Another awesome project from Michael Tess: “My wife is embarrassed that I decided to build a tall bike, but at least half of the people I show it to end up trying to ride it. The idea is to stack one bike on top of another so that the rider sits high off the ground. It is sure to get stares anywhere you ride. I started this project with a 26” mountain bike and a 16” kids bike found rusting in a barn. I welded the frame from the 16” bike on top of the mountain bike and extended the chain to connect the two bikes and ran new cables. The most difficult part of this build was the connection for steering. I didn’t get the front forks perfectly in line when welding which made connecting the steering difficult. I tried several connection possibilities before making a sketchy connection by welding a ⅜” rod between the two forks. The connection depends on the rod flexing a little each time you turn the handle bars. Next time I will spend more time aligning the frames before welding. I’d love to get some more people building tall bikes so that I’d have someone to ride with. Let me know if you have an interest.”
This was a project Michael Tess made with some of his high school students in his Environmental Science class. The challenge was to make an art project using the least amount of new materials possible. Having recently seen a deer mount project on pinterest, he happened to walk past a pile of boxes from twenty new computers and thought, “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.”