SnowBikes

1996 - I always wanted to build a SnowBike and race downhill courses in Moto-cross style mass starts.

I designed several in 95 and 96 and continued to dabble with it for years. Around 2000 I registered SnowMoto.com and started designing and fabricating prototype parts. I envisioned ripping down slopes like a moto-crosser/mountain biker/snowboarder. I envisioned sports and events taking off and growing around these devices. I figured we could get snowbike races in the X-Games and create park freestyle contests etc. I still think this can, should and will happen. Over the past several years snowbikes do seem to be slowly gaining momentum in North America.

Soon with all the other things I had going on, like trying to get into video games, finishing my snowboard binding patent, doing freelance modeling and design work and planning to get married, I decided making snowbikes was not the best use of my time. The potential for fun was high but return of investment seemed low. I held SnowMoto.com for 2 or 4 years then let the domain go. It was quickly snatched up by another company. I watched them create snowbikes and market them on Snowmoto.com for several years, then one day the site was gone. Some time later the company Outer Edge grabbed the domain and is still marketing toy snowbikes and sleds under the snowmoto name.

I envisioned really fast hard carving bikes. As you can see in the images above from 1996, I designed skis with dual edges for better control, sidecuts and a rear axle that would pivot with a biasing mechanism to angle the board edges for tighter turns. I also kept an offset foot platform on most of my designs. When I'm laying a snowbike over I like to have offset pedals just like a bicycle crank. Most of my designs were just theories and never fully put to the test. Snowbikes were fun to think about though. I'd still like to have a well designed snowbike capable of large cliff drops and high speed moto-cross style racing.

I still have a SnowMoto Facebook page because my friends and I still often talk about building them, we just don't currently have the time: Facebook/SnowMoto

Mechanical Product Design & Fabrication

1995 - In school at Red Rocks I became an avid mountain biker, I rode Dinosaur Ridge a lot. I also frequently completed a lot of mountain bike related work for my school projects. Most projects required us to develop our own design solutions. Some required reverse engineering of an existing consumer product or part currently on the market. For these we had to use calipers and gauges to study and measure actual products shape, form and dimensions, turn it into a 3D solid CAD model then detail it with GD&T data. I was also involved in an actual NASA design program where I had to design a hydraulic lift/lower table transporter to take large delicate scientific instrument clusters from labs and move them through a facility and up into shuttle compartments.

At the time I was initially working in Autocad for DOS (before windows).  We had 3-1/4 floppy drives that held something like 1.4 megs of data. When I finished the program I was into windows NT with Acad12 I believe. I also had just started to have some access to 3D Studio, Pro-E, Solid Works, etc. Below is an elevated chain stay frame of my design and a Rock Shox fork and Spin carbon mag wheels I did based on reverse engineering products. Now I could model all this in a couple hours, back then it took weeks. This is the only school image I have on hand but I know I have a large portfolio bag somewhere of many more product "CAD's".

In the summer of 1995 I worked at Pangaea Engineering, a company which built mountain bike frames and other products as well as a lot of product R&D. I believe the parts in Christopher Reeves were designed by Tom the owner. At times I would be on the computer detailing some part and he would be sitting there working out a 3 legal pad page calculation by hand on some finite element analysis for a customer who had hired him to design and engineer something. The best part of the projects I worked on that summer were in the shop helping make bike frames. I learned about designing frame jigs and different frame geometry, etc. I was hoping to eventually be able to build some of my many full suspension bike designs I was doing in school. In the images below we are threading a bottom bracket, honing a head tube and running control cables.

Over the next several years I worked for a number of companies on multiple projects as an independant contractor, which seemed to be the norm. Companies would bring designers onto projects but often only as full time on site contractors.

B-Ten Systems (Automation)

I was hired at B-Ten as a mechanical designer while still in school. I focused on industrial automation equipment; basic robotics design. I worked under a project engineer who had the total big picture vision of the machine or product that needed to be built. I was assigned design duties on specific sub-assemblies for that product. For one project I designed gripping mechanisms and arms for a Saginaw steering housing assembly line. Another project I was given full design over airbag folding production line stations for GM. I'd design the core in the computer and often found myself out in the shop mocking up quick rough prototypes to test my ideas. I'd then take that information back to my computer designs.

