Design & fabrication of a hobbyist motorcycle

skills: resourcefulness • fabrication in a resource-constrained setting • structure design • ergonomic design • welding • technical communication

hardware: stick welder • general shop tools

software: pencil & paper

This project was completed in fulfillment of the international baccalaureate (IB) tenth-grade personal project requirement. I was living in the beautiful city of Accra, Ghana at the time.

This is the project that made me want to become a mechanical engineer.

The motorcycle is minimalist in its components. I sourced most of them locally: electrical conduit pipe for the frame, wheelbarrow wheels for the tires, a bicycle seat, bicycle hand grips, a bicycle hand brake used as the accelerator, and a bent piece of rebar used as a scrub brake.

The powertrain components I was fortunate to have someone bring me from the U.S.: a centrifugal clutch, a rear sprocket, and a chain to connect the two (see gallery for details). Everything else was sweat and time. Chatting with local craftsmen to find parts and spending hours in traffic just to get to the appropriate markets, learning to weld from local welders, watching YouTube videos to learn how others made similar motorcycles, and lots of testing and failing.

I include this project in my portfolio not because it’s the most technically challenging, but because it’s where I learned to materialize dreams that otherwise would have died in my head. This undertaking was the first time that I had a dream to build a thing, that dream was interesting enough that other people wanted to help me achieve it, and together we threw our energy into making it a reality. The rest is history.