Airbus Builds First 3D-Printed Motorcycle
Airbus of Germany’s APWorks has built the world’s first 3D-printed motorcycle, a small electric it calls the Light Rider.
The whole frame is made out of Scalmalloy, an aircraft grade aluminum that offers the specific strength of titanium while keeping the weight of the motorcycle down to about 77 pounds. Bionic algorithms define the organic frame strucutre using nature’s design principles, says APWorks; the bike’s frame has been created out of thousands of very thin layers in a metallic powder bed.
Power comes from a 6-kilowatt electric motor that will accelerate the bike quickly to about 80 mph. This one’s really just an exercise to show what can be done, though if you’re interested APWorks says it will build 50, each of which will sell for 50,000 Euros ($56,020 today). “We have used our knowhow of optimization and manufacturing, to create a means of transportation to match our expectations”, explains APWorks’s Niels Grafen.
Read all about it here.
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