In a country where vehicular emissions are the second-largest source of pollution, five final year Mechanical Engineering students from JK Lakshmipat University in Jaipur decided to put their education to good use, They have upcycled a scrap bike from the early 2000s to a sustainable, modern version of itself. That too in just 18 days!
It all began when one of the students Raunak Singh discovered an old, rusted bike in a warehouse when he was back home in Bhilwara, Rajasthan during the first COVID lockdown. He phoned it into his peers Abhimanyu Shankar, Anirudh Pareek, Piyush Singh Pawar, and Prashant Chaudhary and bought it for ₹3000 before taking it back to Jaipur.
“While we were in college before the pandemic broke out, we were working on a project to convert a normal bike to an electrical bike but we had to put this on hold when we all went home,” says Raunak. “When I found this old bike, all of us wanted to redesign it and make it suitable of ruse in the current day. I searched all over Jaipur for spare parts and rented out a workshop near my residence and that’s how the work went.”
They refurbished the bike’s completely damaged engine by converting it from a 4-clutch plate to a 5-clutch plate system. This improved its pickup and torque. Being a 2000 version, the carburettor management system of the bike was old, so the students went on to design a new gas gauge and added some modifications to the design to give it a whole new modern look.
Abhimanyu says, “When the bike was originally designed, it was supposed to work with a heavy load with boxes attached to the side of it. But we needed to give it a tweak. So we gave it a new blend to modernise it. Basically, the idea of doing this was to just know how much we have evolved as engineers. Being an engineer, we wanted to know if we have reached that breaking point where we would be able to achieve this on our own.”
“An education in Engineering can provide you with all the data you need regarding anything. But to work it out practically depends completely on you. We were taught a lot about Automotives in our classes but to work it out practically, there was a lot more effort involved. Our teachers instructed us to open the bike and get to know every part of it. We then reassembled and disassemble it again to get to the root of it. That was the engineering philosophy that they taught us.” he concludes
The students are planning to add more features to the bike like gear changes and adding a few set-ups to improve its pickup. They also have their electric bike project back at home that they are excited to complete that they started before the pandemic began. More than anything else, they are hopeful to add more sustainability to their engineering education.
