This year’s Singletrack Award for Most Innovative Product goes to Project Mjolnir.
Project Mjolnir is an open source design for an adaptive e-mountainbike. By being open source, it allows people to take the design and have it manufactured at whichever CNC shop they choose. Get a complete set of parts made at the cheapest location and have them shipped to you, or just have the replacement component you need done as quickly as possible nearer to home. The ability to get spare parts quickly is especially important for adaptive users, for whom periods of inactivity can be harder to recover from.
The design uses standard mountain bike components, making it much cheaper to build into a bike than many other adaptive trikes, and again making spares easier to come by. There’s a certain amount of adjustment available within the design, so it can be built to suit a wider range of adaptive needs. But by being open source, others can come up with their own additional design solutions and share them for others to benefit from.
Innovative? Definitely. And it’s not even a bike industry project – it’s a university one. Noel Joyce was inspired to create the Mjolnir with New York University after he found his own adaptive trike experiences expensive and fraught with delays for repairs. It’s fair to say he was delighted to hear he’d won this award:
He’s currently working on a 20inch version of the trike, for children. He’s hoping that he will be able to get those to a stage where companies can buy the kit and build it up as a corporate social responsibility or team building event, making adaptive e-MTBs for kids all over the world. How flippin’ great would that be?
For more information about the Project Mjolnir, check out this article:
