A 60-year-old gent has just smashed a new record for the steam-powered machines of our industry – and he’s gone and done it on veggie oil, using a bike he built in his shed.
If that isn’t a thumb-your-nose at retirement life, I don’t know what is.
Coverage from Motorcycle News tells us that the bike in question is christened “Force of Nature” – a machine that sucked £70,000 out of northern engineer Graham Sykes’ finances to guarantee the record win at UK&ITA World Records Speed Week, Elvington, in late May.
Curious how this steam-powered bike gets the job done?
“We’ve got a kerosene burner which has been converted to run on Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil,” explains Sykes.
“The flame generates around about 800 degrees centigrade of hot gas… it’s not a quick process so you don’t thermally shock anything.”
“We take about four hours to heat it up to 250° C, which brings the internal pressure of the vessel up to 40 bar, which is 600 PSI, and at that point you’ve got lots of potential energy in the temperature of the water.”
The insane talent uses around 25 liters of water per second, a process that starts with a fantastic sonic BOOM at takeoff – and, better still, Graham thinks more can be had from the tank yet.
“We’re about 50% into the power ability of the bike, and we’re just slowly increasing the performance of the bike so that we can get acclimatized to the acceleration,” Graham imparts.
With 163mph attained in a mere 3.87 seconds over the 1/8th mile – and the previous record having locked in 80.509mph in 2014 – we look forward to seeing how much closer Sykes can get to the revered 200mph marker.