(gonna look for my dwg's)

The things I really liked about B-Ten as well as Pangaea were: the projects were interesting and challenging and I got to split my time between design work on the computer and doing some hands on fabrication or assembly of those designs out in the shop. It was fun seeing something I designed on the PC get built, come together and fully function out in the shop. I continued at B-ten for awhile after school until I got a more art centric job as a Lightwave3D artist and video editor. 

Unique Mobility (EV's)

I worked at UM on an electric vehicle project. My interest there was in eventually doing stylistic form designs and related body design work, but they did not do much of that there. Bodywork they did do was primarily for conversion EV's and was pure function not artistic form. Most of my time was spent on electric motors and gearing. I found out Tom, who I'd work for at Pangaea had worked there as an engineer in the past, he had invented a patent that was still being used at UM. Kinda cool. I remember him telling me was bummed because they were making a lot of money off his idea and he got only a small bonus.

Timberline Automation

More mechanical designs and lots of straight drafting with this one.

Aegis Designs (Practical Scale Modeling and 3D Design)

Aegis was cool, I worked there the summer of 96 doing 3D mechanical design work creating machines, a commercial architectural building renovation project as well as practical model-making which was my favorite part. The owner Bud was an old school practical model miniature maker who had moved into "the new era" of CAD modeling but still had some practical modeling accounts. My main practical modeling work was done on a Navy ship project that was needed as a show piece in a high ranking Navy officers building. 

Here's an early video of me fabricating this ship model:

Snowboard Seasons

93 and 94 I spent several months of both winter seasons staying in Breckenridge. It's a great mountain and great town. In 95 after saving all summer I bought a Vail/Beaver Creek season pass, which was $1000 back then. I took the spring school semester off and moved to Vail for about four months. The back bowls and treelines are EPIC on a powder day.

Breck.

It's not bad waking to this:

 

Metal Shop

In 1992 I was shop foreman of a metal fabrication shop. The owner Jesse and his business partner Dave were both interesting characters. They saw some of my skateboard ramps I built and offered me my first real job after high school (while I was attending a few classes at community college). They apprenticed me for one year then handed the reigns of the shop over to me as we went on to grow from 7 to 45 people at the company in less than 4 years. They easily talked me out of my morning college classes to work there full time, average 60 hours a week. I'd still often go to my shop on the weekends (even if we weren't working OT) and I'd work on my own projects, usually on one or both of my two Toyota trucks. I'd also do vehicle mods and side jobs for friends. Having a shop to work in and fabricate in is a very good thing for me. This was a great job and a great 4 years of learning tons and making good money.

In the Beginning

Very Old Art (Late 80's - early 90's).
I think it's good to always remember where you started. Since my 1st blog post was old drawings I found from when I was 13, I decided to keep it going from there and work up to my recent works. It's fun to look back at times and recollect, and laugh or smile at your old work. Putting them on this blog is also a way to back up these minimal bits of old school work, just in case I ever want to look at them again, lol. Most of my many other early art and design works are gone or buried in my parents stuff.

I took a computer programming class in 8th grade and didn't like it. I had zero interest in it, even though at the time I really liked playing my Atari. Once I actually got into computers in the early to mid 90's it was because I was drawn to programs like Lightwave3D and what you could create with them. Working at CMS I was sent to NewTek in Boulder for a week of Lightwave training in order to earn our authorized reseller license (and a copy of Lightwave3d)! During this week I learned the basics of box-modeling among many other things. My first ever box model was this fish. I was stoked and pretty much hooked on box-modeling from here on. It was much better to me than the more rigid autocad style modeling. Lightwave became my favorite modeling program.

My second Lightwave box model was this hand. It was my first ever attempt at modeling a human part.

Once I got comfortable with Lightwave I quickly tried a vehicle. This truck is my first. I was stoked when I found a way to use a piece of crumpled tin foil as a reflection map. Hahah.

In high school my favorite mediums were pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor (and making artworks from wood such as skate ramps). I mainly liked drawing cartoons and painting landscapes but I tried anything. Here are the few remaining pieces I found in my box of old photos.

