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[ Originally published on: Friday, August 14, 2009 ]
Recorder/Paul Franz
Richard Roo Trimble sits in his Roopod high-mileage vehicle.
SHUTESBURY -- One of the big surprises when the One-Gallon Challenge rolls into Greenfield next week will be whether Richard Trimble's 'Roopod' will join six other vehicles on their 100-mile trek to Boston on just one gallon of gas.
With just a few days to go, the race is on for Trimble to finish his handcrafted aluminum vehicle so he can actually drive it in the rally that culminates at the Boston Green Fest.
At the Miles Street parking lot Wednesday, Roopod will be among the 'new-generation, ultra-economical cars' at the event, but for Trimble, a self-described 'gearhead all my life,' it will be his first try at a building vehicle so green it won't even be painted a color.
Trimble, whose industrial-design thesis at Rhode Island School of Design was building a racing wheelchair, had as his inspiration the realization that his 2000 Volkswagen Super Beetle weighs 10 times what he does.
As a lifetime bicycle enthusiast, who left RISD in 1990 planning to design bicycles, the inherent inefficiency of an automobile hit him suddenly about a year ago. Instead of a vehicle that uses 90 percent of its energy just to get itself around, he figured he could design and build one that would be just twice his 250-pound weight.
To do that, he began with a shape common in bones and elsewhere in nature, transitioning from vertical to horizontal, back to front. Using 1οΎ½-inch diameter aluminum tubes in a pod design, Trimble is creating a diesel powered, three-wheel vehicle with a suspension system borrowed from a Harley-Davidson but which meets the technical specifications of a modified 1980 Kawasaki KZ 440.
