I certainly have experienced similar things, particularly been acused of reinventing wheels. Flexibility and performance are two big reasons, but also "it's fun" or "I want to understand X" also have a good weight when we do this kind of "useless reinvention".
Reinventing the wheel is great for learning or creating something better.
The first version of the wheel used a square glad someone thought maybe a circle could work. Spokes were a big upgrade. The rubber tire filled with air creating[a donut changed the game.
There are no bounds in engineering to how many wheels one can reinvent/reimplement. Ultimately, it's a matter of deciding where to invest the (limited) engineering resources.
If they've gotten this far, they've already been iterating. In fact he says so at the beginning. "A year ago I welded two bicycles together..."
Having built two recumbent vehicles (a bike and a trike) I can say that the options for a rear wheel drive are either:
- Single wheel drive
- Dual wheel drive with freewheeling action
- The inside wheel is driven in turns
- A differential
- The outside wheel is driven in turns
- No differential at all
- Both wheels are driven equally all the time
He's chosen the latter. It's simple, cheap, and provides the best traction in almost every situation except a turn. It's a good compromise for where this thing is intended: Dirt. If it were optimized for street use, he'd just drive one wheel, which is what I'm doing with my own trike.
For reference, this is my current trike build. It's not done yet. Needs finishing, and paint:
If I can do it in a way that's better suited to my use case, learn something from it and/or entertain myself, that may not be as bad a tradeoff as it may otherwise seem.
Reinventing wheels out of plain curiosity has exposed me to a variety of problems and their solutions, and I believe it exercises my general problem solving skills.
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