure of the boost is set by actuating these little levers that move around and my presentation my presentation thing won't show the moving animation of that which then leads on to the fact that the the TDI engine uses a Bosch because it uses the VNT engine turbo that uses the Bosch VP-37 pump which doesn't mean much but it's a mechanical diesel pump it's not a common rail one but it has a fly by wire control to it so there are only wires that go into the pump so there's no just connecting up to a cable and being done with it and because of that you need basically a microprocessor to run the pressure and the fueling maps which is kind of like a non-trivial thing and I found a guy a Finnish guy I neglected to write his name down but he's produced a personal project and he's put it up himself so it's kind of open source and he produced a project and at the time of starting the build this was his published schematic so that's all I had and some code that ran on Arduino and also on his website he had a little link saying you too can build one just like this and then this as a photo I thought maybe on a car you might get away with that just for testing but I'm looking at a motorbike which is far more exposed far more vibration and everything so I sat down being an electrical engineer worked out some proper schematics I included Solve it I've run out of time to talk about a particular problem but Solve the problem with it sorted out a double sided circuit board which I think I have a no it's my business car a little board like that so it's about this big double sided with the Arduino mega as a core on it and that's because that's the software he wrote on it that then controls this is the pump that's open and it controls the input via a rotary solenoid and then this really strange inductive magnetic feedback which I've run out of time to discuss and that's me in the street outside my house re-flashing my rat bike and slightly more extreme I took it somewhere and I stopped at a lay-by to re-flash it because I didn't like the tick over so you know it's it's quite high tech and on the the first shakedown run I really pushed myself to finish it otherwise if I'd have finished it and polished it made it look nice I'd have been working on it right through to next year so I got it going as quickly as I could went out to an annual show I go to one first prize in the engineering section of their show which I was quite pleased at and this is just a scenic shot and I think that's the end of the presentation and with perfect timing I must say, 10 minutes for Q&A so before you line up at the microphone for questions did I get this right that you melted down a hard drive to make your motorcycle work? yes and but the cycle broke down on the way here so maybe you want to shout out to ask a question about spare parts or something I broke down on the way here as I said I broke down despite using the bike every day for several years with not much I'm sure I've got friends all disagree with me but without much problem I broke down 10 miles away which was close enough to get here without too much thing and what I've done is I took it all apart because maybe we have some speaking people here who can help you out I was wondering if someone could help because tomorrow is Monday, whether someone could come and help me fight through the language barrier of searching for spare parts because literally in the half an hour before the show dirty hands I took it apart I took the injection pump after watching one YouTube video, the first here on YouTube for the diagnostics was a Australian guy he said take the injection pump apart maybe you've got a broken spring so I took that apart, had a broken spring and because of that the pump doesn't return so the engine gets no fuel there's the broken spring again but yes if anyone wants to help me out tomorrow maybe use some telephone calls or local knowledge we can track down where to get either an original spring or a suitable one and I can go home under my own steam rather than on a wagon where can you find you? I'm in the Bristol hack space which is over the dyke and just to the left and the bike will be parked there so I'll leave my contact number on it if I'm not there sorry for letting you wait so long I have a question how does it sound? Do you have any recordings? No, it sounds just like a diesel engine in a car it doesn't sound any different again that's a very common question and I get loads of geysers hanging around me when I stop at garages and truck stops and for coffee and everyone say let's hear it go and I start it up and they all go because you know from that point of view nothing special it's not loud I silence it so I don't get problems with authorities The other question I got from people standing around was why? Why? Firstly it's the engineering challenge but at the end of the day there's a the fuel economy which is it worth the effort of working on a project for 18 months in a spare time or is it not but it brings your bills down and it's the satisfaction as well of using every day a project you've made because there are so many projects that people do at places like conferences like this and in the maker world that for the sake of the project and yet with this one I use it to go to work on So you need spare parts spare room in your flat So you looked up what you wanted to ask Perfect I just check I see the exhaust is pointing backwards like on any motorcycle but it's a diesel engine and then you got your dog on the trailer behind it for the sake of the dog I've had a look at that and you know I had an engine in it to start with it was quite smoky before I changed it and because you're moving the dog's head is about here and the exhaust is down here and because of the wind it goes past and it's not much of a problem Any further questions? Come up Interesting project but wouldn't it be interesting to build an electric motorcycle? I would, I'd love to unfortunately it would either be a toy for around town and I've thought about it and the big problem there is the cost of batteries and battery management which to make a 50 mile or 100 kilometer range would be many thousands of pounds so it would be a huge investment Will you be moving next to gas turbines? A gas turbine? Oh, no Why not? I wouldn't know where to get a cheap one from I did once have a motorbike with a sidecar on it that I ran from LPG for a few years that was really interesting and saved a huge amount in fuel fuel price Any further questions? Specialist here Take your time We've got a few minutes Just one we're getting electric motorcycles again since you looked a lot into regulations how hard would it be to make a motorcycle like this from scratch but with an electrical engine instead of If you make it from scratch so it's only in the UK I think it's obviously different in every country but in the UK there's something called the MSVA because of sort of international regulations everything has to sort of conform to everything else is about 15 years ago all the kit cars and self-builds had to be regulated they brought out this single vehicle approval scheme which an electric vehicle had to pass and in it is a section on the specifics that you need to have checked in an electric vehicle so there is no real difference that I'm aware of a few years ago I worked with a guy that was making electric cars and he successfully registered an electric motorbike he made it had very small range it was a fun thing but he successfully put it through the regulations just by filling the forms out and sending it off and having it tested Excellent, another question please Where do you stand particularly back in the UK at the moment as we've got the war on diesel powered cars where do you stand without going forward and also with our esteemed friends to the car in London I stick my head in a bucket of sand I don't know it's certainly very interesting that basically just wait and see what happens nothing will happen within a few years so there's not a lot an individual can do and another question coming out perfect you've got good timing the most important part what's like driving it compared to a gasoline it's interestingly different this little one is underpowered because most motorbikes are very much overpowered for what they need even the small motorbikes will exceed the speed limit within seconds so the one out there is slow to get up to top speed but not enough to be a problem in traffic or hold people up and the bigger one is very heavy so you're aware that there's a big you're on a big mass and that is powerful so it's closer because I've driven quite a few electric vehicles over the years driving the big diesel bike is closer to driving an electric car in power delivery because it just surges forwards with a petrol engine you get all the power at the high revs and none of the low revs so with a petrol car as you go faster and faster as the revs pick up you get more and more power but with a diesel you get that from the low RPM up so I find it much more relaxing because you're not always chasing the revs and the power it's just there when you need it as there is no one else learning up at the microphone that's another question quick one last one quick one please you mentioned that your latest vehicle is based around a VW diesel engine have you noticed when you take it out on the road that the emissions are considerably higher than when it's on the test ground you and I think on that bombshell we will finish up and please give a warm round of applause to Russell