I think the 3D printed layers of titanium thing Charge is up to is just plain great. I’m also glad Bikerumor posted it, because I would definitely have missed it. Charge makes some pretty cool bikes, but I wouldn’t have expected the next stage of bicycle frame production to happen on their watch.
But this is it.
When I first starting working on a frame design back in 2007, I got to spend some time with an engineer who was developing vehicles for the military. The things she was helping to create were incredible, but the materials she was describing were off the charts. Their fabrication process sounded like carbon fiber, but they were metal. What’s going on in Charge’s video bares a strong resemblance to what she was describing.
Combined with an increasing realization that America has to wake up when it comes to manufacturing, these entirely new ways of creating bike frames are pretty interesting. Will you be manufacturing your own frame with an in-home 3D printer in the next few years? No chance. But things are changing.
It occurred to me today that there might be some shorter distances between points yet on Danzig, and that I just might’ve been a little too conservative with the amount of tubing. If you’re going to have to machine something anyway, I think there’s a real benefit to putting all your pivots onto the same piece. Might change my mind once I see the price tag for machining that section, but here’s the last shot of Danzig’s main triangle for a while. Have to put some more time into the meetings necessary to bring this thing to life.
BikesComments Off on I Heart Customers (Seriously)
Aug162012
I miss customers.
There, I admit it.
Cyclocross.com hasn’t launched yet, but I’ve already exchanged emails with three customers looking for bikes. And I’m not in sales. Whatever it is that’s wrong with me, I really like helping people buy bikes.
Which isn’t to say it’s easy. I’m sitting near our company’s customer service guys these days, and I promise they’re fielding some strange stuff. And yes, the expressions on their faces as they speak to people trying to return year-old tires exactly resembles the positively elated CS agent at the top of this point.
We’re really in the home stretch for the new site launch at this point. Can’t wait.
And lest anyone think I’ve backburnered Danzig, I’ve carved out a good bit of room for the shock placement at this point. I’ve made my bearings enormous here, too. The idea was to create a worst-case scenario in terms of clearances and placement, but now it’s time to look at some actual numbers and see where some material can be shaved. I also think the final upper link design is going to be pretty cool. Uber minimal.
One of the kids busted a 46-inch HD TV over the weekend. No excuses, just pure and absolute bad kid behavior. The remote he threw–ostensibly at his sister out of sheer anger over a channel debate–busted the screen. By the time I got to the TV, it was clear that yes, he had roasted it.
This gave us all pause.
Though I wasn’t in the mood to look up legal precedents, I’m pretty sure Washington State frowns on both child abuse and manslaughter, limiting our available response to talking. And taking all the money he’d saved. And banning him from all video games and most forms of fun until further notice–and of course from TV, which wasn’t hard to do, given that the living room TV now displayed a serious of unappealing vertical lines where a picture used to be.
We aren’t a big TV-watching family. In fact, we’d bought the recently destroyed TV for $200 from the previous owners of our new house. It was the biggest TV we’d ever owned. In fact, it was about twice as big as the biggest TV we’d ever owned. It was nice. We’d watched the Muppet Movie on it. Good times.
Our lives still didn’t revolve around it or anything, but seeing it broken definitely got our attention–particularly once the time of death had been officially called and the cracks were visible. My wife and I were quick to start comparison shopping and scouring the Internet for replacement options. “Not a big TV family” or not, this was the living room TV.
But then we got to thinking. Somehow the last thing we wanted to do was show the kids that things as expensive as TVs–the nicest one we’d had–were just instantly replaceable. There are no magic elves that replace things you’ve destroyed thanks to your own stupidity. Put bluntly, when you screw up to that degree, you go without for a while.
Work on Danzig has been relentless at this point. Lots of refining. The key now is shock clearances and making the most of the space. Things are packed pretty tight around the shock and upper pivot, which is a good thing, but I don’t want to run into any clearance issues once we go to production on the prototypes.
Here’s the spacing situation on the rear shock that I’m obsessed with currently.
I’m all about the upper rocker and shock orientation right now.
