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There's no official count for bicycle-related records or world firsts, but if there were, The Q would be at the top of the leaderboard. The Q is Sergii Gordieiev, a self-professed nerd into "science videos and more" with a soft spot for reinvented DIY (do-it-yourself) bicycles. For him, the combination of these two has proved the perfect recipe for getting those world firsts.

Over the years, The Q has delivered some of the strangest contraptions on two wheels you'll likely see anywhere, starting with the most basic, pedal-powered bikes and turning them into noteworthy one-offs with his imagination and refined skills. There's the icycle, a bike that can ride on ice because he swapped the wheels for circular saw blades. There's the bike with wheels made of hot glue gun sticks, which glows in the dark. There's the bike with half-wheels and the hubless fat bike and the examples could continue for a while.

The Q has a knack for strange ideas and, most impressively, for making them into real objects that retain some of the functionality of the original. That last part is the most impressive.

Photo: YouTube / The Q

Where common sense and physics say it can't be done, The Q proves that it can. Take the square-wheel bike as an example, his most recent build and by far "the craziest" project he ever worked on: it's a Crosser fat tire bike (he seems to have a thing for those, too) with homemade wheels that are perfect squares. It doesn't just look very impressive, but it's actually rideable.

The Q even goes as far as to say that it's a fully-functional bicycle, which you can ride normally and even take turns with. Do take a grain of salt with the latter part of that claim because it's highly unlikely that it can do anything more than crawl at a slow speed on even ground, and that too with maximum effort on the rider's part.

Photo: YouTube / The Q

Obviously, since a square can't turn smoothly on the ground, the wheels on this bike don't rotate. Instead, the bike rides on tracks, like a mini-tank on two wheels, with an adapted drivetrain that sends power from the crank to the gears on the outside of each square.

To create the square wheels, The Q built a heavy supporting metal frame, to which he added a spinning gear and a couple of rolling bearings on each side. He added bike chains to the spinning gears, going around the frame, and a new rubber track made up of cut-up pieces from the original bike tire, bolted to the chains, the moving part of the track. With the modified drivetrain, which features two cranks, one for a spinning gear on each wheel, the bicycle can be pedaled into motion.

Photo: YouTube / The Q

It's safe to assume, though, that it wouldn't hold up. The wheels are very heavy, so getting it to move from a standstill is probably hell on your legs, and it will most likely not be able to turn or handle a rougher patch. But it works, and it shows that you can have square wheels on a bike and still have it ride. It's beautiful, too like watching an optical illusion come to life.

Read more:

The Square-Wheel Bicycle Is a Rideable, Beautiful Piece of Engineering - autoevolution