Heather Miller
After experiencing a life-changing, mountain biking accident that left Noel Joyce paralyzed from the chest down, he left his military career behind to pursue industrial design. Years later, he found his passion for biking again—albeit with three wheels instead of two.
As Joyce grew more confident in biking again and tackling trails in the nearby Slieve Bloom mountains of Ireland, he was consistently “outriding” the bike’s capability. Mountain bikes can be pricey, but adaptive mountain bikes are often difficult to repair and “frighteningly expensive,” Joyce says. There wasn’t much of a choice in his mind. He needed to design his own bike for wheelchair users.
Designing a new ride with Autodesk Fusion
With Autodesk Fusion, Joyce designed an entirely new type of adaptive, open-source mountain bike design that he called Project Mjolnir. He set ambitious goals for the most complex, full-suspension bike possible, creating specific geometry based on the desired characteristics and figuring out the assembly in Fusion.
As a New York University professor teaching Fusion, he also brought students from campuses around the world along for the ride with Project Mjolnir as it became a part of the VIP (vertically integrated projects) program at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Joyce, NYU staff, and the student teams set out a core objective to build four bikes at the three NYU campuses (New York City, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi) and in Ireland within the first year. They accomplished it in just under 10 months. They also hit another major milestone with the first adaptive mountain bike ride in New York City across the Brooklyn Bridge, followed by a ride on trails within the city not long after that.
Moving forward
Project Mjolnir continues to set and achieve new, ambitious goals, including the exploration of generative design. Joyce and the team are looking to lighten the next bike iteration, developing suspension systems for more extreme offroad capabilities and focusing on enhancing the bike’s portability, possibly through foldable designs or easy disassembly for travel.
The team has already succeeded to this end by building a full-suspension bike at NYU Shanghai and the ITP facility at NYU in New York. At NYU Shanghai the team successfully carried out a build event with a group of riders who subsequently went on to test ride that bike in Mongolia. They will follow up with two more bikes for that group with an epic adventure to happen later in the year.
Back in Ireland, the project has also begun to find traction between sponsorship and commitment from cycling bodies where the team will build a bike for each public trailhead in the country. With further builds happening at other locations globally, the team is looking at building up to 15 bikes this year, helping more people to get into the sport of adaptive mountain biking and the opportunity to design, build, and ride bikes. All of this work starts with an Autodesk Fusion file generated by the team as they experiment and develop new ideas.
“Project Mjolnir encompasses so many things,” Joyce says. “It’s about education and evolution. And, most importantly, it’s about inclusion. It’s about taking something that was out of reach and making it accessible to more people. It is the pursuit of knowledge and development of empathy that will help students at NYU design and build for people in the future.”
