Some of you may have already seen this picture of a pedal powered snowplow on Trek’s “1 World 2 Wheels” blog a few weeks ago. This machine looks pretty interesting in the still picture, but you really need to see it in action to get the full effect (click the video link from this story on a Wisconsin news station’s website). It was designed and built by Kevin Blake, who works by day as an engineer at Trek. In the video, he talks a bit about the construction of his recumbent snowplow bike, which has a handbuilt steel frame but is also made from old bike parts, a salvaged Craftsman riding lawnmower, and a couple of snow shovels. Pretty cool idea; it almost makes me wish I lived somewhere that gets some snowfall …almost. I should also mention that Kevin was a runner up in the “Innovate or Die” contest with this machine. He didn’t get the $5,000 grand prize, but apparently he did win a Specialized bike (just what every Trek engineer needs I am sure).
While I am posting, I want to mention bike content that I spotted on a couple of Industrial Design websites this morning. Core 77 has gallery coverage of the North American Handbuilt Bicycle Show. It is great to see that the show is growing and being covered at sites like Core this year. I also saw an interesting bike rack design in a recent designboom post. It looks like the lock hole lines up pretty well with the top tube on the bike in the photos, but I wonder how well it would work with variety of bikes of different types and sizes.
Photo credit: Trek “1 World 2 Wheels” blog.
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