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Mar 18

A Hubless Harley-Davidson Chopper Is One Sure Way to Get Attention

By General Posts

For most riders, a Harley-Davidson is beautiful on its own and, if you add the growl of the engine, there’s enough happening to get attention. But there are other ways you can stand out even more, should you be interested.

Hubless choppers are one such option. They are futuristic, almost alien-looking custom bikes built by hand around a Harley-Davidson frame, with wild-looking paintwork and at least one spoke-less wheel. Invented by Franco Sbarro and most famously used on the 1989 Sbarro Osmos, the center-less wheel is difficult to make, difficult to maintain and has many practical disadvantages.

But it’s bound to get you noticed.

Perhaps the first, most famous chopper to get international media attention is the Hubless Custom by New Jersey-based Howard’s Killer Custom, which was unveiled in late 2007 and is believed to have cost no less than $155,000. It is usually included on lists of most expensive motorcycles in the world.

It partially started out as a classic 1969 FL Harley-Davidson, which, in the hands of Howard Sofield, became the most famous hubless chopper in the world. Weighing about 700 pounds and able to reach speeds of 100 mph, the Hubless Custom took 4,000 hours to make and two full years of research and design.

According to Sofield, the Hubless Custom started out with a 1974 swing arm frame and a 21-inch front wheel, the 1969 Harley-Davidson Pan Shovel 80ci engine, 1969 & 1974 Harley-Davidson engine cases, and 1982 Harley-Davidson cylinders. The goal was to make the hubless wheel more practical and to create a fully functional bike in-house.

“Using my experience in drafting and automotive industries I was able to come up with a different way to make the hubless wheel work in a more practical way,” Sofield said upon the bike’s introduction. “Combining that with my Father’s extensive machining and fabrication skills, we are able to create our bike entirely in-house and do things that most every other builder would have to outsource. Over 4,000 hours of design and build time went into this project and we could not be happier with how it turned out. It looks and functions perfectly.”

The downside to this hubless chopper: it is difficult to handle.

Some years, later, in 2014, Ballistic Cycles unveiled their own take on the hubless chopper, this time with a spoke-less front wheel and a rear so low it almost grazed the ground. Called the Hubless Harley-Davidson Road King, it won several prizes right after introduction, including Baddest Bagger at Full Throttle Saloon, Deadwoods Nastiest Bagger and Best in Show at the Easy Rider Saloon.

Ballistic Cycles never went public with how much one such Bagger cost.

But the Road King is a stunner, as you can see in the gallery attached. Ballistic Cycles boasts of being the first custom team to put a 30-inch front wheel on a bike – and a spoke-less one, at it! Add the all-aluminum body with the wickedest paintwork and a twin turbo Harley-Davidson air / liquid-cooled engine, and you get yourself one visually arresting machine.

“Cutting necks and adding a few glass parts is one thing, but truly building a ground-breaking motorcycle takes a bit more time, effort, and a planning,” the official website reads. “The entire front end is completely one off and each and every part is custom for this feature. The hubless wheel is machined from a solid piece of billet, and the brake system is integrated into the wheel. The custom air cylinder is designed specifically for the load endured by the wheel and motorcycle. The mechanics behind the hubless wheel features all the latest technology and completely pushes the boundaries of what is possible.”

The good news: Road King was the first of a long line of similar projects, and Ballistic Cycles is still making and selling hubless Baggers. Any rider with deep enough pockets can get a chopper that will make them get all the attention on the road – and then some.

Dec 22

NAWA’s Radical Electric Motorcycle Highlights The Potential Of Supercapacitors In EVs

By General Posts

by Bill Roberson from https://www.forbes.com/

Despite the fact that they have built an electric motorcycle, French tech company NAWA Technologies, or just NAWA for short, isn’t in the business of building electric motorcycles – they build batteries. But maybe they should reconsider the motorcycle market option, especially in light of the one-off bike they did just indeed build, because it’s a serious looker packed with possibly industry-changing technologies.

The NAWA Racer’s sleek, minimalist styling comes courtesy of a collaboration with Envisage Group, who have been involved with Jaguar and other brands that want some cool lines with their new tech. One highlight is a hubless rear wheel, although the bike is covered in cool touches including the wrap-around LED taillight and duck-tailed seat.

