During Winter 2003 when there weren't a lot of events to put on the web site, I started the idea of doing a work in progress page instead. These aren't intended as directly copyable designs, just an account of what's been happening in my workshop. When I've started these projects, I generally had no idea if they were going to work or how I was going to solve the problems. Hopefully these accounts will give some idea of the process of making things out of stuff that was never meant to fit together in the first place. Quite often, building something is only the first stage of the process and it's only when you've taken it to an event and found any problems or seen how people react to it that you can develop it properly.

Over the last Winter I did a rebuild of my original upright bicycle generator. Although I'd been using it as an example in workshops, the 'nuts and bolts' alternator mount was becoming loose after over ten years of events. I fitted a A78 belt which is more suitable for its 26 inch wheel and refitted the alternator the other way around on a lower welded mount though I then had to do some tricky surgery on the safety guard. Its orginal A80 belt got re-used on the 27 inch wheel in a low level conversion of one of my  chair generators. Here's a closer view of the front end.
Another side project was a rebuild of a small recliner trike originally built by a friend in 2003. After last year's Big Green Gathering it finished up minus a seat and with a shredded tyre and slipping drive wheel. I fitted a new seat with spring units fabricated from a monoshock spring cut in half and replaced the original 12 inch back wheels with 14 inch ones. I'm still trying to find it a good 14 inch front wheel to give it slightly better rough ground performance.

A recent project was this small Hand Crank Generator which was very popular at events during 2007.

Apart from what I've been doing, some other people have been using the designs from our DIY pages for their own projects. Here's a nice minimal alternator type generator combining an almost standard bike with what looks like bits of some exercise equpiment by Dan from Liverpool, and at the other end of the scale is this mobile artwork which understandably took Sali from London several months to complete.

During the Winter of 06/07, I'd been slowly building a small version of a Tall Bike.

A trip to the local recycling facility to get something containing a large magnet resulted in this project to make a neat demonstration of AC electricity generation out of a Microwave Oven.

An early 2006 electronics project was really simple and very effective, but like a lot of simple ideas it wasn't obvious until after I'd done it. The drive belt in our old pedal powered cassette stereo had failed, and although I'd got it going again with an elastic band there was a noticeable wobble in the tone. The day before we did the Active Swindon event, I found a 40 Watt Graphic Booster car amplifier which had a 3.5mm stereo input socket marked "CD" - presumably CD players had just come out but weren't common in cars at the time. A lead from some broken earphones was fitted with another 3.5mm plug and used to connect it to the earphone output of an MP3 player, it was the right level to run the amplifier. Some old shelf speakers were quickly bolted to a bit of scrap wood with the booster, and a large diode wired backwards across the power input to protect it in case someone accidentally connected a pedal generator the wrong way around. The resulting "iPod Booster" was a great success on the street in Swindon at the start of April, though by the end of the day the ageing rubber surrounds of the speakers had been finished off by loud heavy metal music. However the next day I got a pair of bigger stereo speakers at a car boot sale and the even bigger bass sound has been very effective at several events since.

Another 2006 project was this Exercise Bike Generator. I'm less keen on them as the weight makes them less suitable for carting around the country, and the wheel size is not good for high drive gear ratios. This one was originally built to a spec for powering a 12 Volt flat screen for a TV project that didn't happen but finished up going to the Woodcraft Folk in time to be used at their Global Village international camp.

At the start of 2006 I built a new Pedestrian Trailer for town centre events; our old one was large and heavy and the wheels were too small to go up a kerb easily.

After the 2004 season's repairs and alterations were sorted, it was time to start again on the Autumn/Winter programme of building some new stuff. The Trike Thing above started off as a small bike with a twisted frame and tyres that are too chunky for a pedal generator, but it was too good to cut up for the metal, so it became the next project.

The last effort before the events season at the start of May 2004 was to make a slightly different design of alternator type Pedal Generator although all I did was make the frame and drive. The alternator fitting and finishing off was part of the Druid Network Pedal Music System Workshops leading to the creation of the new Pedalectric system at Braziers Park.

In November 2003 I found a slightly damaged Exercise Bike at the recycling area of a local supermarket. I needed some curved metal tubing for a modification to a bicycle trailer at the time, but apart from a bent seat tube it was in very good condition, too good to cut up so it turned into a project.