Interstellar Pedaller

What's better than a cardboard spaceship? A second cardboard spaceship. On a tricycle!

So I'm starting a new spaceship. The Cosmic Onion is great, but it requires two people to really enjoy it, since someone has to pull it. I don't want to have to rely on another person wanting to pull me in my cardboard ship in order to use it. Ever since I made the Onion, I've wished I could find a way to propel it without a second person, but every idea I came up with was either too expensive or way beyond my ability. The solution I came upon was building a new ship off of a tricycle.

Step 1: Get a Trike!

It's a child's tricycle. It definitely wasn't meant to fit me. But that's not the point. I can ride it, and that's all I need.

Step 2: Fix the Tricycle

The trike is old. It's an offroading trike, so the tires have tubes, and two out of three have holes. The steering is also loose, the seat is too high and really uncomfortable, and my knees are too close to the handlebars. But these are all fixable problems!

I dismantled the seat, cut an oval out of some plywood, and attached the wood to the seat. Then I stacked foam from an old mattress on the wood, laid an old bandana on top, and stapled everything down. My new seat is complete! I also tilted the handlebars forward so my knees have more space.

There are some other problems that still need fixing but I'll put those off until later.

Why a tricycle and not a bicycle?

It's true that a bike would be more comfortable for me to sit on and ride, and the shape would make more sense for a spaceship. But I want my spaceship to be freestanding when I'm not riding it, and I don't want to have to worry about balancing while riding my ship. So my base needs more than two wheels, and a trike is the simplest option for pedaling. And bikes are way more expensive than tricycles, so this fits my as-cheap-as-possible theme in nearly all my projects.

Step 3: Design

I started with a picture of myself on the trike and drew a spaceship-like shape around me. My brother drew me his idea based on my original design and I refined it to fit the tricycle.

Labeled rough sketch

Clean first design

My brother's design

Final design

Why is the shape so strange? How will the ship be attached?

Because of the size of the trike, the size of my body, and the fact that the front wheel turns for steering, I can't actually attach structural parts of the ship to very many places on the tricycle. 1: behind the seat, next to the wheels. 2: underneath the seat. 3: between the handlebars and the front wheel. Every piece of the ship can only be connected to the trike in those three places.

Step 4: Prototype

I used cardboard to plan out the shape of the ship. The structural parts that attach to the trike and make up the basic form of the ship will be pvc or pex pipe in the final version, but for now I just hot-glued cardboard strips to the metal so I could workshop the design.

Adding cardboard to the trike

Forming the shape

Finished shape

Final design fitted to prototype

Step 5: Planning

Using ratios (yay math!) I added measurements to the sketches so I know exactly how long each part needs to be. Then I drew out the top view with chalk in real-life size to make sure the trike fits in the design.

Side view with measurements

Top view with measurements

Tricycle in chalk plan

What tools and materials are being used to create the ship?

The main structural points of the ship were created using mostly pvc pipes, which are stronger than pex, and attached to the connection points using screws, duct tape, and hanger tape. The basic shape is formed from pex, attached with screws and strengthened with metal rods and rope. I used tools like the tape measure to keep the body as symmetrical and straight as possible. The shell of the ship is made with cardboard, trimmed to shape with an x-acto knife and attached with hot glue.

Step 6: Main Structure

Now it's time to start building the body of the spaceship. I added structural points, reinforced them with pvc and pex pipes at different angles, and started to add cardboard to create the shell that makes the shape of the ship.

Starting the body

Curving the shape to match the prototype and my height

Adding cardboard to the nose of the ship

Finished nose

Side ribs and starting the fin

Finished fin

Starting the sides

Finished shell

Where's the dome?

All my designs show a dome, like the one in my first spaceship. But the final shape doesn't have a dome, and doesn't give space for one. I decided to use the extra panels of plexiglass leftover from the Cosmic Onion for the windshield of this ship, instead of fitting the dome to the front. I wasn't sure about this until I had built the structure of the body and saw that fitting a circular shape into the front would be difficult and wouldn't match the style of the design.

Step 7: Windows and Door

The door is made of a series of panels that are glued together and can fold up. The panels use the bend that the top flaps of a cardboard box have so the box can close. This way, the door opens more easily (not straight outwards) and is harder to break. It attaches to the back of the ship with small pieces of velcro.

Closed door

Partially open door, being folded as it opens

Open door, with black velcro pieces visible

Three handles for pulling the door closed while inside

Now that the sides are closed up, it's hard for anyone inside to see what's going on around the outside of the ship, so it's time for some windows. The ship has windows--made of thin plastic sheets from the recycling bin because I ran out of plexiglass--on the sides and the back.

Both side windows, four in total on the ship

Two back windows

Circular rear view mirrors to see out the back windows, made of old hard drive disks

Step 8: Wings

This is new. I haven't done wings before, because they're difficult to make and attach, weak, and take up a lot of space when the ship isn't being used or when moving through tight spaces. This ship needs to be able to fit through regular sized doorways, which means it can be no wider than 30 inches. Already, the ship has reached that limit, so how do I add wings? They have to be detachable. I did this by cutting slits through the side of the ship's shell, shoving the wings in and using dowels to keep them stable.

To make the shape, I taped some string to the floor, layed out cardboard panels, and glued the wings together over the outline

I curved the wings by bending them and gluing strips or cardboard along them lengthwise, and added paper bags to hide the seams

The final shape of the ship, with wings attached

Step 9: Finishing

To hide the seams, I tried something different. With the Cosmic Onion, I painted the seams red to accent them instead of trying to hide them. With this ship, I covered the entire shell with paper bags, which we have an excess of because we can't use our own grocery bags during the pandemic.

No paper finishing, with large seams from cardboard

Covered in paper bags to hide cardboard seams

Second test ride, with wings and finished surface

Paint

I did some test drawings to decide what colors to use, and settled on orange and white, which was the original design, because those are the colors I had laying around.

Step 10: Lights

I attached 8 different strings of battery-powered lights to the ship--one on each wing, and a string on the bottom, back, and front for both sides.

Finished Product: the Interstellar Pedaller

It's finished, after a few months of work. The finishing, as always, is the hardest and most frustrating, but I think it turned out well in the end. On one side I painted the name of the ship and on the other I added the ship's ID number: 16061963, or June 16, 1963. That's the date Valentina Tereshkova--a Russian cosmonaut and engineer--became the first woman in space.

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Summer 2020

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