Bicycle Polo Bicycle!

Wait is this about a bicycle or bicycle polo? Well Both! Did you really think I was going to tell you about my Polo Bike without telling you about bicycle polo??

One Hobby Leads to Another

I was having lunch with one of my favorite people at one of my favorite restaurants (Please go to Chef Pauls in Fresno, CA. It’s So Good!), and after we ate we decided to go for a walk. Which is really an odd thing to do in that part of Fresno, but we’re pretty odd I suppose.

Well little did we remember that Full Circle Brewing is just down the way, and we heard a ruckus as we walked by and had to go see what was going on. As you might have guessed, it was a bicycle polo tournament! I’d never heard of any such thing before, and was absolutely enchanted by it. After watching it for a few minutes, I thought I Have to get a drone to film this.

Well that was met pretty angrily as it distracted the players quite a bit, and they got pretty frustrated with me. But I wasn’t about to give up. So I asked if I could go to their practice and try again. They agreed and I showed up to their next practice, which would be in early 2020 (Just bad timing). I got some pretty cool footage of them (that I’ll add to this post as soon as I can get it edited better), but what I didn’t expect is that they lent me a bike and asked me to play.

Phew I was hooked! Bike polo is all about low speed balance and maneuvering, and I loved getting the hang of it. So naturally the first thing I wanted to do was build a bike polo bike. I really thought I was crazy for this one, but I worked with a bicycle frame builder at the time so I figured Heck I might as well chat him up.

Well one thing lead to the next and I had aluminum road bike tubes in the mail, and a design in SolidWorks. I overthought it a little bit, but ultimately it all worked out. I used the shop CNC to cope my tubes and get everything just right (which still didn’t get me exactly the right lengths, but that’s what I get for trying to take a shortcut :P).

First I had to get the main geometry together:

After that I had to get the stays on. This was especially hard because one, I had to make my own dropout holders (most track bike style dropouts are for steel frames, so the closest I could find was a paragon dropout that was made for a steel holder). This wasn’t too hard once I got it in the model, but made for some pretty interesting welding:

After this it was time to start assembling of course. This could have gone worse, but it could have gone a bit better too. I borrowed a tool from my coworker to ream the head tube and seat tube; the seat tube came out pretty tight, so I tried and tried again and then all of a sudden it w as loose and now I have to tighten it all the way to get it to clamp right. The head tube came out similarly ugly but a bicycle shop managed to press the bearings in okay. I think this was ultimately down to the curing (or lack there of) of the aluminum not going quite right, so any cutting turned to peanut butter.

Missing Parts Won’t Stop Me!

But I still needed wheels! I picked up a used rim, front hub, and a weird 48 spoke Milwaukee hub for the rear. I had some trouble with the parts for the rear hub, so I called Milwaukee. They said they thought about making it but had never in fact put it into production. I don’t know how my friend got ahold of it, but apparently Milwaukee’s prototype guy made a few and one of them got free. So I just had to make a few parts to get it to work just right with a big old gear:

After that, I had wheels to build! I got em all spoked up, and used an old wheel stand with a dial indicator to true them up just right.

With a little help from another bike I had laying around, and some tires, I suddenly had a bike! And it’s perfect for me, it’s not a feather but it’s quite a bit lighter than the bike I was riding. And I had to get a couple pink spokes on it for breast cancer awareness 😛 🙂