SUPERCYCLE
I have never been sporty. I felt it was a form of abuse
being forced to play rugby on Saturday mornings when I was in secondary
school. So the extreme competitiveness of professional sport seems bizarre
to me. But at times it certainly is comic. I love the ridiculousness of the
female Olympic shot putting event with their trouble about the many ‘trans’
contestants. But particularly memorable and entertaining were the 2014
Russian Scochi winter Olympics, when it was proved that the urine samples of
all the Russian atheletes had been literally passed through a hole in the
wall of the lab and replaced with ‘clean’ samples. It was good that the
Olympic committee at the last moment removed their ban on the Russians and
allowed them to compete in the Rio Olympics two years later. International
harmony is worth a lot more than a bit of cheating in sport.
I’d had the idea of making an arcade machine on this theme
for a while but in March, having spent the winter making youtube videos, I
strongly felt the need to make something again, almost anything. The
physical making process with all its constant problems absorbs me like
nothing else. So I set to work on the sports doping theme with no idea where
I was heading. The cycling action is a good mechanical movement for models
so seemed a reasonable starting point. I spent a few weeks making cyclists
where you pull levers to activate their various leg muscles. This was
interesting but a bit mild, particularly because what worked much the best
was a single thigh muscle with a flywheel. Pneumatic rams have significant
friction, so reducing their number worked best.
pneumatic muscle bikes
I continued researching the subject, finding Ken Fogil’s
Icarus film particularly good source. This both explained the details of the
Sochi scandal very clearly, but also confirmed my impression that in top
cycling races that all the contestants are using banned substances to
increase their performance to some extent – the key is to stay ahead of
the game. There’s a constant stream of new drugs that aren’t yet ‘on
the list’, there are some completely legitimate things like living at high
altitude (this increases red blood flow) with the added advantage of making
random spot tests less likely, and there are legitimate medical reasons for
taking some drugs so its impossible to prove doping. I think the Bradley
Wiggins doping saga was never so conclusively proved as Lance Armstrong and
the Russians. Interestingly the Icarus film also showed what a marginal
advantage normal doping provides. You still need to be at the top of your
game to have any chance of winning.
small bikes on test
All this detail seemed too complicated for one of my arcade
machines. Meanwhile in my workshop I had started trying much smaller model
bikes racing round the rim of a real bike wheel. Then my friend Andy Plant
visited and he thought the bike wheel should move rather than the little
cyclists. At first I didn’t agree but its always fun debating things like
this with Andy and gave me the idea of using differential gears to move both
the cyclists and the scenery.
Near the beginning of the Covid lockdown I had explored a
good wormhole. Starting from problems with the capstans on my Pirate
Practice machine I became fascinated by Vannevar Bush and his work on
mechanical computing in the 1930s. It was incredibly influencial – all the
WW2 bombsight ‘computers’ for ships and aircraft were mechanical, based
on his research. Differential gears were an element of this that was used to
add and subtract. Used in opposite to how they are used in cars, the inputs
go in through the two ‘rear wheels’, with the propshaft output the
average speed of the two inputs. Then if the rotation of one ‘input’ is
reversed, the propshaft output is the difference between the two inputs.
differential gear test
Finding the right differential gearboxes was tricky. There
are tiny ones made for model cars, or large ones made for golf buggies, but
very few in between. I eventually used a couple of golf buggy ones with 25mm
shafts just because I already had them. The finished mechanism, complete
with ‘cheating’ motors looked impressive. Later I was amazed and
delighted to find that ‘mechanical doping’, adding hidden batteries and
motors within the frames of mountain bikes, is an actual phenomena.
first race test
I wanted the doping to be secret. So you get told what to do
by listening to advice from your coach through an intercom. My first idea
for secretly activating the doping during the race was to pull the crank
wheel towards you. I got this to work, but it somehow just didn’t feel
like doping. So then I started playing with hidden foot switches and at some
point thought of making them vibrate. This wasn’t right but led to trying
an offset motor that wobbled your foot a bit. Finally for some reason this
felt suitably medical, I could imagine the drugs being pumped into my foot.
The first version was impractical because it would have got clogged with
sand when on the pier. I went through 6 versions before settling on the
final one. Though later I decided the effect is too mild to be noticed in
the heat of playing the game so I’ll probably rebuild it yet again.
secret cheat switches
foot switches
The problem was that I had greatly underestimated the
friction of differentials and other gears. Though still easy to turn, it
meant the cheat motors needed a lot of power. I was shocked to find the
original battery drill motors with a 4:1 reduction were drawing 9 amps each.
I’m always nervous about large currents like this – smaller currents
which can’t overheat wires etc. I tried larger mobility scooter motors
instead. Ungeared these still drew almost as much current, but geared down
3:1 they now take a modest 2.5 amps.
I managed to get the machine in a playable state for the
summer half term, ready for my grandchildren to try it out. It’s been very
useful with many machines but particularly with this one. Jessie pointed out
the obvious flaw in the game – “what’s to stop players just activating
the cheat motor for the entire game?” but after a short pause added “its
obvious, they will overdose and stop completely”. This was a proper Eureka
moment. The game could be more like the real world, with the skill in
judging how much dope you dare do without overdosing. Then Ellie, my
daughter, suggested dividing the race into stages like the Tour De France so
you can gradually perfect the optimum doping technique.
Sam and Jessie test run
Nearing the end of making any machine I always have a crisis
of confidence, maybe this is getting worse as I get older and have more
experience of what doesn’t work. With this machine, playing it somehow
just didn’t feel instinctive or satisfying enough. There’s a lot more
mechanical complexity than most of the other machines, so only at the last
moment did I have to address some wierd issues that had never occurred to
me. Its actually essential to balance the relative amounts of friction in
each part of the mechanism to get it to work well.
While this final period of making a machine is definitely
stressful its also exciting and gets my brain going like nothing else. It
reinforces my bafflement of the fine art world with their emphasis on ‘concept’
rather than detail. The curators and critics just don’t have the technical
knowledge to engage with any of it. But of course it suits me perfectly to
be ignored by the lot of them. I get enough personal feedback to know people
enjoy what I make.
As the machine got closer to moving to the pier, my main
concern became simply to get the Brightsign media players to change tracks
quickly and reliably. The game becomes so much less intuitive if they don’t
reliably keep up. I found the players are a lot less responsive if tracks
includes sound tracks, so I added separate sound effects to mix with the
mute brightsign tracks output. Also downsizing the video files to 720p
helped a lot, as it does with so often.Over the years I’ve found its better not to announce a new machine at
first..its more useful to watch how people react without any publicity and
less embarrassing when it inevitably goes wrong with teething problems. This
one worked better than many. Kids enjoyed manically cranking the handles and
adults got the jokes. Everyone seemed to start by turning the cranks in the
wrong direction – it will be a pig of a job to reverse them but I’ll
bring the machine home in the winter to do it. I had underestimated the
enthusiasm with which people would turn the cranks, the chain came off and
then a bearing seized – more reasons to bring it home!
