Gyro Bike

I have always liked gyroscopes. Maybe everyone does. My dad worked with inertial navigation systems for Boeing, so perhaps that is where my interest started. My dad also had this kooky idea for a device for overcoming inertia by using some of the principles involved in gyros. He never actually made it work. Perhaps it is time for me to pick up the torch. Maybe it will get me off the ground.

We lived in Seattle when they had the World's Fair there back in the early sixties. In the hall of science, they had a gyro platform you could stand on. There was a large motorized gyro mounted on a gimble on a platform that was free to rotate about its' vertical axis. I never got to try it out, it was either broken, or there was a long line waiting to get on. We went back to Seattle to visit a few years ago and I took my son John with me to the Science hall, now a museum, but it was gone.

My first Christmas after we moved to Ohio I got a flying saucer toy that contained a gear driven gyroscope. Now there was a gyro! You could crank that thing up and you had a really strong gyro. It was great. But like all toy gyros, the bearings were feeble, and it would start slowing down almost immediately. I looked on the Internet, but I could not find a picture. It was about eight inches in diameter and maybe four inches tall, made of yellow plastic with short orange (or red?) posts at either end of the axis. I think it was made by Marx.

Later on, after I had been riding motorcycles for a few years, I discovered a very interesting phenomena. If you are cruising along at a good clip, like sixty MPH or so, and you press forward on one of the hand grips, the bike will go off in that direction immediately. The handlebars will not noticeably move. That is, you press on the right hand grip, the bike will heal over to the right, and start turning right. The reaction is instantaneous. I attribute this to the gyroscopic action of the bike's front wheel. You might be able to observe the same effect on a bicycle, but the amount of force involved would be minuscule compared to the mass of the rider. In all my years of bicycle riding I have never observed it.

A few years ago, flywheels were going to be the new way of storing energy in cars instead of batteries. You would have a three foot diameter flywheel in an evacuated chamber spinning at 20,000 RPM in the trunk of your car. When you wanted to go, the flywheel would be connected to a generator, which would generate electric current which would be sent to electric motors which would drive the wheels. When you stepped on the brake, the drive motors would act as generators, and the current would be used speed up the flywheel. A nice idea, but it never really took off.

I do not ride motorcycles anymore, not that I do not like or enjoy them, but I have responsibilities, and I am afraid of the other drivers on the road. I do not want to end up in an ambulance because I was hit by a car. The problem with motorcycles is you have no protection against impact. A fully enclosed motorcycle could overcome this difficulty, but then you have the problem maintaining your balance when you come to a stop. One way to do this would be to have mechanical struts that you could operate with your feet. A fully enclosed motorcycle would be heavy, so you might want power assist on those struts.

Another solution might be to use a (can you guess?) flywheel! Speed the flywheel up when you come to a stop, connect a vertical gimble to the bike's steering and use the gyroscopic forces to maintain your balance. When you take off, syphon the energy from the gyro to drive the wheels. When you have reached cruising speed, the flywheel would have come to a stop and would generate no gyroscopic forces.

There was a guy who built a gyro balanced motorcycle here in Portland a while back. I made an inquiry a few years ago, and it seemed like it used the gyro to stay level like a car in corners. Interesting but not what I was looking for. However, as you can see from the ad, he seems to have updated his device.

Update June 2016 replaced missing picture.