Designing a Durable, Affordable Commuter Bike

Date: 2025-05-11

This summer, I will be spending 10 weeks developing a cheap commuter bike with the following goals:

Develop a bike that is fun, durable and cheap (something I would actually commute with)
Produce one bike iteration once every 2 weeks
Ideally, this bike should cost for $300 or less

I am working on this project to challenge myself and see if I want a future in engineering and manufacturing. And with the likeliness of hard economic times ahead, a bike like this could help people lower their living expenses.

Week 1, May 12-16

The first week is over and I have a decent start to this project. Here is what I accomplished:

Started building a jig to hold the frame while I weld it together
Used a lathe to make 2 chamfered cylinders to hold the head tube in the jig
Sourced 15 feet of frame tubing and cut, notched and MIG welded some for practice
Turned a tube in the lathe to learn how to bring the outer diameter down to spec for a fork tube

Surprisingly, everything is going to plan so far. I am looking for ways to improve my tube notching and welding. But I think they would hold up if I had the same quality on a prototype bike.

Building a bicycle in the US is slightly agonizing. Having primarily built things with 3d printers, I love working with millimeters and centimeters and can estimate those measurements pretty well. So it's nice that bicycle standards also use metric. But then I go to buy some tubing or sheet metal locally and all of the measurements are in inches. And worse yet, they sometimes throw in fractions of an inch for fun. 😑 Because most bike parts use materials thinner than an inch, it's like I have 3 different units of measure I have to work with. Whyyyyyyyy

One neat aspect of this project is that I am sourcing my tubing from an offroad company in Murray called Midnight 4x4. If I were to ever sell any of these bikes, it would be under the Prerunner brand. This is because this project is technically under my business called Prerunner Network LLC. (If you did not know, a prerunner is a type of offroad truck)

Oh and I was not prepared for how daunted I felt earlier this week when I started working on this project. Learning just how many steps/processes go into building a simple bike frame made me question if this was even an attainable goal. The biggest thing keeping me going is only planning 3 tasks each day. This slow but steady progress is reassuring. So now that it is Friday, I'm fairly confident in my ability to make multiple bikes this summer.

Onwards and upwards! I'll report back next Friday :)

A change of plans

I went into this summer with more ambition than anything else. But after a few weeks, I lost motivation because I was working so hard on this project and trying to make my BA thesis good enough to submit as research. And I did not end up accomplishing either of those goals.

The bike project came to an early end because I needed to buy all kinds of specialized tools for fabrication. And because I will be traveling for a few months, I would have needed a place to store a lot of metalworking things. So this dilemma combined with the cost of it all pot this project on hold. I might continue learning how to build bikes when I get back As for the research, I did not submit it because my arguments were weak. I started building a website with my methodology and it showed me some holed in my logic.

It's now towards the end of the summer and I am on a plane to New York City as the first part of traveling. In the next year, I'll keep developing my research and Supermoto (The examples that are part of the research paper). This post will likely be taken down eventually.