BikesComments Off on Magpie Attacks, Stompies and Evolution
Aug102012
I have a great deal of respect for all the things in Australia that can kill you. I have to admit, though, I wouldn’t have guessed even the birds attack you. According to an article on the BrisbaneTimes.com.au, cyclists trying to ride through a place called Manly, near Sydney’s northern beaches, are routinely violently attacked by magpies this time each year.
I’m not sure what to be more impressed with: the fact that even the birds are dangerous in Australia, or that fact that they have towns with names like “Manly.”
Luckily, when the birds finally mount their all-out Hitchcockian assault, we’ll all be traveling in giant robots.
“Stompy” picks up where Kuratas left off, and adds the magic of Kickstarter, which is really how all giant killer robots should be funded.
I’m starting to think building a giant robot might be faster than this latest round of revisions to Danzig. My friend Josh pointed out a potential clearance issue yesterday (and thanks for the shock files!) which got me thinking about some ways to improve all kinds of other details. So here’s the snap shot du jour, but this weekend is going to be a big chance to tackle a bunch of details I want to work out.
According to BoyGeniusReport.com, Woz is predicting cloud computing tragedy as the world slowly realizes they no longer own anything–that they’ve basically ceded ownership of all of their digital stuff.
While I’m sure Woz knows more than most of us, I have to wonder what it was we used to own anyway. Apparently I’ve already drunk the Cloud Kool-Aid, but I can’t think of anything I now store online that would’ve been better confined to a single hard drive. Maybe it’s just that the pace of things has accelerated to the point where nothing we “have” is of any value any more.
“Ownership” has been on my mind since the Danzig patent and the various chaos surrounding patents in the bike industry these days. Intellectual real estate certainly seems to be tightening up in some industries. I’ve been storing backups of all my Solidworks files online, and I still think of those as mine. But even though I’m pretty fond of this suspension system right now–sort of all-consuming–I can still see it as an evolution. What it is right now, isn’t what it’ll be in the future.
I think that’s the weirdest thing about designing something. Whether it’s a little computer code or this bike frame, you have to be completely invested in it. At the same time, you have to realize it’s only a moment in time. Put a little more simply, for me the hardest thing about designing something is stopping.
Case in point: in the process of reshaping the crankcase that houses the lower link, I started to notice a few more things I could do with the lower link. I’ve lowered the pivot locations again, and shortened the link, forcing a reset of the system that I believe–at the other end of a bunch of additional hours–will be better. Here’s where it sat as of last night.
I’m pretty committed to the idea of the even shorter lower link, and I’m liking what it lets me do with everything else. That’s what I’m working on right now.
Uneventful day here at Canootervalve right now while I’m at work on another revision. At least the temperature’s finally breaking some. This past weekend we headed to the coast to escape some freakish triple-digit temperatures in Portland and Vancouver. Everybody else had the same idea, but we finally found a little piece of beach and some 66-degree temperatures. One nice thing about the Pacific Northwest is that you can almost always find a completely different temperature within a 90-minute drive of wherever you are. I’m new to beaches, but I can’t imagine taking a taxi there is particularly common.
The next round of Danzig revisons is all about the “crankcase,” that machined lower pivot housing. Unfortunately, I need some quiet time under the hood on this next phase of that, and won’t have anything to report until the next round of drawings are done. More photos as soon as they’re ready to share.
A little intense, this living bikes 365 right now, but fun. Wake up, ride to work, obsess about cyclocross and e-commerce, ride home, obsess about NoTubes, then put a half hour into frame design. Lots of time to think on the rides back and forth.
Great meeting yesterday about the future of Danzig, too. There are a lot of ideas in the air, and that’s the best part.
The biggest design challenge ahead for prototyping Project Danzig is the piece I’ve dubbed the “crankcase.” It isn’t the busiest pivot location I’ve seen, but I still want this piece to be as clean and simple as possible.
To that end I keep refining this section, and probably always will. This most recent iteration is an attempt to make things even simpler and lighter. When it comes to Solidworks, I’m ten levels below “amateur,” but I’m constantly blown away by how quickly Solidworks lets you create. Here’s the quick 2D redraw of the crankcase.
And just exiting the drawing recreates the extruded 3D piece.
It’s pretty incredible, how quickly revisions can be made to pieces. The question is how streamlined can this piece possibly become. That’s what I’m working on this week.
