I learned to ride a bike when I was 8 years old. However, obsession with cycling set in much before then. That, along with my obsession with designing and building things, in addition to my concern for the environment made this the perfect project for me.

I stumbled upon velomobiles on Youtube when I was 13; and I've wanted one ever since. Given the price, I knew it was only a dream, and I soon forgot about them and continued riding normal bikes. Years passed as I learned to drive and started using a car to get around.

I drove for about a year before getting back on my bike and remembering the simple, clean, sweet freedom of riding. I rediscovered the velomobile by chance, and now that I was more confident in my building ability (not sure exactly why) I decided I could save myself some money by building the velomobile myself.

So it was decided, I would build my own. What a fun project! After I decided this, I thought to myself "hey, these things are great for long distances, I should get a bunch of my friends in on this and we can take a road trip in them!"

The plan was to ride to Denver, CO (again not sure why, just seemed nice I guess) in the home made velomobiles. My 17th birthday was coming up, so I asked for a flux core welder and a bunch of tools.

When I presented the idea to my family my step dad suggested that I do the ride for a cause. I agreed and we decided to change the destination to San Francisco, CA (WHY?!).

Since I had no experience building bikes, I knew I would need some plans. I knew that velomobiles used a recumbent trike as a chassis, so I looked up plans for a recumbent trike. I found plans for an awesome looking trike called the "Warrior" from a site called AtomicZombie.com.
 

I started building. Luckily my family owns a garage that services semi truck trailers from our trucking companies, Chief Transit Lines and Rediehs Transit Lines. I told my grandpa about my project and he agreed to let me use the garage to do my fabrication. THANK YOU POMPA! Without this garage, none of this would have been possible.

Over the course of this first trike I posted progress videos to Youtube and sort of taught myself how to weld on the big MIG welder they had at the shop. (The flux core I got for my birthday just didn't do the job.)

I finally finished the first trike on the 4th of July, 2010, and painted it the next day. While testing it I noticed the handlebars kept loosening, the idlers wore away at a noticable rate, the rear end seemed like a weak point, and the brakes were incredibly fussy. Also, it was too big to be a velomobile chassis.

So I started again from scratch. This design I drew on paper. I decided I would use the left over box steel tubing from the first trike and I would use a cruciform structure like most commercially made trikes. I gave the new design a low slung look with considerably less ground clearance, a narrower track width, rear suspension, a bit of negative camber, a higher bottom bracket, and a somewhat complicated lever steering system to improve stability at high speeds.

Someone will later inform me and others that I have stolen this design. Interesting.

So I built the new trike over just 12 build days, half the time the first one took. I painted it and now came  making the fiberglass fairing...

Now, I won't go into detail about the fiberglass fairing because it was such a let down, but I will tell you the basics. 

At this point in the project, it was me and two others going to Cali. Adam Mercier, from France, was using corrugated plastic for his fairing and wouldn't need a fiberglass one. Dan Kowalski from here (USA) was using the same design as me and would need a fiberglass fairing. That means I had to make a mold to pull two fairings from. To make a mold, you need a life-sized model of what you are trying to create. This piece is called a plug. 

I spent well over 150 hours designing and creating this plug using wood, fiberglass, 13 gallons of bondo, and gelcoat, before bringing the plug out to our sponsor, Fiberglass Chicago. there they made the plug into a mold, and made one fairing from the mold (yes, just one now, because Dan Kowalski had backed out of the project for financial reasons and no longer needed one).

When I picked up the fairing from FGC, Adam was in the US staying with my family. I spent 3 days cutting up the fairing and trying to make it fit onto my trike I made before I finally got it on. Within this three day time slot, Adam built his own fairing for his trike out of PVC and corrugated plastic in just 20 hours.

And after all that, my fiberglass fairing was way too heavy. I knew it wouldn't work in the first quarter of my single lap around the block. It twisted, banged, buckled, rattled, and vibrated every which way with violent noises following whenever you hit a bump at all, or attempted to turn.

Shit. The night I tested my fairing was the day Adam and I were supposed to have left in the morning.

Adam and I knew we had to make another corrugated plastic shell, and FAST. So I panicked and sent emails to every sign outlet store in the area and found a place that was willing to donate some 4x8 sheets of white corrugated plastic to us in exchange for a link to their site, awesome.

We made my new fairing together in 16 hours, and if I swallow my pride, I'll admit it looked better than the fiberglass fairing I worked so hard on for so much longer.

Now then, let's get some details on these vehicles.