chris@canootervalve.com

2D Suspensions and Fun with Instant Centers

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Jul 182012

Hank Matheson from Bicycle Fabrications let Dirt Rag take the wraps off his wild new “2D” suspension system today, and bravo. It’s sufficiently bizarre to have warranted the cloak and dagger. I love that it’s part homage to the old Cannondale Gemini DH frame, and that it’s legitimately something completely different.

Matheson developed it with engineer John Heim, and the truly unique thing about it is the axle path–or really axle paths. The suspension moves vertically, but it also moves horizontally. Square-edged hits allow the rear triangle to kick backward up to 19mm. The whole thing pivots on a large eccentric, so essentially it’s a single pivot on a pivot. The large eccentric onto which the swingarm pivot mounts can rock backward, and that motion’s controlled by a giant elastomer.

I have to admit I’m always a little envious of DH frames because there’s just so much you can do with them. You just don’t have the same chain growth and gear combination concerns.

Today’s Danzig detail deals with instant centers and gear combinations. Draw a line through the pivots of each of your rockers, find the place where those two imaginary lines cross paths, and you have your instant center. Unlike a single-pivot frame that has a fixed instant center, frames with multiple pivots have instant centers that move around. Where that instant center is relative to the chain you’re pulling along between your chainring and whatever cog you’re in dictates how the suspension behaves. Here it gets a little hairy, but the bottom line is that it’s desirable to build a happy relationship between that instant center point and the “line of torque,” i.e. your chain.

A key aspect of the Danzig design is the position of the lower link and how it affects that moving instant center’s relationship with the chain. Danzig’s lower link is basically the mirror opposite of every other lower link orientation out there. This orientation doesn’t just put the instant center right on the line of torque. The way the pivot rotates actually tracks alone with the line of torque as your wheel raises.

Clear as mud, right? For now, here’s the resting point of the instant center (the red dot). Next, I’ll blow out some other drawings so we can look at where it goes when the suspension is compressed and why I worked hard to get it to do that.

Details on Danzig’s New Shock Position

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Jul 172012

Every day it’s looking more and more likely that Project Danzig is going to happen. No doubt there will be slow days, but there’s momentum now. Since leaving Speedgoat, I’ve worked my ass off to build a whole new me, and one big part of that is seeing this design turned into a rideable prototype. That this could not only happen, but that I might get to work with some incredible people, is pretty rewarding. Sure, it could all still go to hell. There is no coasting allowed here. But all the effort I’ve put into the design is starting to at least be appreciated.

As promised to the nerds out there, here are some details about the shock orientation.

Originally, I’d thought the only viable shock position for my suspension system would be the near-horizontal position you see in the drawing up top. Turns out, that was completely wrong. Given the position of my links and the nature of how the rear swingarm essentially pivots on itself, it turns out the absolute best position for the shock is vertical–like a walking beam bike, only without all the mess. The suspension system itself can drive the shock straight down without any longer, flexier rockers. One small lower link feeds out the swingarm while one small upper link reins in the suspension and directly compresses the shock.

Once I figured out that the shock really could fit in that area, everything began to fall into place. As long as we can position the shock as low and forward as we have it in this next drawing–and we should be able to without any problems–everything else becomes much easier.

Without further ado, then, he’s a small animation of the new shock position. Please ignore the background drawing and stay with the blue lines instead. Apologies for the blinky note bubble, but here’s how it works.

More soon. Stay tuned.

Something Old, Something New

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Jul 162012

I’m not much of a believer in signs and symbols, but I received some positive news over the weekend regarding Project Danzig. At around the same time, I happened to also see the rare and beautiful creature you see above. That’s right, the full-suspension mountain bike equivalent of an animal thought long extinct: a GT RTS-1, circa 1995. And while it didn’t have any sweet Spin wheels, it somehow, miraculously, had a Girven fork.

Those of you old enough to remember this stuff will realize this was a bit like walking through the woods and happening upon a living, breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex being ridden by a Bigfoot.

To be fair, this is Portland, and I tend to see all kinds of things I’d thought disappeared forever here. I came across the RTS while walking through Lloyd Park headed to the Max station with my wife and kids. Lloyd Park was hosting the end of the massive Seattle to Portland ride, so plenty of bikes were on hand. But still. Witnessing a functioning RTS-1 doesn’t happen every day, and I’m taking it as a positive sign for building some prototypes.

