bottpower

Formula Moto is a monthly Spanish magazine. In the next number #52, April, available in magazine shops from next tuesday (March 17th), there is a 4 pages article about the Morlaco. This is inside a bigger article about Spanish prototypes, which shows also the D1200R, another prototype with FFE and an impressive aesthetics.

The concept in which the D1200R front end is based was invented by Juan Elizalde, the mechanical design was made fifty/fifty by Carlos Beltrán and Pablo González de Chaves, who created also the aesthetics of the bike. I strongly recommend you to visit his webpage dechavesgarage.com, you will find great stuff there.

By the way, I take the opportunity to show here some of the photos I took to generate graphic material for this article. I took the photos in my garage, using a background white clothe and a Nikon D200 with an external flash that my friend Jose Bautista lended me.

You will find these photos with higher resolution in the Bottpower Flickr gallery.

The Morlaco was designed as a racing motorbike, in the meantime Hugo van Waaijen is exploring several conceptual possibilities for this motorbike. In the next image you can see the original design and behind it a possible street version.

The main objective of the Morlaco project is to learn and have fun and these concepts are part of this process.

For this design Hugo was inspired by a bull (a Morlaco is a kind of bull in Spanish), with powerful shoulders (in this case the fueltank area) and a low head (the nose of the bike). Of course, the mirrors are the horns..  :)

The rendering process (to apply colours, textures, lights, and cameras for the image generation) has been made by José García Pérez, alias “cutangus”.

We are exploring other concepts and Hugo is working on it from time to time. As soon as we have it ready we will show it in the blog.

As always you will find higher resolution images in the Flickr gallery.

I had some time without writing about the Morlaco, a project that is going ahead at idle speed. Yesterday I took this photo that shows the current status of the bike.

Comparing with the last time I took photos, this is the new stuff:

• The bike has custom built Technoflex shocks.

• Carbon fiber airbox.

• Carbon fiber fueltank (here and here you can see 2 post talking about the fuel tank construction).

• The “triple clamp” is a new, stiffer one.

• I changed the steering rod-ends.

 Although currently I am fully focused on the Moto2 project, I want to continue working on the Morlaco, even if it is at idle speed.  

You can see a higher resolution photo in the Flickr gallery.

(Thank you Hugo for the photo postprocess).  

Tags: morlaco, prototype, construction

Good, cheap and nice. These were our premises for the Morlaco bodywork design. To build a nice and efficient bodywork involves a lot of time and resources that we don’t have, so the most practical solution was to copy something or start from something already fabricated. We decided to use parts from other motorbikes (bodywork, fueltank cover, tail and keel) and modify it to change it’s aspect in order to achieve a motorbike with it’s own personality.

Hugo van Waaijen chose the parts. The trick was to choose parts from different motorbikes, but keeping in mind that they must work all together. It is a complex subject because we were limited to those parts that could fit on the Morlaco.

Hugo designed also the way in which each part should be modified to make everything work together and also to avoid that anybody could realize where each part came from (hey! this is from a kawa ZXR!!). He achieved the objective with very few and simple modifications, this was great because to modify the parts costed less time and money.

To create good surfaces, with a good simmetry, etc is a difficult job that requires experience. Hugo knew Michael Uhlarik, designer and proffesional modeler that has been working in great projects like the Yamaha MT03 or even the Yamaha M1. We talked with Michael and we arrived to an arrangement with him, so he was the one who modified the parts. He also made this cool sketch.

This is how the bike looked once the modelling work was finished. You can see big size images in our Flickr gallery.

One of our main aims was to use a narrow bodywork, with a small front area, in this way we took profit of our narrow chassis design.

Here you can see the fuel tank cover.

By the way, is there anybody who can guess from which bikes are the parts we used for the bodywork?  :)

Tags: bottpower, morlaco, bodywork, design, construction

The wishbones of the front suspension are the most critical and most heavily loaded parts of the bike. The wishbones connect the front fork with the chassis and they also acommodate the front shock.

Both parts are clamped to the chassis through 2 rod-ends that allow to modify their lenght, making possible to adjust the front end geometry. The lower wishbone is the one more loaded, mainly during braking. It’s shape is far from optimal in order to achieve a good load distribution, because it is wide and short, but I chose this option because it allows to achieve more room for the radiator that is “surrounded” by the wishbone.

Anyway the width of this area of the bike is dictated by the engine, so it didn’t have too much sense to try to design a narrower wishbone. This is the top one:

Taking into account the responsability of these parts, I made a quite conservative design, keeping good safety coefficients. It always will be possible to try a more efficient design in the future. Even so I studied 10 different options because I wanted to try to get the best possible design inside of the intended safety coefficient. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is a great tool that helps to resolve this kind of questions.

