Here is an image of Frank Seeger's Demarcay. There is a fabulous video of it on Youtube.I would post the link,except I don't know how to tranfer the hypertext.So,if you want to see it you'll have to go to YouTube and search for Demarcay von 1922 mit Anzani Motor 1000cm
The Demarcay video is fascinating - - and right up the alley I'm chasing in designing and hopefully building my own replica/cyclecar to look a bit like. Here is the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cgZmxtyO4o Some photos from a marvelous web-page concerning this example: See the whole page by clicking this link: http://tricyclecaristes.forumr.net/t119-de-marcay-vous-connaissez Still another Demarcay page can be found here: http://www.demarcay.de/ .
Has anyone else noticed the 1912 Pioneer Cyclecar for sale by "Celebrity Cars" in Las Vegas? They have lots of photos and quite a bit of information on this really interesting car - - just "click" this link - (I hope): http://celebrity-carslv.ebizautos.com/detail-1912-pioneer-cyclecar-2_seater-used-8398348.html .
Here is a great photo of a "Rollo" on flickr, by Richard and Gill Long that some folks might enjoy seeing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardandgill/529297954/
again these are tremendously cool- and a three wheeler today would use the HOV lanes now prob and like squeeze a few lanes at stop lights heh heh
Ronald Saunders has a neat photo of a modern three wheeler I found interesting if not compelling: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronsaunders47/3854784645/ Not easily seen is the 2CV Citroen boxer twin that pushes the wee beastie along: .
Same as mine - I run the club for the Blackjack Avion. I've just in the middle of a respray & body off rebuild and have found a supercharger from Nissan March SuperTurbo to go on it. The Citroen engine can be seen in the chassis picture below. The car is not anywhere near a recreation of a Morgan as suggested in the caption to the photo on Flickr - the styling could not possibly be more different. It's nearer how a three wheeled cyclecar might have been done by a French coachbuilder like Delahaye if they'd had glassfibre back in the 30's!!
BalckJack,shouldn't the sign on the door read "Parking reserved for the Chester MENTAL Health Council"?
Delahaye was a manufacturer of chassis but I know what you mean, Blackjack. What you're thinking of is the work of Saoutchik, Figoni et Falaschi, etc. It's a thought I often come back to, how design is influenced by both technique of construction and technique of representation. Modern designers are taught to design from loose to fast, from rough sketch to technical document; they are also taught that a design is good to the extent that the final product looks like a designer's concept rendering. This was not always the case. Personally I dislike the sort of "shapery" practiced today, that is, for a designer to conceive "shapes" without reference to material or technique, safe in the knowledge that there is a corps of production engineers ready to turn it into a working product, and quite oblivious to the end user's arguable interest in understanding the materials and techniques involved. To me the mark of the designers of the Vintage era lay in their ability to think on several layers at once, artistically, practically, structurally, mechanically. It is visible in the honesty-with-elegance quality of the best of their designs: flat sheetmetal feels like flat sheetmetal because that is how the design was conceived; there is a sort of skin-quality in which the fact that the material is .060" thick is readily intuitable. For that reason there is a sense of appropriateness in the absence of compound curves in the hood of a '20s car, for instance.
What Ned said: Designing, at least in part, with available construction methods as one of the guiding factors. Other mitigating strictures and limits were similarly considered as well. .
Another interesting thing is, given that it is by long-standing convention customary to depict cars in left-side elevation during the design process, and that 70%-90% of designers are presumably right-handed: the shapes that were desired for the parts of a car before c.1970 were not shapes that a right-handed person draws naturally and comfortably in left-side elevation. This was not a problem while coachbuilders came from a craft tradition in which drawing was a means of illustration with no greater concentration of creativity than the processes of abstract conception on one hand, and physical fabrication on the other. That is, the craft-designer uses the techniques of drawing to represent a product already conceived in imagination as a concrete artifact, anticipating further creative processes involved in actually making the thing. It does not matter if the lines do not flow out of the hand: they have already flowed out of the imagination. By contrast the modern professional designer comes from an academic fine-art (and marketing) background, in which all the creativity is concentrated in the process of sketching. It is solely this psycho-mystical faith in the power of the scribble, of the doodle, that gave rise to the '70s wedge profile. It is aerodynamically all wrong, certainly, despite the post-rationalization: Kamm tails are quite something else. But the wedge sketches readily; it is easy on the arm. And as the modern designer can conceive no design process except the scribble/doodle/sketch, the modern designer has not been able to kick the wedge habit until direct-to-digital techniques arose; and even thereafter the addiction to bottom-front-to-top-rear lines proves to be thoroughly ingrained. As with many things the trick is to be able to use both processes interchangeably, so that each may strengthen the other. A designer ought to be able to use scribbles and doodles to clarify thinking, but should be free enough of the glamour and mystique of "high art" as not to require the product to be an expression of the process of sketching, for the sake of somehow marking it as "design".
Roland Bugatti and his Briggs and Stratton Red Bug.The Red Bug ultimately influenced the building of the Baby Bugs.These Molsheim built Baby Bugs are at the Beunos Aires Zoo.
I will see.If you don't see an explanation,that means I stole the image and there was nothing more with it. Tom,I loked where I found the image.There wasn't any further explanation. Bob
Bob, you didn't steal the image, you just referred to it by means of a technique which displays the image in the reference to it. Take a look, it's still right there where you found it ...
. Going through some photos I shot in 2010, I turned up a few that I thought might be worth a drool or two: More "wishbook" photos to come as I crop and size a few more. .
. Here is a shot of the complete bike - - - its not exactly at the top of my list of all-time great bikes, but I'd sure be proud to own one of em all the same: .
. Some pretty interesting and in some cases, kinda bizarre cyclecars, modern style. Here is a link if you've not found it previously. http://www.electric-bikes.com/cars/ready.html Examples:
i didn't even know what the hell a cyclecar was until I opened this thread. I had no idea so many people were into these things...
There's somthing evocative about four wheels and two wooden planks, with a sodding big old air cooled engine strapped to one end and an eccentric madman strapped to the other:
The Jalopy Journal