I’ve found some partners who’d like to help finance the development and fabrication of Project Danzig prototypes. As the kids say, shit’s about to get real.

I’m particularly excited because my last round of frame redesigns yielded the vertical shock position that appears in the most recent renderings I’d posted.

And I think this is going to make production much easier than I’d originally thought. The entire suspension–including the rockers–is so compact and minimal, that I think some good things can come from it. Even the movement has a simplicity to it. After searching for the optimal shock position for days, I realized that the movement of the swingarm and upper link wanted to drive a shock straight down. No big walking beam levers or anything required. Very, very compact–which was a major goal of the design. For anyone who nerds out on this sort of thing, I’ll try to post some development photos during the week, but for now I’m just very excited about the future. Danzig lives.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pinterest

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Jul 132012

I’m thinking I might’ve been too hard on Pinterest yesterday when I suggested it was destroying our souls. Maybe. I mean, I coveted some stuff myself today, which of course makes me absolutely no better than the cupcake people.

That Giant up there is the upcoming Trance X 29er. I didn’t so much covet that as just appreciate it. I’ve always liked Giant bikes. All the way back to the days when they were installing their bottom brackets without even tapping the shells first. Yes, they did this on some “budget” bikes for a while–did a bottom bracket replacement and was greeted with a BB shell filled with metal shavings. And I don’t mean “a few” metal shavings; I’m talking “small plate of spaghetti” here. I guess if you have an powerful enough air gun, you sort of have a tap, too.

Now, the Tonic Tushar Crusher, I just plain coveted. Madly.

It’s not lost on me that people who like uncomfortable $2000 chairs and $400 faux worn-out jeans may think I’m nuts for believing everyone in the world should see this (probably $4000) bike. But I don’t care.

And I have to say, it feels damn good to love bicycles this much again–and the whole messy business of selling them, too. On Wednesday, the Cyclocross.com offices received a gift from Hope. Some V-twins are now looking for a drop bar disc brake bike to call home. To say I go way back with Hope would be an understatement. When you can call a company and ask how Mom’s doing, you’ve got some history. Some of the earliest and most complicated bike builds I’ve ever done (including one for my current boss) had Hope brakes–closed system, no less. Only fitting really that the first product we’ll get to test at Cyclocross.com is taking me all the way back to my first years running my own bike shop.

OK, that’s all for the weepy introspection. More snark next week, and hopefully a major announcement from the not-so-secret files of Project Danzig.

Pinteresters

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Jul 122012

I’m pretty sure I hate Pinterest. Yes, I know a bunch of hip programmers are busily trying to make all the fonts on the site even bigger, and realistically, there’s probably a greater chance of monetizing Pinterest than there is a lot of other social media platforms, but Pinterest has been around for a while now, and it’s still all bruschetta and washed out pictures of cars people who don’t know anything about cars think are cool.

But it’s worse than that. In aggregate, the stuff that Pinterest has come to stand for gives me the willies.

I mention this because I set up a Pinterest account for a company last night, and the choices you see above were the first options Pinterest offered for building an interest profile. The remaining choices were:

Prints and Posters
Products
Science and Nature
Sports
Technology
Travel and Places
Weddings and Events

The “Products” category’s icon was a photo of one of those aesthetically repugnant and horribly uncomfortable-looking chairs that’s pretty much a replica of aesthetically repugnant and horribly uncomfortable-looking chairs one found in public libraries in the ’70s. Poorer quality versions of those now apparently sell for upwards of $2000.

The “Sports” category included the obligatory football image, yet here–surrounded as it is by humiliated, little dogs and children dressed in home-made shark costumes–even “football” is somehow disconnected from anything even vaguely football. If you really liked football, you’d be terrified to click this, because you just know it’s going to unleash a bunch of Tim Tebow shit.

My mission involves looking for some cycling-related stuff, and I’ve been down this road before, creating Pinterest accounts for cycling companies. It pretty much always goes the same way. I’d hoped maybe that had changed, but no. Plenty of social media experts could claim I just don’t understand the platform. I’ll admit there’s much I can still learn about social media, if they’re willing to admit they get paid to convince people they need to use Pinterest.

