What’s up y’all, I’m James. I’m currently a junior MechE, but just came back from a year off, so I’m getting back into the swing of things and get involved. I’m originally form from Florida, and I’m a Sidizen, though I admittingly haven’t been there in a while. I love water sports, the outdoors, and things that go fast (especially vintage cars and bikes). Also, photography/film more recently. If you like these things as well, please be my friend.

me surfing!

me kiteboarding

Since I’m just coming back from a gap, I haven’t really been involved on campus recently, but I’m trying to get back involved as quickly as possible. I did go on the ISEED trip to Costa Rica with Mr. Wettergreen one summer, and that was awesome, so if anyone has the chance to do one of those programs I highly recommend. I recently heard that we have a Formula SAE club now, which is 200% my jam, so I’m hoping to invest some time into that. Overall, I would just like to get involved with the OEDK as much as possible.

Most recently, my running project–that is allllmost done–is a 1989 BMW K100 motorcycle, which I fully stripped to the last nut and bolt, cut up, painted, and reassembled a bit differently. Along the way I rebuilt the engine, rewired the harness using a new computer and breakout box, designed a new rear subframe and suspension mount for a custom cantilever rear shock set up, and essentially rebuilt every other part on the bike that had gone bad after sitting for 35 years. I utilized SolidWorks pretty heavily in order to design the new rear end and ensure that the new suspension geometry would work before anything was welded up. I also used the SolidWorks suite to run some somewhat rough stress simulations on the new frame, though would have preferred to use ANSYS (unfortunately I didn’t have 60,000$ lying around). Turns out welding is pretty hard, but I had a few lessons and hopefully these welds hold (not like anything’s on the line). There’s still a few things that need to be finished on the bike, including a new seat, headlight mount, brake light, and a few other brackets and covers, which I hope to utilize some 3D printing and/or molding with fiberglass and carbon fiber. I would also like to design a new front fork setup for the bike using some more modern forks (which gets you better brakes and tires as well), but this requires some pretty expensive custom machined aluminum adapter parts (hey maybe I could make them by the end of the semester).

The bike when I got it; it wasn’t running 🙁 but it was only 500$

bits of the engine

PAINT

Reassembly with crank cover off and no transmission on

solidworks assembly for the rear subframe and suspension mount. Also very handy for generating tube notching templates using the sheet metal features.

Checking fitment for the cantilever suspension. Is this in the right spot?????

assembled, but still missing a few things. It runs though

In class I said I wanted to build a racecar, which still holds very true, but is maybe not super specific. So for this I’m going in another direction, inspired by the fact that we are starting off with sewing. Since I’ve been kiteboarding for a while, I have a lot of old kites. They tend to be pretty easy to break, and most people get new gear every couple of years anyways. The kites are made of high strength nylon ripstop, dacron, and sometimes some other fancy textiles including dyneema and aluula. I would love to be able to repurpose a lot of this material instead of just chucking it into a landfill and want to start with trying to make a simple jacket (or maybe an apron) from some of these salvaged materials. I’ve seen one other person online do a similar thing, though I never have been able to sew so I have yet to be able to achieve my dreams of sustainable kite clothing.

Using the CNC mills is definitely the skill that I’m looking forward to the most in this class. For a couple of my projects, I’ve been limited by a need for CNC cut parts, and its generally pretty expensive work to outsource. Understanding how to design parts for this machining process and then operate the machinery is pretty invaluable to me, and I’m sure will continue to pay dividends down the road.

I’m looking forward to a great semester of learning the ins and outs of the OEDK with y’all. Mahalo!