bottpower

When designing the BOTT M210, we have tried to use solutions that facilitate the work of the mechanics. The most important aspect of a race bike is beeing fast on the track, but it is also very important that the mechanics can work on the bike quickly and safely. Good race bikes are full of small details that can greatly facilitate the work inside of the box. In that sense I feel very fortunate to work closely with Jose Contreras, who has several years of experience in Motogp and now we can implement much of that experience in our Moto2.
Let’s see some of the BOTT M210 detais, in this case in the rear wheel axle area.

The head of the rear wheel shaft has a bell that helps to center the spanner cup. Ducati uses this solution in their MotoGP bikes.
The piece that serves to clamp the brake caliper is also used to hold the rear wheel speed sensor. This sensor reads impulses from a sheetmetal part that gives 24 signals per each wheel revolution.  The cable from the sensor makes a loop shape to avoid tension when changing the wheelbase.
The sliders used to tighten the chain have a small platform (not seen in these pictures because they are on the inner face) that keep the wheel in position so that when we remove the wheel shaft, the wheel keeps in place. This is a great help when you change the wheel, you let it fall between the two arms of the swingarm and it is always perfectly aligned with the sliders so you only have to worry about pushing the shaft.
The anchor for the bike stand is located behind the swingarm, in that way you have more room to work in the brake caliper if necessary.
The quick connector of the rear brake line has a black rubber around it to avoid friction with the swingarm.

On the left side of the bike you can see that the nut is screwed to the slider, in that way we don’t need to worry about holding it when we remove the wheel axle. You can also see that the shaft is tapered to facilitate it’s placement on the wheel.

Many of these ideas come from endurance bikes and nowadays are used by the best road racing bikes because they allow to work more quickly and safely in the qualifying sessions.

You will find bigger pictures in our Flickr gallery.

The airbox intake is one of the M210 parts that was not designed yet. In most race bikes this part is made using carbon fiber (CF). By the moment we have designed it to be fabricated using  Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). Fortunately for this task we have the support of Ineo, a Spanish company specialized in rapid prototyping.

Using SLS technique allows us to have the part fabricated in a few hours, without having to make moulds like it happens with CF. Another advantage of SLS is that we have a lot of design freedom because we can design the part adding details and forms that would be impossible to fabricate even using a CNC milling machine.

In this way it is easier to design the part so that it can serve several functions:

- Introduce fresh air into the airbox.
- Hold the bottles for the leftover water and fuel.
- Provide a solid clamping point for the nose of the fairing.
- Provide multiple clamping points for the electrical cables.
- Provide adequate clamping for the connector that is used to download telemetry data. The same connector is used also to manage the engine maps and electronic strategies of the bike.
- Provide a platform to clamp the display bracket and the spider that holds the fairing around the windscreen.

The overall geometry of this part was determined some months ago based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) studies.

Using finite element analysis we can design the part to minimize its weight, we can also use a variable thickness to put the material only where is necesary, we can add ribs, etc.
In this way it is possible to design a part that has a weight very similar to a CF part, specially if we consider that in the CF part we should add several inserts and small pieces to clamp the various elements that are around it.

For the part that supports the display (pink colour) we studied two different designs. We must decide which design we want to use and then send an email to Ineo with the geometry of the part, in that way we will have the part ready to assembly on the bike in a few days.

This is the first design:

This is the second design, a hollow part with ribs inside.

Next week I hope to show you pictures of these parts already manufactured.

After finishing the clay model of the BOTT M210 fairing, Anima guys gave us two posters with sketches that give a good idea of how the bodywork will look. The posters are very cool! We will hang them in our office.

On the other hand, we move forward building the bike. This week we have been assembling the bike that we will use in our first test. We will post some pictures soon, but first we have to resolve some details to make the bike look nicer, like painting the chassis, for example.

They say the last 10% of a project (details) take 90% of the time, and we are experiencing that it is true. It is also true that this is beeing a very nice stage of the project. After watching the bike so many hours on the computer screen it is a great pleasure to see it assembled and work on it solving some details.

Anima boys have now completed the bodywork clay model. I think the final resoult is spectacular. We are really happy..  :-D

These photos show the bike, but without showing it completely, just to keep some mystery..

In live View, the bike certainly has a particular aesthetic, which I think is given by its dimensions (I think that it is something that can not be noticed in these photos). It looks small and compact, and at the same time sturdy and powerful.

