I knew since December last year, when I ripped my anterior cruciate ligament clear off my femur and tore my meniscus a bit, that I’d need a surgical operation to fix it. Just after arriving back in Vancouver from the DR Congo in March this year, my surgery date was finally given to me: April 10th, 2012 at UBC Hospital. I knew then that I had only a limited time to create… the fastest crutches ever.
In order to do this, I first carried out many (fractions of) hours of rigorous scientific research online (Google Image search function) to find the best idea someone else had come up with, then do something completely different.
One guy I found in my research had added a beer holder to his crutches to make them faster. Unfortunately, his design doesn’t take into account the S factor (shaking of beer) which means that a closed beer, in his crutches and travelling at the speeds at which such speedy crutches must travel on a daily basis, could easily explode — or at least lose a lot of its carbonation. Not good for mouthfeel. Anyways, I hadn’t the time to devise an ingenious gyroscopic sling system to keep a beer from over-shaking while held by a crutch moving at supersonic speeds, so in the end I didn’t use any of his engineering ideas (I may do so in the future, however).
(photo copyright: Claire Howell, http://www.flickr.com/people/midwestbass/)
I also found a young lady’s detailed instructions on how she made her crutches faster, including the mathematical calculations she used. Unlike the beer holder crutches, I could find no engineering flaw in her design – it’s clear that her crutch land speed greatly increased once she modified them; plus, she even got compliments on the design from passers-by. Much like designing the Koenigsegg Agera R, it’s very difficult to build something that is both incredibly fast and also aesthetically pleasing, but some people seem to have that gift. A number of the engineering concepts found in her pink rhinestone-studded crutches have been adapted to include in my design, although in order to protect my trade secrets I cannot tell you which of these elements I’ve incorporated.
(photo copyright: Katie Brown, http://downtownkatiebrown.blogspot.ca/)
A quick warning to those who aim to create their own, faster-than-slow crutches, when doing rigorous scientific research online: There are numerous companies selling so-called crutch “covers” and “accessories” to make your crutches look faster, but I guarantee you that they do just that: they make your crutches look faster. They will not increase your crutch land speed in any way; they might even slow you down!
Now, having explained all of this to you, I hereby present: the cranderson enterprises world premiere of accELeration speedcrutches, the fastest fully homologated, zero-emission high-visibility speedcrutches ever designed.
Features include:
- Super speed
- Amazing acceleration
- Very quick
- Make you go faster
Before and after photos:
The EL wire bits I needed to make my crutches faster, from the Vancouver Hackspace:
The result of all this hard work? accELeration speedcrutches with the kitchen light on:
accELeration speedcrutches with the kitchen light off:
Two studio close-ups of the accELeration speedcrutches:
Yours truly showing off the crazy speed of these super fast accELeration speedcrutches:
A video of the fastest recorded crutchrun in history, using cranderson accELeration speedcrutches, can be viewed by clicking here.
me likes shiny :)