Originally Posted by
FBinNY
An interesting gadget, but they forgot the first rule of good engineering and that's to identify a problem and provide a solution. Yes, they've removed the spokes for whatever that's worth, but at a cost of higher weight and less efficiency.
That's the way I looked at it at first too, but come on- it was a college student project to look at alternate ways of doing things. They were supposed to design it differently and they did. I'm sure they learned a lot about why the common spoked wheel is the current standard. For projects like this you have to judge it based on the assignment the professor assigned (in this case using a different implementation of a common machine), and not based on its market success.
They were just playin' around for a grade, not trying to rattle the foundations of the cycling world. If you read the comments you can see the problem they were trying to solve was not to accomplish some quantum improvement in cycling technology; the problem was to get them a good grade. If I were the professor here, I would also ask for an analytical writeup of what they produced; that would be potentially more educational than actually producing the project.