A Bike Concept with Maximum Suspension: The Spring-Loaded Bike by Colin Furze

Most people haven’t heard of Colin Furze, and those who have, know that this bike design is right up his style of kooky and wacky, yet functional creations.

Furze has been designing contraptions, rides, special effect machines and a wide range of other contraptions, even a hover-plane, all of which are fully functional. Well, to the extent that any mad scientists stuff works.

We’ll talk about Furze’s other works some other time. For now, we handle the Bicycle of Springs, as it’s been dubbed by its creator. How does this idea come to life? Well, from a guy like Furze, it’s not really unexpected. He says he just saw bikes with more and more suspension systems on them and thought to take it all the way, and so he did, Furze style.

The whole design is based around a standard mountain bike frame picked up from a garage sale. The idea was that he replaces the tubes of the bike with springs. The problem with springs is that they offer very little lateral stability.

Springs are made to function on a vertical action, so the only one on the bike that may offer any sort of support would be the seat tube. It’s for this reason why on the back of your mountain-bike's suspension you’ll see a piston. That whole system allows the spring to function as if pressure is applied to it vertically.

The initial design used smaller springs than on the final bike but proved to be a bad choice, as they were too thin, and the bike easily buckled underneath the pressure of a rider. The initial designs also had in place the idea of removing the front and rear forks, but this proved to be a bit too much and the bike couldn’t keep upright.

Three weeks after the first model failed, the new springs were in and the final project was underway. Over the course of the next few days, the bike was assembled and completed. A first test run was done within the compound of our local mad scientist, on a patch of soft grass in case of any obvious falls.

And it works. The new springs offer the rigidity to hold the bike upright and be able to be ridden according to Furze, “...like a normal bike. It just does weird things.” I bet. In the video below you can see the whole building process that Furze went through, and even some test riding. And I must say I am a bit impressed. I wasn't expecting to see this type of action from something like this.

We can see the bike being tested on a dirt-bike track, and frankly, it seems to be taking those hills very nicely, albeit, with some bends here and there. Staircases and drops seem equally fun, but I'm not sure how big a drop it can sustain.

Funny as it may be, it works. And if it works somebody’s got a use for it. Heck I'd like a ride on something like this just for the experience.