Look who stopped to visit us at HWI! It is Grant, our former bike director, his wife Katie, and young Will. Grant’s dad owned 2 bicycle stores while Grant was growing up. So we are passing on the wrench to the next generation. Thanks Will for bringing your mom and dad by to see us again.
On Monday June 24th Kevin and Alice left home at 5AM and drove 4 hours to Spring Arbor University (SAU). There we met with old and new friends. One of the old friends was Carla, Alice coast-to-coast cycling leader from 1977. It only took us 2 hours for 5 of us to travel the world through our brainstorming efforts. Pray with us as we watch our university trike consortium grow. (more…)
Last Tuesday Shawn came out to HWI headquarters from Sunshine Gospel Ministries on the south side of Chicago. We have partnered with Sunshine for several years. We loaded 26 bikes into this trailer and 16 bikes into this truck bed.
Today we did some potentially destructive testing on a DOTT trike frame. (Note that all of these tests were performed without the additional strength of a “Haiti Brace” installed. The Haiti brace is an extra support welded into the frame below the seat that helps to strengthen the trike frame. All current HWI trikes use this brace.)
These tests at HWI were done in parallel with the Solidworks computer stress analysis reports compiled by the students at Messiah College.
The intention was to provide us with a feel, both practically and theoretically for how strong the design was, and to help identify any weaknesses in the design. Unfortunately, we ran out of weight for the test as we approached 900 pounds. We really did not expect to get that far.
Our future tests will involve actually overloading the trike to see what parts do fail first.
As well as providing valuable theoretical analysis of the trike design, the students at Messiah College were able to identify the likelihood that most of our trike frame would still be strong enough even if we used a slightly smaller diameter of tubing. Thanks again to the students and staff at Messiah College for their work and suggestions.
Spring Arbor University (SAU) has an Enactus chapter on their campus. You can read more about Enactus by clicking this link http://enactus.org/. One of the three projects the SAU students presented at the Regional Competition in Chicago this April was a way to keep the trike project in India sustainable.
In the presentation below you can see the multimedia component of their presentation they showed during competition. The SAU students won first runner up in their division.
As we think of recapturing our dream I want to begin by asking some questions:
• Are the Road Signs in your life pointing towards your Dream Destination right now?
• What is a dream destination you have/had at one time envisioned for yourself?
• What Roadblocks, dead end signs, impasses, or alternate route bypasses have put a death to your dream or caused you to lose your way?
Alice Teisan interviewed with Jerome McDonnell on WBEZ Chicago Public Radio on the Worldview program.
Podman Daniel Smrokowski, founder of Special Chronicles did an audio podcast tour with Alice Teisan at His Wheels International’s headquarters. Daniel heard about HWI through his classmate at Roosevelt University, Aubrey Smith who was HWI’s journalism intern in the Fall of 2012.
Alice Teisan was interviewed on Faith Radio, with Ted and Michelle on June 21, 2012 to share about His Wheels International
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