Pretty much all of the fantastic inventions from YouTube creator James Bruton are bizarre engineering oddities. But when the former toy maker says that one of his wacky omnidirectional rides "behaves weirdly" – a closer look is definitely warranted.
Bruton has been generating video content of his tinkering achievements for around 18 years as far as we can tell, with many of his early builds focused on bringing an Iron Man suit to life.
My first brush with this fellow Brit was back in 2017 for a 3D-printed "Lego" electric longboard. We've also covered his partnership with Gravity Industries to develop a shoulder-mounted weapons system, his self-balancing "Screw Bike" and most recently the utterly bonkers but wonderfully cool bike on balls concept.
Those last two are referred to as omni-bikes, and the fifth member of that exclusive club is a sidewinding chopper-style ride featuring two omni-wheels mounted most oddly. As with many of Bruton's projects, the new bike is made up of parts scrounged from other builds.
The front wheel and fork that extends out Easy Rider-style is from a self-balancing robot he built a couple of months ago. This features a larger wheel shape that can go forward and back, while belt-driven smaller wheels enable sideways motion as well as self-balancing using data from an internal measurement unit.
The large rear wheel has been harvested from his 2023 Star Wars Speeder Bike. This one is mounted at 90 degrees to the front wheel, and features two discs – each rocking six mini wheels around the outside edge.
The custom chassis is built using aluminum T-slot extrusions, machined plates and 3D-printed components – all securely bolted together. A pair of O-Drive servos from the earlier robot build power the front wheel, and another O-Drive sits atop a vertical extrusion behind the riding position and drives pulleys to control the angled back wheel.
Footpegs and a battery box are slung under a slightly raised padded seat. There's a control box here too featuring a level indicator, output meters, wheel activation switches and more.
Though previous omni-rides have been controlled by twist-grips – where the left controls forward/reverse motion and the right tips left or right – Bruton has taken on viewer suggestions and opted for joysticks at the handlebar of this project.
Each joystick offers control over six axes, so Bruton reckons that the vehicle could actually be moved and steered using just one joystick. But that's likely too much for one hand to deal with all at once, so he settled on one joystick for forward/backward motion and another for sidewinding.
Bruton details the whole build in the video below, which is well worth watching all of the way through for a full-on geek out. But if you want to watch just the riding footage, skip to the 20:30 mark for the bone-shaking test drive.
Interestingly, Bruton found turning in circles to be a tad counterintuitive – where he had to lean one way to turn the other. So he opted to experiment with riding the bike backwards, with mixed results.
As ever, a fascinating project with a video containing lots of useful information if you want to have a crack at this yourself – and perhaps even improve on the design.
In the end, the omni-bike is never going to be the most practical – or even safest – way to get from A to B. But it's off the scale for nerdy goodness and jaw-dropping cool.
Source: James Bruton
