Letter to the UCI on the Downtube Attachment Rule

My interest as a bicycle designer is that when moving the downtube to above the chainrings, a significant drag reduction is accrued by this polo-bike frame style, thus making the bicycle as a machine more efficient.

Now, since common street bicycles copy the official form, which is slower, this actually costs billions of calories of food to be eaten for no reason by riders per day worldwide who are using their bicycles for transportation, in reality if these frames had their downtubes above the chainrings that food would not be needed per day.

So, with the importance of the bicycle as basic transportation worldwide and its use by the poorest people on the planet, this seemingly benigh attempt at a "level playing field" actually is costing these poor to eat more per day using their bicycle as transportation.

There is no structural need to alter anything on a bicycle made with the downtube above the chainrings, the standard tubing wall thickness doesn't change until above this point so needn't be changed in alloy, temper or dimenesions; it requires re-jigging the downtube on an assembly line along with changing the headtube attachment, no other changes are needed to manufacture this design and the scaling of them to the world ridership saves energy by design.

Please could you seriously consider this issue, as I state it seems rather off, but has a huge effect on efficiency of the basic machine, on the order of 1-mph increase in average speed by simply moving the tube up for a traditional road machine with '70's tubing, thus a very significant percentage of the work being done to overcome aerodynamic drag is removed.

While this will effect racing speeds, that is only one facet to consider in the same light as an engineering change to the machine for transportation, hard to ignore the vast influence the UCI rules have on manufacturing.

The UCI can be seen as a leader in using its knowledge for the betterment of humanity to pursue this.

Respectfully yours,
tom mallard

Mechanical Power Systems From The Wind

Mechanical Power Systems From The Wind

This paper is for all those farmers and ranchers who live and love their wind-swept land and want to make a living from it but it’s hard.

There are some things very standard to farming, and by brand the PTO, Power Take-Off unit is one of those things. What drives that unit is usually a shaft from the engine of the tractor, so this is to add a unit with industrial springs that are storing energy, these wound-up by windmills in a system of carts & conveyors that automatically keeps winding things up when the wind blows and stacking them ready to pick up and cart them to the fields.

These are dangerous levels of spring power. It demands designing in safety on an industrial scale to drive a mower, what happens when a spring or ratchet breaks and so on.

So, this is a very simple concept, to work best the windmill may be of another type, one designed for stormy weather, one that doesn’t shut down in big gusty winds, instead it cranks them out because that is the policy to follow with natural systems, get it while you can.

Sand dunes sit, until the strong winds hit.

The burden then becomes having enough units to do the actual work-per-second needed to drive the acreage for the next, how many can be afforded ends somewhere and after that hook them up to a biodiesel fed engine and call it good because the wind doesn’t always blow but all that was saved in expenses per acre to work the land, per year.

To design all this to a first prototype system is a worthy enterprise for farm equipment manufacturers to consider.

Without the unique windmill, my assessment is the watts won’t be there to move much dirt but could supply seeding and other less powerful needs per acre. Since most windmills shut down above 30-knots, design examples of those that operate in strong wind is spartan and historical; my first approach to this was in the late 1970’s, so, the recent addition in figuring out springs and ratchets can be wound up by a variable wind to high mechanical torque and basically no loss in energy, nice combo!

Easy to see how it'd really reduce the yearly costs on any farm or ranch with these smaller uses that seem to deserve their own systems, like for rotary power for hand tools, wind-up toys that do work.

Taking this into the other processes on a ranch or farm, dairy cows, prairie cattle, row crops to hand-dug back yards moving dirt takes a lot of watts, that’s an outlet for these units, to be designed to specific purposes from running compressors to conveyor belts to shop equipment, designed to step-down the high torque to a steady output that lasts so many minutes per PSU, Power Storage Unit.

May this concept inspire, my desire is to put that paperwork into 3dcad … someday, over the rainbow ...

Just figured out these would be easy to scale down to use in refrigerators that use compressors, very nice, had thought of hand tool powering with springs before, this puts intermittent wind-power into the kitchen! Most small appliances can be powered by a standard base using spring units ... the drawings will flow.

Sustainable Row-crop Agriculture

Sustainable Row-crop Agriculture

An example of my solution is to put biomass harvesting units all along appropriate stretches of the Mississippi River and all its tributaries to gain the biodiesel and the pressed cakes after the oils are extracted, which, if my math is correct is enough annually to supply the fertilization needs of Big Agriculture for corn & soy bean rotations, totally eliminating the need for ammonia, a fossil-fuel dependent method to get the yields they need to pay the huge bill for using it.

The cakes are a true soil enhancement, beyond soil amendments which only last 1-2 seasons, an enhancement enriches the soil with organics to add to its structure, its ability to hold moisture and provide habitat for soil inhabitants, from fungi to worms, part of organic farming.

So, this plan produces gigatons of pressed cakes free for the taking & processing, not to mention billions of gallons of biodiesel and other useful oils and nobody is eating it as a food, so, all that excess nutrition goes shooting out into the Gulf of Mexico and all that fresh-water plankton dies to produce the seasonal "Dead Zone".

Now, with a domestic supply of farm fuel and fertilizer that's free until our cities & towns stop polluting groundwater and run-off, then we'll have to come up with something else like wastewater effluent ... probably enough of that to do something, Phoenix, AZ, has 10-million gallons a day of it, that's 83-million pounds of nutrients the biomass has to eat before tomorrow, converts to over 2-gallons of biodiesel per person per day from this source and the water is almost pure at the end so treated and recycled.

Hope that does the job of creating an economy due to profit from biodiesel from ignored sources and recycling fresh water on a municipal scale, saving billions a year nationally this all emits 40% of the harmful emissions versus gas-ethanol extract it to burn it up, it’s a real cut of emissions, soot is a problem biodiesel refiners have already begun to reduce, emitting about 30% less soot over fossil diesel at this time.

These two strategies can supply all volume needs with biodiesel for transportation and agriculture, and enhance the soils on a long-term basis versus today’s costly methods, providing an economy and scale that provides more food per watt used, the ultimate measure of efficiency as we leave the Industrial Age for the Thermally Aware Age, where all energy transformations are conserved instead of all the heat wasted we see today.

With the cost of corn tied to biomass production instead of the price of ammonia, we’ll have more food for less. The parasitic and captive-market system currently in vogue seems to be losing its favor lately, hoping that’s a trend, I remain without funding for these ideas, with public utility PhD’s ready to work on the problems of pathogens & poisons, nice project.