But beyond the slick lines and hubless rear hoop of the NAWA Racer, the cafe-racer inspired from-the-future motorbike carries an underlying technology that significantly boosts performance and could signal a significant step forward for electric motorcycle performance – or the performance potential of anything that needs batteries for motive power, including electric cars.

NAWA has added a supercapacitor to the Racer (NAWA calls it an ultracapacitor, and have branded it as NAWACap), and the short version of the technese is this: A supercapacitor is similar to a battery, except it can be charged in seconds, and can then dump that charge at an extremely high rate – far beyond what a battery can provide – for an instant boost in power. It can also repeat that feat millions of times without any substantial performance losses. NAWA isn’t the first company to put a supercapacitor into service; supercar maker Lamborghini is integrating a supercapacitor system into their new Sián hypercar (sorry, but all 63 are sold out at $3.6 million per copy).

According to information provided by NAWA, the Racer has a relatively small 9kWh lithium-ion battery pack, and a .1kWh NAWACap ultracapacitor located in the upper pod above the pack in the frame. The inclusion of the NAWACap system has multiple advantages. Since it can be charged in seconds by regenerative braking (preferably) or the Li-ion battery (or both), it’s pretty much always ready to give a power boost when physics puts the largest load on the battery: From a stop or during hard acceleration. NAWA claims the racer can go 0-60 in about three seconds with a top speed of about 100 miles an hour. The Racer’s motor puts out about 100 horsepower, and NAWA says that since the supercapacitor system cuts down on needed battery capacity, the Racer weighs in at about 330 pounds – far lighter than some current electric motorcycles like the Zero SR/F, which tips the scales at 485 pounds with a 14.4kWh battery. That improved power-to-weight ratio also helps in performance metrics and improves handling.

Additionally, the NAWACap system extends the urban range of the Racer since the motor can be smaller, lighter and has to push less weight around. NAWA is claiming 186 miles of urban range, where the NAWACap system will be in its element, sucking up free electrons from the regenerative braking system in stop-and-go traffic. Highway range would be less, of course.

The Lamborghini Sián and the NAWA Racer are shining more light on both an ongoing problem and a potential elegant solution around the limitations of lithium-ion batteries, which currently power pretty much every electric car, hybrid, electric motorcycle, ebike and cell phone in the world. The problem? Lithium-ion batteries, wondrous as they are, take a relatively long time to charge. Also, they are not able to dump power into a drivetrain at a very high rate – unless you can pile a literal ton of them into your vehicle, as Tesla and others have done, but which you cannot do with a weight-sensitive machine like a motorcycle. Also, batteries can catch fire if severely damaged, and their lifespan is limited. Capacitors, which have been around for about as long as electricity, have none of those problems – but there’s a reason we don’t use them as long-term energy storage devices just yet: They are not able to hold a charge over long periods of time like a battery, and they currently have low energy density compared to most batteries. If those issues could be solved, they would touch on the holy grail of battery technology: The Solid State Battery.

To put this in perspective, consider that if a Tesla used supercapacitors (or a solid state battery) instead of a lithium-ion battery pack, you could likely charge it in a fraction of the time it now takes to fill a traditional car with gas. As in: A minute or so. Additionally, an array of supercapacitors would also be able to pump huge amounts of energy into a vehicle’s drive system, resulting in incredible acceleration even beyond the feats of Ludicrous Mode and so on. But again, because they cannot hold a charge for long and have low energy density, they are not yet practical for uses as a primary energy storage system. NAWA’s solution with the Racer? The battery/supercapacitor hybrid.

Just like battery technology, capacitor tech isn’t standing still either. Work is ongoing on making supercapacitors even more super by lengthening the time they can hold a charge and otherwise improving every other aspect of their performance. While powering vehicles with supercapacitors was once something talked about on the fringes of EV R&D forums, the tech is now heading mainstream, and we should expect to see more vehicles with ever better supercapacitors in the near future. For now, all we can do is hope some OEM slips a check under the door at NAWA Technologies and brings something like the Racer to market sooner than later.

If you’re going to be in Las Vegas for CES 2020, check out the NAWA Racer at their booth in Eureka Park.