Be green while clearing the fluffy white! That’s the idea behind Kevin Blake’s pedal-powered snowplow. Rather than burning gas and spewing fumes, Blake’s design relies on your quads. Must be a good way to stay warm on cold and snowy winter mornings.
Unlike some of the hair-brained (but really fun) bicycle-lawnmowers, this contraption actually does the job. Blake works as an engineer for Wisconsin-based bicycle manufacturer Trek. Check the cool news footage to see the pedal-plow in action:
This started off life as a riding lawnmower, and I took the rear wheels and the gear box and the seat and the front wheels and the steering section up in the front all from the riding lawnmower. "I built the frame, this welded steel frame myself, and bolted everything to it, and then I got some old bike parts. This crank came right off an old bike.
The blades are made out of two separate shovels that I cut and nestled together to make the ‘V’ shape. This handle is actually from one of the shovels so I can lift and lower the plow.
The pedal-plow won a runner-up prize in Specialized’s Innovate or Die program. Other entries included MIT’s pedal-powered supercomputer and the Aquaduct mobile water filtration device.
Via Treehugger.
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