bottpower

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..  :-)

Today has been an important day in our Moto2 project. We assembled for the first time the engine into the first chassis unit that we built last week. I was a little worried thinking if everything would fit correctly.
I have checked 1000 times the cAD design and theorically we shouldn’t have any problem, but sometimes you can not be 100% sure till you don’t check it physically.

Fortunately everything went as it was planned. The engine fits perfectly in the chassis.
Here you have the first photo of our chassis. What can I say.. I am happy!    :-D

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!    :-)