#HTE

This Strandbeast Bike Looks Like A (Fun) Nightmare

Are you bored with your single speed? Does your cycling lack style and urgency? Add pep to your ride with a bike that’s part mechanical spider demon!

Though less objectively terrifying than certain other awkward movers, this bike project uses the same spooky flavor of walking technology that brings Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests to life. The result is a little unsettling but totally rad:

This bike started as a Walmart single speed and wound up an engineering puzzle. Its successful scuttling is the work of Blaine Eliott, a tech-wise guy in Santa Barbara, and his compatriot JP. 

The assembly alone took over three nights to finish, and the design itself… a bit longer, at over 6 months and 1000 human hours.

Jansen’s linkage (the walking mechanism) is well documented, and many engineers and researchers have looked into optimizing it for further designs. Eliott’s iteration was informed in part by The Design and Optimization of a Crank-Based Leg Mechanism by Amanda Ghassaei, among others.

Check out Eliott’s terror-bike building process and recipe list starting here, and if you love time lapse (of anything) as much as I do, there are a few assembly videos on his YouTube channel.