Friday January 10, 2014 at 10:09am
For the second time this series Channel 4’s “Speed with Guy Martin” focused on a Solid Solutions customer, episode two saw Plymouth based, Sealander Marine International and SolidWorks play an integral role in Guy Martin’s quest to break the distant record for riding a motorbike across water.
Hydroplaning, the act of riding a non-buoyant craft across water, requires complex physics, thrust and lift in order to keep the bike skimming the water’s surface; thanks to their amphibious vehicle expertise marine engineers, Graham Davis and Charlie Broughton were called upon to modify Guy’s dirt bike.
The equilibrium of speed and balance would prove crucial in the completion of the task especially with no lateral stability, thus a ski–like hydro blade was fashioned on SolidWorks to sit beneath the rear wheel to act as a hull in order to steady the bike whilst moving at pace.
The five month long project which culminated with a number of record breaking attempts on Bala Lake, Snowdonia National Park showed SolidWorks as a key component of the bike’s success. Projected onto the side of a white transit van, Graham and Charlie talked both the viewers and Guy through the importance of accurate CAD design, employing the sketch picture feature in order to model the part to an appropriate scale, going onto create the part prior to production on SolidWorks.
Whilst Guy’s first attempt may have seen him head straight over the handlebars and his bike plunge to the bed of the 31 metre lake his second attempt was much more successful, managing to break the world record as he hydroplaned 63.56 metres across the water’s surface!
To see Guy Martin break the hydroplaning world record and Sealander Marine make their channel 4 debut for yourself simply follow the link below and catch up on 4od.
by Lucy Appleby
Applications Engineer