My Half-Pipes

1984-1988 Before I graduated high school I had designed and build a dozen or more half pipes. In 8th grade I changed schools which didn't have as good an Art program as my previous school so I took Drafting and Design classes instead. I'm sure I designed well over a hundred different half-pipes and drafted out every detail. I could show and tell you exactly how many nails were needed to perfectly build each ramp. I wish I had photographs of every one but I only have a few random images of a couple of them.

I built my first smooth curved quarter pipe in 7th grade. I took a 4x8 sheet of plywood leaned it against a tree, watered it, staked the base, walked up it and bent it into a curve. I proped a couple 2x4's against each edge, tacked a couple nails into the tree and started riding my bike on it. Later I turned it into a half pipe by adding a sheet of plywood on the ground for flat bottom and made a new 8' wide quarter-pipe for the other side. Seen below is that first quarter pipe after being widened and re-built to free stand. I just stood up a plywood sheet along the ramp surface and traced the curve, cut two support transitions, put 2x4's in between them and extended the ramp to 8' wide just in time for skateboarding...

The image below is the opposite side of my first true skatable half pipe that touched vert. The power company had just placed a new yellow plastic tube on the support wire of the pole on the edge of our property so I took it off and tried to make a coping edge with it, as you can see below it didn't work too well first try because it went behind the plywood. That's ok, we couldn't grind yet anyway and on the next several ramps I built I mastered coping placement.

After a couple more mini ramp design/builds in my yard, I had to move elsewhere. My dad didn't allow any more builds in the yard - "too noisy and too many kids...". Next ramp was Foster's. We got enough wood and his parent's let us build one in his side yard, they had plenty of nice property. I took a look at what we had and started going for a 12' wide x 9' high ramp but realized we didn't have enough wood so I had to settle for 8' wide. I went with 8.5' transitions and 6" of vert for 9' high overall. This is one of the best images I have of Fosters, it was fun and I learned a lot of tricks on it, backside, mute and Indy airs, 50/50's, handplants, bs boneless, lien to tails, etc. We finished the ramp in the summer and every day after 9th grade I'd throw my skateboard on the handlebars of my GT and ride 4 miles to Fosters house and skate till dark. Good times.

There were many many other ramps after or around the same time as Fosters: Carrolton X2 or 3, Chicks, Smith's yard, SL, The field, CRIT - abondoned store, Dean's, etc. - ones I designed and built for friends, ones that parents hired me to build for their kids and just constantly building ramps anywhere and everywhere I could. It was always the most fun deciding on the curve or shape of the transition, as that helps to characterize the individual ramp. Sometimes I used string compass for specific radius and other times I would just freehand the curve to make it more unique. Hopefully I can dig up pics of all these ramps from peeps on facebook or something....! TBC

The Woods Ramp 1: We couldn't build in my yard anymore so I had to find more options because I wanted to build bigger and wider. I scoped out a nice clearing in the woods, it was close to my house and a 7-11. This was a perfect spot and ended up being the perfect 8 foot tranny/6 foot tall/16 foot wide with extension ramp. 

        

 


Woods Ramp 2: I got bored with Woods Ramp 1, other ramps were starting to be built with that same transition, height and width and it just felt too "standard" but it was a very fun ramp, we just needed a new layer of ply and more options. I wanted to add a new channel and spine section and the bigger the ramp the more it took so I went smaller and more unique with a complete mini ramp rebuild on the second design for woods 2. I had to rotate it 180 degrees to allow for the spine addition. I eyed it and hand drew the transitions, added a roll in channel and a spine for more options. Also we put a tarp over it cause it rained so much and going a day without skating was torture.

TBC...

BMX Freestylin'

In 1983, I got 3rd place overall for the year in my class for the BMX racing season. It was my last full year racing BMX. I had been getting more interested in just jumping and having fun doing tricks on my Mongoose.

At a youth camp talent show one year me and my cousin Stephen along with our announcer Mike, put on a Freestyle BMX show on Mike's PK Ripper.

In '84 I traded in my awesome Mongoose Supergoose at Conte's for a brand new GT Pro Performer. Of course I always kept my bikes in my room. I'm not sure why I'm making the face, I guess that was all part of hamming it up for the camera. Ahh it looks pretty stupid but whatever. lol.