Meanwhile, so I’m trying to make this account. At this point Pinterest has emailed to confirm my email account. I’m already choosing from crappy interest options with overpriced chair icons, but clicking the “verify email” link in the email opens yet another Pinterest tab on my browser, where it proceeds to try to build a profile for me and fails endlessly.

I am not a professional programmer at a hip and heavily trending company, but does it not occur to anyone that letting people go directly on to creating an account in a browser and simultaneously sending them an email about creating the account they’re already using could cause problems? For a while, I let Pinterest #2 struggle to “build a feed,” secretly hoping it would come up with better options than the crap I’d seen so far, but of course it was hopelessly locked in a permafail and just kept refreshing my browser tab to waste resources until I finally put it out of its misery.

So back in the original Pinterest tab with the crappy options, I hold my nose and select “Sports,” “Products,” and “Outdoors” and hit the “Follow People” button.

What I get is indescribably bad.

I’m not even kidding. I refuse to describe the things Pinterest shows me, or even think about them ever again.

My options for vetoing the mighty Pinterest algorithm hell-bent on making all of us soul-less “product-liking” shells is precisely this: nothing.

That’s right. I have to accept these horrible people and their “boards.” And this is where you see the monetization that’s so eluded Facebook already baked into Pinterest. Sure, you can delete all of these wretched collections of crap, but only after seeing them–and for most people, anxious to just start seeing stuff on their screen, some of those curated boards of indescribable garbage will hang around a long time. It’s sort of diabolical, really. Pinterest really, really wants to know what you’re interested in, so that it can show you mostly pale, overly commoditized shadows of those things. It’s raw, unadulterated consumerism, traipsing around in vintage dresses.

Sure, Pinterest is about “discovery” and “sharing,” two things I hate, but it’s also just weird. At its worst Facebook can make you lose faith in humanity, but the dialogues it creates are also genuinely meaningful. I don’t think that’s true of Pinterest.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m warming to it. My soul’s as cumbersome as anybody’s, and I long to just covet photos of speedboats, fancy mustaches and “football” (OK, so one photo I wasn’t able to avoid seeing had a photo of a football player sitting next to a lion–there, I hope you’re happy.) Time to start pinning.

Boss Cog and the Coming Malaise

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Jul 112012

So the 2013 S-Works Enduro is the first brand-spankin’ new bike I’ve seen sporting SRAM’s 1×11 system, and it finally brings some perspective to that cassette–which completely obscures a 160mm rotor. That’s a big gear. In stark contrast to all the haters out there, I think I’m in love with this gearing. And how nice is it that Specialized is putting a custom Cane Creek Double Barrel and an e*thirteen guide on there? I gave them a hard time over the Volagi thing, but credit where credit’s due: spec on that bike shows what I believe we can only describe as “soul.”

And we can use all the soul we can get, given the shitstorm that’s slowly trundling everyone’s way: Lance versus USADA. Based on everything that’s come to light so far, the only thing we’re certain of is that there will be no winners in this. If he’s guilty, everything’s going to suck for a while. If he’s exonerated and deals a body blow to an agency trying to police a clearly skunky sport, it won’t be any better. Short of coming out of retirement to win three more Tours with a Pfizer-developed transparent body chock full o’ internal sensors displaying vitals and chemical balances directly to the web, cycling in general better enjoy this year’s Tour. I’m afraid it’s going to be all downhill after the Pyrenees.

Know When to Run

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Jul 102012

It’s that time of year again. Or one of those times of year (these days there are about 30 of them) when bike companies start leaking photos of their latest and greatest all over the internets. Scott is in it to win it for 2013. Between the new 650b bikes, the battery operated dual shock adjustomatic systems and whatever that is you see up above, these boys have the bases covered.

That’s the 2013 Gambler, as photographed by Bikeradar. It uses what’s arguably the most convoluted single-pivot suspension system ever created, a complex rats’ nest of linkages hovering there in the center of your frame. I’ve kept my mouth pretty well shut while friends have weighed in on the previous Gambler, calling it various forms of abomination and joke. For all I know, that’s the future of all suspension systems, but I do have to think it’d be one of those Bladerunner kind of futures, where it rains a lot and you’re never sure if you’re really human.

In case you’re somehow not getting the full impact of that design–or just can’t count the rockers without a closer shot–Bikerader obliges.

