This week’s selection is the Bicycle Parking Brake by designer Bryce Lenarcic.
Have you ever leaned your bike up against a wall only to find it tipped over? Did someone slightly touch the handlebars, leading to a chain reaction where the front wheel rolls, crashing the bike? I know I have.
There’s good news for bike riding readers, as designer Lenarcic has come up with an incredibly simple solution to the problem: the Bicycle Parking Brake.
The 3D model is simply a static clamp of appropriate size to fit around the bike’s handlebar brake control. The idea is to apply the brake while the bike is parked to prevent it from rolling.
If the front wheel cannot roll, then the bike is far less likely to tip over. Here’s a video of how it works:
For those of you who park your bike in a garage beside a vehicle, this 3D print could save you from scratches on the vehicle when the bike inevitably tips over. The cost benefit ratio of this 3D print is likely astronomical.
I’m always fascinated by ingenious designs, and this is certainly one of them. It has no moving parts, is trivial to 3D print, and provides a highly useful function. Literally anyone with a 3D printer could make this object without issue, and do so very quickly.
The only catch to this design is that it assumes the brake application distance — the width of the “grip” needed to apply the brake — is 65mm. This is likely good enough for many bikes, but for those that happen to have brakes that are not tuned properly, a tighter diameter might be required. This typically happens when brake cables stretch over time and thus require more pull to activate them.
Lenarcic does have a solution for this issue, however it’s not quite ready yet. It sounds like he intends on developing a “customizer” version of the 3D model for Thingiverse. This would allow a requester to specify an exact diameter and Thingiverse will generate a 3D model of that size.
You’d need to do some simple measurements on your bike’s front brake, but that’s easy to do, just like everything else with this design.
Via Thingiverse and Reddit
Alternatively, one could simply carry a rubber band which would do the same job and you wouldn’t have to worry about whether it would fit or not. Also be a lot, lot cheaper.