The Bicycle Bubble Machine

thingiverse

Full video: http://youtu.be/-RRaYNLv_Zs Make a splash as the star of commuter traffic! Delight kids in the neighborhood with your whimsical antics! Engage in lively discussions with chemtrail believers as you pedal by, leaving a trail of soap bubbles in your wake. With the wind-driven Bicycle Bubble Machine drawing a dense stream behind you, you can bring joy and serenity back to the streets. The Bicycle Bubble Machine is a bubble machine attached to the luggage rack of your bike. I discovered bicycle-mounted bubble machines online, but they all rely on batteries, neglecting the fact that our bikes have a more sustainable and fun source of energy: relative wind. The Bicycle Bubble Machine harnesses the relative wind created by riding your bicycle: a wind wheel turns a wheel with bubble wands, which are blown directly by the relative wind. It works surprisingly well at a comfortable range of speeds, and with its funny, jet-engine design, when one is attached to every side of your bike, it's an eye-catcher. This is my first real project constructing something that moves. I'm not an engineer, so please be kind! I put a lot of work into this (and printed many prototypes...): for example, the tank was supposed to be printable in one piece, store enough liquid, not store too much liquid in 'dead' places, and not spill all the time while cycling. The design now has bulkhead walls to reduce sloshing effects. That said: *it will still get messy*, but that's part of the fun! While I thought about a gear system, I discarded this idea because everything I came up with led to a) a smaller tank, b) larger dead spaces of fluid, c) too many wind turbulences in the bubble path, etc. If you're interested, I've written about the process of designing this [here](https://heinzdrei.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/bicycle-bubble-machine/). This thing is not difficult to build. I tried to give detailed instructions. Future improvements might be: a lever to temporarily block the bubble wheel, so you can turn off the machine when it's not needed; and modifications to the bubble wheel like combining two bubble rings into one for larger bubbles or improving the topography of the bubble rings to store more fluid. For the pulleys, I used [Parametric Pulley](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16627) by droftarts. I kept them although I dropped using tooth belts (replacing it with elastic ribbon), because they give good friction. **Please take a look at these remixes:** http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:976106, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:973210 and http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1656828. They definitely make this design better; miroks tank prints easier and without difficult removing of support (his bubble wheel makes more bubbles and might print better on printers with problematic bed adhesion, but for you it might also lead to many connected bubbles which don't fly as good, as someone reported); 3dMODler's remix will help those with friction problems on the pulleys. The third one by jkf123 is a clever idea to reduce spilling even further, by collecting spilled liquid and leading it back to the tank again. reparator's remix https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3808090/ is a very impressive redesign of the whole thing, improving on many aspects at once!