From a technical point of view, we believe that the aerodynamics of the bike are very good. Forms around the nose are very rounded and the design meets all technical requirements we had set.

The truth is that we are very pleased with the outcome of the fairing design. The more we look at the bike the more we like it. :-)

We would like to congratulate and to thank Joan, Diego, Jaume, Joanma, Cristian and Arnau. In short, the entire team that has worked in this design. You have done a great work!

Anima designers continue working and here we have the third evolution of the design. We have defined the tail and the nose of the bike.

From now on it is necessary to work in 3D. Here you have some proposals for the nose of the bike.

And here several proposals for the tail.

As always you will find the images in bigger size in our Flickr gallery.

The bodywork is beeing designed by Anima, a design studio from Barcelona.

You can see their first 5 proposals in our Flickr gallery (sketches A, B, C, D, E).

Here we have the second evolution of the design, these ones have a more racing feeling. Compared with the previous ones, air exits are smaller and surfaces are smoother.

The designs we are working on follow current design trend, more worried about turns than top speed in straight line.

Our intention is to create a design as effective as possible and later on try to make it look nice. But efficiency is our first goal. When I talk about efficiency I don’t mean top speed, I mean try to reduce lap times.

Please let me know your opinion about these designs.

This is proposal A1:

Proposal A2:

Proposal B1:

Proposal B2:

Proposal C:

As always, you can see the sketches with bigger size in our Flickr gallery.

This is the first prototype of the Moto2 fueltank, made in aluminium. As you can see in the photo, it hasn’t been welded yet, with the intention of checking that it fits properly in the bike, before welding it.

I designed it trying to make it very narrow, in that way the rider can close a little bit more his legs, making possible to reduce a little bit the front area of the bike in order to make it more aerodynamic. I also tried to make a “low” fueltank, in this way the rider can lie down over it in a more comfortable way, again with the intention of improving the aerodynamics.

In order to try to make a lower and narrower fueltank I used the Honda CBR one as a reference.

Like you know one of our technical sponsors is Incomet, a company that provides us with scanning service. Taking the most of it I asked them to scan the Honda fueltank. This is how it looks the mesh that you obtain from the point cloud that is gererated in the scanning process.

And this is how it looks once you convert the mesh into surfaces. This work could have been done in a much more precise way, but it’s not worth doing it because as I said I only wanted it as a reference to design the Moto2 fueltank.

Finally here you can see the final design of the fueltank. As it happens with the original one, this fueltank is covered by a fiber carcass. In following evolutions of the bike it is probable that we will make a “seen” (not covered) fueltank, eliminating the carcass and taking more profit of the available room.

Because the fueltak is narrower and lower than the Honda CBR one, part of the fuel has gone under the rider seat.
The cut that you can see in the lower area of the fueltank has been made to let room for the electrical loom.

Stay tuned! We will keep informing..  :-)

During the last weeks we had a lot of activity. The chassis welding was programmed for December but several delays in the parts manufacturing has delayed it to January. We start beeing with up to our neck to have the bike ready on time. Next months are going to be really “funny”…

As you can see we made some progress with the bike design. The CAD model now has fueltank and a swingarm. We are doing the design, fabrication and developing of the swingarm in collaboration with a South African company called CRP (you can see their logo in the sponsors area).

From a mechanical design point of view, I do not feel comfortable with the electronis location (battery, ECU, telemetry box) in the tail area. It should be closer to the center of gravity of the bike. Fortunately those 3 components are ultralight, so its location is not so critical to minimize the moments of inertia of the bike. From a practical point of view, taking into account the electronics wiring routing and the mechanical accesibility (I’m not talking about accesibility to the electronics, I mean to the rest of the bike), this is a good place.

The CAD model is far from beeing complete. We still must add a lot of details (in which we are working right now) like the radiator clamping, the exhaust system, airbox intake, display, bodywork, etc.

I don’t like to start the fabrication till the CAD model is 100% finished till it has the last screw on it, but in this case, taking into account how fast we must work (we started the design with Honda engine in September), we had to overlap the design process with the fabrication process.

In next picture you can see the parts of the chassis located in the swingarm axle housing. These are made out of steel, cnc machined. That “oval” hollow allows to adjust the swingarm axle location.

Right now we are fabricating 2 complete bikes. During last weeks I received several emails asking about the possibility of buying a Bott M210 to race in 2010. At this moment we don’t plan to sell any bike in 2010. Our Moto2 project is planned from a technical and sports point of view, and not so much from a commercial point of view. Our objective for 2010 is to have fun, continue learning and developing our bike.