I considered to build the parts using welded steel tube, welded aluminium sheetmetal, finally I chose aluminium CNC milled parts, in this way it is not necessary to weld, or to build any jig. Moreover it is a cool option from an aesthetics point of view, Hugo van Waaijen gave me some ideas to improve the parts in this aspect.

Once we have the final design of the parts, we can export the geometry to a file, send it by email to our provider, and in just a few hours we can get the final parts, ready to assembly on the bike.

English is not my native language, so please let me know if you find any mistake. Thank you.

Tags: morlaco, design, finite elements, FEA, aluminium, cnc

The photo shows the Morlaco prototype, with a still unpainted chassis. The white part is a first “test” airbox, made using fiber glass just to check that dimensions are ok, that the intake trumpets fit properly, etc.
In this post you can see the airbox, with its cover, already built using carbon fiber.

In the middle-lower area of the photo appears one of the aluminum triangles built to clamp the trellis chassis to the engine. Also, in the steering area you can see several aluminium cnc parts with machined hollows to save weight.

Once the parts were assembled on the bike, I was dissapointed because the steering (the “triple clamp”) didn’t give me a good feeling, the housing area for the triple clamp axle was not stiff enough, and it was possible to feel some deflection if you pressed strong enough the handlebar.
So I redesigned that area and now I already have new parts to assembly on the bike. It will be necessary to cut and weld again into the chassis a new steering axle housing.

You can wath this photo in big size in our flickr photo gallery.

Tags: morlaco, chassis, airbox, aluminium, cnc, steering

In the photo you can see the size differences between the original Honda CBR 954 chassis and the new trellis built for the Bott 1000 Morlaco. One of our objectives in the design stage was to achieve a smaller and narrower bike than the original one, mainly in the area that the rider embraces with his knees. In this way we could improve the ergonomy, making a bike more comfortable to ride, and also making possible to use a narrower bodywork, improving aerodynamics.

The chassis that appears in the photo is the first prototype we built, it was bronze welded by Tony Foale, a man with a vast experience, who has built hundreds of bikes. Later we built a second prototype, this one was TIG welded by myself.

Tags: chassis, morlaco, trellis, welding, construction, motorbike

In the photo you can see the fueltank model mounted on the bike. One advantage about building the fueltank using composites is that it is possible to create more complex shapes than using aluminium, for example (building an aluminium fueltank with this shape would be very complex). This allows to take more profit of the avaliable room, in this way it is possible to maximize the fueltank capacity.

English is not my native language, so please let me know if you find any mistake. Thank you.

Tags: fueltank, construction, composites, model, morlaco

My good friend Jose Garcia is a true rendering artist, normally I give him the 3D models and he generates images as nice as this one, which I add to the bottpower flickr gallery. I must give him new virtual parts, because in the real motorbike, some things changed regarding what you can see in the image.
I like a lot the front mudguard designed by Hugo van Waaijen. It reminds me a F1 nose.

English is not my native language, so please let me know if you find any mistake. Thank you.

Tags: morlaco, 3D, model, render, comic, motorbike, design

For the fueltank construction, I thought about 3 possibilities: steel, aluminum and composites (carbon fiber, fiberglass, kevlar). Taking into account my limited means and knowledge I choosed the last option. The technical FIM rules explain in a quite precise way (in this document) the requirements that a composite fueltank must fulfill in order to be homologated for racing. These requirements are based on the rules for road legal vehicles, so it is clear that this is the way to follow (at least in an orientative way), not only for racing, but to fabricate something safe. If finally I find difficult to achieve these requirements, I will build or order an aluminum fueltank. The bike has an outer carcass that covers the real fueltank, so the external look (finish) is not so important.
Having the fueltank in the computer model, the first step is to build a real model, I mean, some kind of “sculpture” with the same shape and dimensions of the fueltank I want to build. It is possible to use a lof of materials, in this case I used some wood.

After that, I fill it with poliurethane foam.

Finally I applied polyester filler to achieve (after a lot of sandpaper) some “good” surfaces.

In the next photo you can see the fueltank model already finished, with it’s final shape and surfaces. In the bottom area there is a big dent, I made it to provide some room for the electrical wiring (you can see it in black colour in the previous photo). It is very important to take into account this kind of details, and think everything twice before starting building.

To build this kind of things by hand requires a lot of hours of work. It would be great to find some technical sponsor that would allow me to use a rapid prototyping machine (stereolithography or similar), in order to do this kind of work faster and in a more accurate way. I must look for it. 

English is not my native language, so please let me know if you find any mistake. Thank you. 

Tags: fueltank, composites, model, construction, motorbike, morlaco