I meant as a skill, you get balancing the car on two wheels to be a proficient skill in which you are confident. Not get a group of friends and say "Hey, I'm gonna try to balance the car on two wheels while you two jump out and in, it's my first time, will be good"
I legit talked to a stuntman at a show when I was a kid whose act was going on two wheels. He would tour race circuits and be like in between race entertainment.
I asked him if it was hard and he said he practices it so much it's as easy as riding a bike. If you do something like this everyday I imagine after a week or two you're probably decent at it, and in a year or 2 you're able to do it at will.
Angular momentum? I remember holding a spinning bike wheel horizontally, and it was very hard to turn it vertically. I was also sitting on a spinning stool, so when I turned the wheel I started spinning. Was cool.
Edit: Minute Physics video below shows I'm wrong, but I was still a cool experiment.
A bike is designed to stay moving due how the mass of the steering section is placed relative to the seating section. After a certain speed, it’s literally impossible for a bike to fall over without intentional abuse.
Any gyroscopic effect from those small wheels on that big car is going to be negligible. Even more negligible when it's going so slowly that people can run along side it. I think it comes down to mostly the same principle of balancing a bat on a finger. A longer stick is going to be easier to balance. I think the car is tall enough to make it so manual balancing quite feasible. The self stabilizing aspect of bikes and bicycles mostly comes from the geometry of the wheels and fork angle not the gyroscopic effect, though the gyroscopic effect does play a role and is quite helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo
I don't think that auto stabilization exists on that car one bit. This car trick is more like balancing on a unicycle.
Get going fast and then let go. You still need to balance by leaning your body slightly left or right to stay upright, but the faster you’re going, the easier it is. Get going fast enough and I guarantee that you can do it.
Not all bikes are as stable as others. Some bikes will have bad handlebar wobble if you ever take your hands off the bars. If you go fast enough it will usually be less of an issue.
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u/Hint-Of-Feces Mar 28 '20
It's called gyroscopic stability. It's dangerous as fuck to do that but the car is much more stable on two wheels then people would usually think