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How Do Bikes Stay Up?

minutephysics · 1.7M views · 2015-06-30 · 3:57

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Overview

A short minutephysics video explaining why bicycles stay upright. It looks at gyroscopic precession, head angle and centre of mass, and shows that bikes self-steer toward the direction they lean.

On Hacker News

HN people link it as a quick, clear answer to the question of bicycle stability, including in threads on bike mathematics.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2016–2024

Topics

Everyday physics & science demosFundamental physics
Search by tags
bicyclesgyroscopic effectself-stabilizationphysicssteering

What people said

ramanan · 2016-11 · Recommendation

Bicycles are surprisingly stable as long as they are able to maintain some momentum. minutephysics had a great video about this too: How Do Bikes Stay Up?: [VIDEO]

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Someone · 2016-07 · Recommendation

The surprising thing is that it is way more than "a few feet" . Apologies for repeating myself, but watch [VIDEO] (And that is not on smooth terrain) And nitpick: typical bicycles aren't symmetric left-right. The chain and gears make them heavier at the right. Most mass is close to the center line, though, so its moment is negligible, especially when ridden by a human.

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rtkwe · 2024-02 · Reference

I'm not sure how closely that applies. We didn't, but mostly because people hadn't really studied it and hadn't worked through the mechanics. As soon as we really started looking AFAIK the solution came pretty quickly; it's a combination of 3 things that all make the bike steer towards where it leans: gyroscopic precession, head angle and CoM of the front steering section. All 3 of those things can be tuned to be larger or smaller and that affects the velocity required to achieve stability. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by minutephysics, played through YouTube.

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