Custom Rear Wooden Bike Basket: Design (Part 1 of 2)
I bought a new bike to travel to and from the shop when the weather permits and that also means that I needed a way of transporting small shipments to the post office to be mailed around the world. As such, my bike requires a custom rear wooden basket!
Sure, I could buy a rear wooden bike basket for the bike but I want to showcase the capabilities of CNCROi.com across just about any custom CNC application, design through production. It’s also great making something out of the ordinary to showcase to our own clients who are interested in having us make a custom box for them too!
The pine I’ll use for this project are narrow planks so I’ll optimize my design to use as much of it as possible, that’s what these two rectangles represent in my drawing. Pine is a good material for something that will be bumped around because it has some shock absorption built into it, it’s very easy to seal and paint.
It can also be laser cut or CNC routed in our shop when the design is finished.
I’ve now got my basic box structure built-out. I want this to look “crate-ish” but still be incredibly strong and dead-easy to assemble. I will be using a few ideas to hold this together, first is interlocking, second will be glue and third pillar and post screws.
The custom wooden bike basket is now starting to take shape, I want it to not only be beefy but to actually be incredibly strong as it will be on the back of a bike that’s weaving in and out of traffic, hitting bumps and so forth. It will also be in some offloading environments as well!
Although I don’t need this custom wooden bike basket to be weatherproof, it will be pretty good against the elements if it rains, the lid will be extra strong though, made out of clear polycarbonate that’s essentially bulletproof glass.
CNCROi.com does lots of work with this material for various client applications, I think the strength and nice black edge contrast will look great when mixed with the burned edges of the bike basket.
Part of the challenge of making a very strong custom wooden bike basket is making sure the elements of design and strength are intermeshed. It’s easy to make something strong and ugly as it is to make something weak and esthetic. For this application, I’m looking for middle-ground, hence using three different methods to keep everything together.
The sides are well supported but the front and back, not so much so adding an element that adds more depth to the design while supporting outer structures is required.
Throughout this process, lots of additional design elements are modified, my goal at CNCROi.com when it comes to designing things is to waste electrons, not material prototyping ideas!
The back of this custom wooden bike basket is coming along nicely, it’s time to start adding more support and introducing more ideas to add strength to the top of the box. Interlocking is a wonderful concept but it will add challenges when it comes to assembling in real life.
Double-checking each element is vital as it’s quite easy to design something that’s impossible to do in the real world.
Having a sheet of plastic on the top of anything is generally asking for trouble especially if it’s exposed to the elements but in this case, it’s incredibly strong and durable polycarbonate. I’ve still created a support both below and above the sheet for two different reasons. The one below will support the sheet so there isn’t any flex in the middle while the part above provides a means of grabbing the top lid for easy removal.
Additionally, this will allow me to strap this custom wooden bike basket to the bike tightly without damaging the lid.
The custom wooden bike basket is now just about done, as I’ll be creating this box in our Austrian industrial wide-format laser, I might as well make the holes where the pillar and post screws will go into for both the pine and the polycarbonate. Why bother going over a model with a drill when you can make the holes during production!
This is what smart and lean production is all about, adding the holes during production is almost no additional work while adding them in an extra process after wastes time and energy, as well as introducing possible errors in final production. This way, assembly is a breeze!
I’m happy with my design, it looks great (to me at least), should be incredibly strong and the top is bulletproof! What more could you want from a rear bike basket? It’s now time to export the files into something I can cut with the laser.
By the way, I designed this box so it could be just as easily cut using our CNC router.
I went through our pine wood inventory here in the CNCROi.com shop and found-out I didn’t have enough material to make this box so I headed to the lumber store and bought a bunch more.
My new size limitations have been changed as a result I’m going to make this box slightly larger by making the bottom to go slightly lower so that I can more easily interlock it to my bike to limit movement when tied down.
This custom wooden bike basket has as few parts as possible, I could have even cut this in half if I wasn’t concerned about strength but I plan on using this box in all seasons, sometimes carrying heavy stuff, so overbuilt is better than underbuilt.
It’s now time to cut the file out with our dual-sourced Austrian CNC laser!
The Power of 3D Modeling
I hope this illustrates the incredible flexibility and power of our design process. How much wood was wasted during the design process prototyping this custom rear wooden bike basket? NONE! That means our customers can visually SEE what we are about to make for them and give the necessary approvals before any saw dust is made.
Looking for an awesome custom CNC company that can handle custom design through production? You’ve found CNCROi.com! Contact us right now!
