YouTuber Constructive Chaos spent weeks engineering three radically different bike wheel designs in an attempt to find one that actually outperforms a standard wheel. The project included a solid steel sawblade wheel, a custom geometric wheel designed to roll smoothly up stairs, and a final version built almost entirely from springs in place of traditional spokes.
The sawblade wheels, fabricated from solid steel and manufactured through PCB Way, weighed roughly 80 pounds each. They performed surprisingly well on salt flats and dry dirt, but failed completely on gravel and mud where the teeth dug in rather than rolled forward. The stair climbing wheels, shaped using a custom geometric pattern meant to mirror the rise and depth of a staircase, quickly proved nearly impossible to pedal up or down anything in practice.
The most successful design replaced the bike’s spokes with tensioned springs stretched around the rim, creating a wheel built more like a trampoline. After multiple blown tires and a reworked hub design, the springs managed to hold the wheel together using nothing but tension. Early tests showed the bike still relying on its factory suspension, so Constructive Chaos disabled the stock shocks entirely to force the spring wheel to absorb impact on its own.
After removing half the springs to allow more vertical travel the wheel became significantly more responsive over rough terrain. Despite being far lighter than the steel sawblades, it delivered a smoother and more dynamic ride, enough to earn it the top spot among the three experimental designs by the end of testing.