In the quiet reaches of Wisconsin, just north of Green Bay, Sunny Hill Cycles is turning heads and making bike aficionados drool. The Sunny Hill Cycles Signature Series bike is a gas-powered, custom designed, DC Lowrider bicycle. Check out the PD&D Kickstarter of the Week video.
This motorized bike features a sleek, retro design and boasts a 66 cc PK80 Chrome motor. The vehicle still has pedals, allowing those with a standard driver’s license to operate it. If the pedals were removed, a motorcycle permit would be required. There were some other limits that the law dictated, as the project creator, Jesse Smits, explains, “The top speed is around 37 or 38 mph, but at that speed you’re driving illegally. Really, you’re not supposed to go above 30 mph on these vehicles. That’s part of the reason we picked a 66 cc motor.”
The team tested several motors of different makes and compressions. In a side-by-side comparison, Smits and his father set up three bikes with different engines, checking for reliability, speed, and compression. “[We went with] a 66 cc motor because that only needed one gear while still providing a tremendous amount of low-end torque to get up those hills,” says Smit. “The [PK80] Chrome packed so much punch with great gas mileage. It gets 128 mi/gal, yet provides enough punch to scoot you up hills. If we geared these engines, you could get up a hill at like 65 mph, but even with this single-geared version, you can reach 27 to 30 mph, uphill.”
A wholesaler provides the basic bike to Sunny Hill Cycles, but that is only the beginning of the process. Smit and his father take to chopping up the bike frame and tweaking the front fork, to allow a motor mount and steering stabilization. The most time-consuming part of the build is attaching the 32-tooth sprocket to the 140 spoke wheel and hub, which ends up being a six hour process. “We have to drill through the hub, and then we use spacers to push the sprocket out further so it can connect with the drive chain on the engine,” says Smit.
The mounting brackets for the engine and the carburetor are custom-designed to fit the Sunny Hill Cycle. “With such a tight frame, the carburetor kit that we had didn’t fit. So, we had to engineer our own carburetor mount,” explains Smit. With tight frame constraints, even the chain tensioner had to be rethought. “Rather than having a traditional tensioner for the chain, we used a custom-designed spring tensioner.”
Revising his dreams of opening a motorsports company, Smits attention and hopes have turned to getting Sunny Hill Cycles off the ground. With just ten days left, the Kickstarter price for a gas-powered bike sits at just under $800.
Support Sunny Hill Cycles at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1926355577/sunny-hill-cycles-project
