(goto my source at www.dieselbike.net)
While its easy for many to concoct imagery of a post-apocalypse world, few are creating actual industrial objects that would be at home in that world of Mad-Maxian ruin.
Pictured here is Haydn Franklin and his motorbike. The frame is made of old water-pipes, fashioned with the aid of a pipe bender. The motor is a 1 liter diesel, formerly the stock motor of a Daihatsu Charade. Most of the parts for this bike came from the dumpster. Haydn claims it can do 100 mph, and gets 85 miles per gallon. It has won 20 trophies, including Best in Show at the Rat and Survival 2007.
This diesel motorbike is an emblematic specimen of possibilities after the fall -after the fall of nation-states, or industrialization as we know it, or corporations, or whatever. Imagine a land of hand crafted post-dumpster machinery, riders bringing back spoils from a raid on pacifist farmer cultures in the delta. Living in houses converted from old huge metal structures such as battleships, oil storage tanks, and rail cars (just as done in Russia in 1990's).
Hopefully amongst all that metal-ness we can keep the core luxury of contemporary life up and running: mesh-networked computers using no moving parts, a solid-state hard drive, and Linux operating system. More ambitious and certainly worth the trouble would be keeping the Google Proj2 in The Dalles Oregon operational. Just as the Vatican and the Forbidden City kept humans higher than animals in an earlier age, the Google connectionist brain living on that server farm provides us with higher parameters for living than we would otherwise have . After a collapse of Google services, I cannot imagine what primitive depravity humans would reduce to.
A friend responded that he loves the diesel motorbike, but also would want an Earthship in the post-apocalypse.
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