Basically, the swingarm tries to pull that vertical link down and forward, but it’s checked by the horizontal link that does its best to apologize to the shock and convince it to compress instead of just rotating forward. Yes, it is a little Rube Goldberg for my personal taste, but to each his own. Except that the talking points for the 2013, as related in the article include this: “With more focus on providing a World Cup racing chassis, the new frame loses approximately 700 grams over last year’s. It features a relocated main pivot for improved bump absorption, and offers several adjustments that allow you to fine-tune the ride.”

Um, yes. I does appear optimized now. All it took was a little fine tuning, really.

http://youtu.be/FiLCwuc_RaY?t=39s

Perfect.

Danzig DH

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Jul 092012

I’m still finding little piles of sulfur, plastic propellers and random cardboard debris around my house, leftover traces of the ordnance my neighbors put into the sky July 4th. Seriously, the incredible fireworks display I’ve seen, and–like it or not–I was in it. Sort of like waking up and finding your house is a float in the Macy’s Parade. Very odd. This was one of those domestic clean-up weekends, though we still found time to go hike up Beacon Rock. Baden rock starred the ascent, apparently trying for some kind of age record for six-year-olds, while Beckett managed despite a shoe that self-destructed. The dog thought we were all stupid, particularly after realizing there wasn’t anything waiting for us at the top but some chipmunks and turning around and starting the descent.

Speaking of descents, I’ve been keeping Project Danzig under wraps lately–which is surprisingly easy to do when it’s your third job and not yet much of a priority–but this weekend I had occasion to begin testing the system for DH applications. Having designed the suspension originally for longer travel 29ers, I felt pretty confident it could be used to develop a pretty badass DH bike, but you never really know until you try. So far, things look really good.

Those are 26-inch wheels for now. Axle path was my biggest concern, but looks like I have a nice development window of possible options there, and a range of viable pivot locations to fine tune. I think some really positive characteristics could be baked into the instant center on the frame, and they could make its capabilities pretty unique. Still a lot of work to do, but I’m happy to report the initial rough draft passed the maniacal laughter test. It’d be a hell of a lot of fun to build and ride this beast.

My Michelob Commercial

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Jul 062012

The Tour de France is once again upon us. For me, that means many things, but mostly it means those goddamn Michelob Ultra commercials. I have no idea why Michelob so covets the total douchebag demographic, but they certainly are charging hard for it.

As much as I like douchebags golfing on the beach, hiking on rocks in Hawaii and sitting around smiling like douchebags, I’m pretty sure an entirely different demographic is keeping Michelob afloat. Here’s my humble submission for a slightly more appropriate Michelob commercial.

http://youtu.be/PqWPVkwIYB0?t=27s

It’s going to be a busy weekend. Cyclocross.com development is really ramping up, some great new NoTubes products hitting the market, and much is afoot with Project Danzig.

Lanced

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Jul 052012

Based on last night’s celebrations, I’m surprised to find a neighborhood left here this morning. In Washington State, you can basically discharge 50 caliber rounds into 55 gallon drums of nitro glycerin launched from slingshots if you want. It’s a pretty liberal fireworks policy. But America isn’t the only thing smoldering this morning.

Lance may be cooked. Cyclingnews and other outlets are reporting that George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Christian Vande Velde and Dave Zabriskie are all planning to testify against Armstrong.

As has been his preferred method, Armstrong continues to suggest these guys are basically vicious attackers conducting a senseless campaign against him personally, and I see his point: clearly the best thing for all these racers is to lie to incriminate Armstrong, even dropping out of the Olypmics just to land a few low blows. This is, in the estimation of Armstrong’s attorneys, a personal attack.

Would that were the case. It’s very much a public attack, though–and not just against Armstrong, but against cycling. That the Armstrong opera would take place at the same time as the Tour seems weirdly appropriate for a sport that’s slowly devolved into a sad little exercise in disillusionment. How many times can we be made fools of before we start ignoring winners entirely? Eventually, every victory becomes contingent. Every win includes an asterisk. As fans, it’s a miserable situation to find ourselves in, but it’s where we are.

I don’t really care who wins this year’s Tour, assuming we actually have “verified” winner at all. It’s looking like eventually all of these things will be decided over the course of a year or two. I can’t help but be drawn to the quality of the racing, but winners? For the time being at least, there are no winners.

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