Jeff,
Looks like a great ice cream maker!
Reaching and maintaining 50 rpms at the agitator will be difficult for Dave. Getting the drum's spin cycle somewhere between 150 and 200 rpm will be virtually impossible. However, spinning is not a requirement of cleaning, just pre-drying. Nonetheless, for the cleaning cycle, it's not the speed that is the problem, it's the load. I think the high gear on a bicycle generally falls in the 6-8:1 ratio. That means that the rear wheel spins 6 to 8 times for every crank of the pedal. So getting to 50 rpm output is not the main issue. The main issue is the 40 gallons of water at 8.35 pounds per gallon and a full load of clothing adding say another 25 pounds. That's a lot of resistance against the agitator. He could probably handle a couple of shirts and a pair of slacks, but he should probably avoid loading it up with jeans or towels. I think you may begin to understand why the electric motors for such machines are rated in horsepower instead of Davepower. 
Dave may have better luck converting one of the horizontal machines to human power, or building his own. Check out the simplicity of the Staber washing machine for ideas. Later.
Bobby-- Thanks for your input on this... I was hoping you'd have some ideas... We've had a horizontal axis washing machine for almost five years now (a Kenmore), and love it...!
Bobby B. writes "I think the high gear on a bicycle generally falls in the 6-8:1 ratio."
Common for the highest gear found on a standard-issue road racing bicycle would be something like a 52-tooth front chain ring combined with an 12-tooth rear cog. In the professional ranks, you'll see 11-tooth cogs and perhaps 53- or 54-tooth front chain rings.
"Reaching and maintaining 50 rpms at the agitator will be difficult for Dave."
Just to clarify, this DIY doesn't do the wash (the agitation part). The 50rpm reference is to the pedal cadence required under this configuration to achieve the somewhere around 400-600 rpms of the drum.
"Getting the drum's spin cycle somewhere between 150 and 200 rpm will be virtually impossible."
In actual practice, the arithmetic (details in the write-up Jeff links to) says I'm actually getting somewhere around 625 rpms on the drum (with a full load of wet laundry), which is on the high side of the rated range of GE washers that the GE customer service rep provided on the phone for me. I suppose it's possible to use a cycling computer magnetic mount some way to measure the exact rpm's on the drum without resorting to calculations. But rpm's aside, judging from the condition of the clothes after I've spun them, I'm certainly achieving high enough rpms for long enough to get excellent results.
And that empirical standard, I think, is the one that matters most.
The 50rpm pedal cadence is problematic, to be sure, because it's about half the cadence that would be optimal for most people to be comfortable, getting maximum benefit from their aerobic capacity. Ramping up to 50rpm on this configuration also requires some very slow grinding in the beginning stages, which is a great muscle-tension workout, but not so great for the knees for a guy my age.
The suggestion to consider a front-loading design is one that's been followed well by the Cyclean guy who I've linked to in my write up: (http://cyclean.biz/pictures.html) His machine does the wash cycle as well. What I haven't heard back from him about yet is how he handles the issue of spin-start and distribution of clothes. With a top-loading design, you can just arrange the clothes manually so that they're roughly balanced. You've probably noticed, Jeff, that with your horizontal mounted Kenmore, at the start of the spin cycle, there's some back and forth and some little hitches that take place to fling the clothes into a hopefully symmetric distribution. So I wonder how hard that is to accomplish with pedal power.
The take-away here, I think, is that laundry is in fact a problem that can be be solved with mechanical human power, without introducing electricity.
BTW, thanks for posting this, Jeff!
Dave
My pleasure, Dave...!
You have lost me in the math.
If "a standard-issue road racing bicycle would be something like a 52-tooth front chain ring combined with an 12-tooth rear cog", then the ratio is 4.33:1. My ratio was too high.
"The 50rpm reference is to the pedal cadence required under this configuration to achieve the somewhere around 400-600 rpms of the drum." 50 X 4.33 = 216.5, not the "somewhere around 625 rpms" you claim, unless you've got another 3:1 increase somewhere in the linkage. No wonder the beginning of the workout is tough on the knees. I also made a poor reference to the spin speed of a standard washer, which is more in the range of 800 to 1100 rpm. Nonetheless, a 50 rpm cadence for Dave to get 625 rpm for a 10 to 15 minute spin is admirable. You da' man!
It appears that you've converted your machine to be only a spinner, correct? As such, you still are not doing the work of the electric (wash, spin, rinse, spin) against a full load of clothing suspended in water. How do you achieve a thorough cleaning and rinse prior to this final spin?
To close out, Dave is obviously a creative and mechanically capable individual. Show us some more cool gadgets in the future.
I'm always on the lookout for cool gadgets, especially of the DIY variety. If you really want to see gadgets galore, check out EcoGeek...
Bobby B.,
The thorough washing and rinsing is achieved in a hand-levered machine I bought from an Amish Hardware store several years ago.
The spinner was the solution to my frustration with the roller-style wringer I had been using.
In the future, I hope to be able to show you a version that removes the resistance unit from the equation. A naked hub with a pulley mounted in the center seems promising.
As depicted, you have a spinning bicycle wheel, which rolls against a roughly 1-inch diameter roller for a huge increase in ratio, so the the drive pulley gets spun at the same rate as this little roller, then the drive pulley is connected by V-belt to the washer, but the washer's pulley is larger.
The write-up summarizes the arithmetic this way (I'm using the smallest bicycle gear available on the bike):
"The bicycle gearing is roughly 2:1. The ratio of the circumference of the roller contacted by the bicycle tire to the tire itself is roughly 1:25. The ratio of the drive pulley's circumference to the working pulley is around 1:4. So the rough aritmetic for the laundry tub is (50 x 2 x 25) / 4 = 625 rpms."
Dave,
My apologies for not looking at the photos of the set up more thoroughly before asking questions. I see now why getting started is difficult. I can not tell from the photos if you have removed the washing machine's transmission. If not, you could do that and also modify the assembly to couple a pulley directly to the drum. The weight reduction should make start-up a little easier? Of course, you will lose the benefit of the heavy transmission's inertia once you get going. Also, the shaft your bicycle wheel drives appears to be mounted on an electric motor. Are you using it to generate any electricity?
Neat stuff, Dave.
I just posted a new video from GreenovationTV about Dave's pedal powered bicycle washing machine: "How to Wash Your Clothes with a Bicycle." The video is a lot of fun and you can see how it works. The article gives some details from Dave about how he built it: www.Greenovation.TV
Commenting by HaloScan
