David Patrick reinvented the wheel almost completely by accident.
While playing around with six soft pieces of piping, Patrick managed to create a perfect cube. When he dropped it by accident, something amazing happened—it started rolling, and just kept on going.
Being an avid skater, Patrick used his new discovery to make the perfect skateboard wheel—the ‘Shark Wheel’.
It’s pretty hard to imagine a cube performing better than a round wheel, but Patrick’s ‘Shark Wheel’ design is faster, smoother and has more grip than a traditional wheel.
The secret seems to be its helix shape, which allows the wheel to be unencumbered by the terrain, while the sine wave pattern “reduces the surface area that makes contact with the ground, in turn reducing friction and speeding up rotation”.
The ‘Shark Wheel’ can currently be funded on Kickstarter.
Click to watch the video below to find out more about ‘Shark Wheel’:
[via Inhabitat]