Going back to the motorbike design subject, right now we are working in the airbox intake design. we are doing it with a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) parametric model. This model “plays” with several variables, in such way that after doing several calculations for each design possibility, the model tells us which is the best design. Of course the final resoult will depend on how good is our model.

As always, you can see bigger images in our Flickr gallery.

We will keep informing!    :-)

After a lot of working hours, finally I have a more or less defined chassis. It took me quite time to arrive to a design with which I felt satisfied.

One of the particularities of this chassis is that he headstock is “stemless” type, this means it doesn’t have a steering axle that crosses it. In this way it is possible to improve a little bit the air flow that goes into the airbox.
In a competition in which all the engines are going to be the same, it seems interesting to try to achieve some small advantage in two areas that are directly related to the engine performance, one is air intake and the other one gasses exhaust.

If we look at the Moto2 bikes that have appeared till now, the FTR uses a stemless headstock and it is very probable that the Tech3 bike also uses it. It is not a new idea, some years ago bikes like the 95Racer and the Roadson (before known as Tucson) Superleggera BT 550 started using this solution.
Like you see the chassis is a trellis, it doesn’t have any bent tube, all are straight ones. There are some tubes that could be bent ones, but I prefer to use straight tubes, in this way I can work with high strength alloys that do not allow bending. Regarding the tubes I am very satisfied because one of the technical sponsors of the project is Reynolds, a world leader fabricator of high performance steel tubes.

The parts that are located in the swingarm pivot area are made out of CNC machined steel.
The chassis is very low in the rear area. For the rear suspension I used the same linkage system that Yamaha is using in their Motogp and WSBK bikes. With this design I located the shock lower than in what is usual in most of twin spar chassis motorbikes. I tried to move the chassis and shock downwards in order to be able to locate the fuel as close as possible to the engine. In principle I don’t want to extend the fueltank a lot to the rear as it seems is the current trend in almost all Moto2 bikes we have seen till now.

I will keep informing about the project development..  :-)

Since the last change of the rules saying that all Moto2 bikes will use a Honda engine, I didn’t write about our project. We had some news, the most important is the incorporation of Pablo Gonzalez de Chaves to the Bottpower team.
Since August I work in Bottpower full-time and now Pablo is doing the same. For those of you which don’t know who is Pablo, he is one of the designers of the Demonstener D1200R that already appeared some time ago in this blog.

Pablo has an enviable CV, he worked as designer in Lamborghini, and last summer he finished his MSc in Motorsport Engineering, in Oxford Brookes, England. He went there to study because he achieved a Fernando Alonso scholarship.. I think he has been a great signing for Bottpower!  :-)

Pablo is engineer, but one of his strong points is industrial design. In Bottpower, till now this task was made by Hugo van Waaijen, but for this Moto2 project we need to work very fast and Hugo can not work full-time on it, so Pablo is the one who is working in the Moto2 bodywork design.

By the way, by the moment we call the bike BOTT M210 (M2 because it is a Moto2 bike, and 10 because it is our prototype for 2010 season).

Next image is a sketch made by Pablo which shows the way we are following regarding the bodywork design.

Pablo: “We are looking for a bodywork that covers the bike almost completely. A bodywork with classic and smooth shapes, far from current aesthetics of street superbikes. The size will be halfway through the compact bodyworks of current SuperSports and the more “enfolding” Aprilias 250 GGPP. We prefer no to do something too much enfolding to avoid problems with side wind.
On a race bike functionality and aerodynamics must be ahead of any trend so we also want to avoid ultra-short tails like the ones of the new Aprilias V4 and previous Honda MotoGP.
We still must add some air exhaust ducts at the sides of the bodywork, althoug the bike would be more aerodynamic if we could avoid it”.

Using Pablo’s sketch, Ernesto Arnaez from Husmee Studio Graphique! is studing graphic possibilities about which could be the “corporative” image of the bike. He has made a lot of sketches, and by the moment this is our favourite one.

Both sketches are not definitive designs, they are just concept sketches that show the way we are following by the moment.

Right now Pablo is already working in the bodywork design in 3D and I am focused on the chassis design. Our objective is to weld the chassis before the end of the year, and to have a  bike ready to ride in February.

As always you will find bigger size images in our Flickr gallery.