Columnist Susan Snyder: Vehicle design is wheel deal

Tuesday, April 16, 2002 | 8:31 a.m.

A handful of Nevada teenagers have taken some fiberglass, bicycle parts and an amazing amount of engineering knowledge and turned it into a machine that cruises at 40 mph without an engine.

I tracked down members of the Carson High School Cycle Club during a trip to our state capital last week after hearing about its wheeled wonder and plans to build a second for international competition.

This ain't no Soap Box Derby car. Their human-powered vehicle is a specially designed recumbent bicycle encased in a one-of-a-kind fiberglass fairing.

Picture a yellow suppository on wheels.

"I think we're going to dub it 'Yellow Submarine,' " Amanda Carlson, one of its creators, said.

Well, they'd have a theme song.

What's most remarkable about this contraption is that it came from the minds and hands of 16- and 17-year-olds who had never worked with molds, fiberglass and the same technology and engineering applied to airplanes.

I tried to jot down the technical process of building the thing as 16-year-old Abe Gissen described it. But I couldn't keep up with his vocabulary.

Gissen says his dad helped them assemble the recumbent, a type of bicycle in which the rider pedals in from a reclining position. (I'm thinking they probably were humoring the old man.)

But Gissen, Carlson and three other Carson High students did the rest. They obtained a mold for the fairing -- the outer shell that cuts wind resistance -- from California Polytechnic State University.

"It was a friend of a friend thing," Gissen said. "It's one of their old, outdated designs they were going to part with."

That's a nice way of saying the mold was sitting behind someone's barn turning to mulch. They cleaned it up, filled the cracks, sanded it smooth and sprayed some kind of fairing-mold- covering-stuff on it.

"The molds have to be really accurate, and the shape has to be just right. We want the fairing to be as smooth as possible," Gissen said, adding something about "turbulent flow" that I couldn't repeat if you gave me a big bag of money.

The fairing, made of three layers of fiberglass, has a reinforced foam bulkhead that wraps all the way around the rear to protect the rider in a crash.

"The bulkhead will keep it from crumpling up on you," Gissen said. "Hopefully we won't have to test that part."

Hopefully it'll be at 10 mph rather than 40 if they do. That's a distinct possibility, because getting this thing rolling is hard. It teeters like a drunk on payday. Even with a windshield it's hard to tell how far you're tipping or even that you are tipping, Carlson said.

It's too big and heavy to win any races, but it's good practice. The teens are trying to raise about $3,000 for materials to build a carbon-fiber jobbie for the International Human Powered Speed Championship in Ontario. They hope to be the only high school students competing.

And where are the parents in all this?

"I try to avoid mentioning things like I'm going to go out and ride this at 40 mph," Carlson said.

Or mentioning that the world's record set at Battle Mountain last year was 80.