I’ve lost track of the hours I’ve put into Project Danzig, and probably best I did. But just when you think you’ve designed something pretty cool, a company in Japan comes along and releases giant robot that shoots people when you smile.
Lest that shot past you, let me just clarify that last sentence. One feature of the giant new armed robot being sold by Japanese killer robot makers, Suidobashi Heavy Industry–I mean aside from the fact that you can control it with an iPad–is that it shoots people in the face when you smile. Smiling operates the dual Gatling guns that fire BBs, so the funnier and funnier you find it that you’re using a giant robot to shoot your friend in the face, the more Kuratas shoots him in the face.
What type of insurance does a company like this buy?
Did I mention you can operate it from your smartphone? Of course you can.
Nothing I write about can possibly compare to the promotional video, though. Until you’ve watched an adorable Japanese girl’s demure giggles cause a robot to shoot someone in the face, you’ve never met the 21st Century.
My suspension design, in contrast, might one day make people smile, but that smiling won’t be able to put anyone’s eye out. At least not yet.
Clearly I have a lot of design work to do.
To that end, today we wrap up axle path–or the “versus propulsion” side of it. Here’s the drawing from yesterday.
The red dots mark three key stages of the axle path. If you look at the green vertical line along which the red dots are arranged, you’ll notice the lowest dot–which represents the bike sitting there with no weight on it–begins on the right hand side of the vertical line. As the bike moves up to its sag point, the axle moves to the left of the vertical line. The key is that the axle path continues to move rearward for 10mm of vertical travel beyond the sag point.
The idea is that chain tension continues to counteract the suspension’s movement until you’re 10-15mm beyond the sag point. The sag point is where the suspension stays when you’re riding around. Chain force hinders suspension movement until you’re 10-15mm beyond the sag point. Once you compress the suspension beyond that point chain tension no longer tries to control the suspension.
So that’s the idea. Almost all suspension bikes work this way, so I’ve not created anything unique there. What I did try to do, though, is develop a platform that will allow a huge range of options with all of these points. The system makes it easy to fine tune every aspect of the axle path.
So that’s what we’re going to do.
Responses to my “How much more would you pay for U.S.-made carbon fiber?” question keep coming in, but at this point the clear winner is $250-$500 more. The majority of respondents would pay up to $500 more for a carbon fiber frame if it were made in the U.S. Impossible to say how accurate that admittedly highly unscientific analysis really is, those are the results. I’ll keep an eye on incoming responses, though, because these things can change.
And maybe next week we ask how much more you’d pay for a giant killer robot that was made in the U.S. Makes me smile just thinking about it.
BikesComments Off on Short-listing Adam Craig for a Pulitzer then Back to Axle Paths
Aug022012
That photo’s from Adam Craig’s blog. He just posted about his inaugural Megavalanche race–that insane DH race with an eight-thousand plus foot descent, 350 rider mass start on snow, and genuine chance of dying. A lot of my work involves reading, writing, and patching up code for posts. I end up reading a lot, and Adam’s posts always stand out. You have to like phrases like, “I overtook dozens of people, mostly in a safe manner,” and “a 4m wide ‘road’ made up of fist to lawnmower-sized rocks.” Most professional riders lead incredibly interesting lives, but the ones capable of actually describing those lives are few and far between. Adam’s one of those great riders who can write about it.
Anyway, Danzig: so I’m thinking the best possible scenario for version 1 is this: 29er, 125-130mm of travel, 17.35-inch chainstays.
Version 2? Well, that’s something else entirely.
I suspect the last time I tried to articulate what was going on with the axle path made little to no sense, so I’ve been meaning to double back to that for some more detail. For starters, here’s the general axle path of Danzig:
Here’s that same deal, only zoomed in and with highlights on the sag line (where the suspension should be when the rider’s weight is on the bike) and dots to emphasize the horizontal orientation of the axle relative to that sag line and a hypothetical straight vertical line. I came damn close to using “vis a vis” instead of “relative to,” but I fought it off there.
What the hell’s all that, then? At this point, most of you probably already know, but let’s wrap it up with a final detailed explanation of chain and axle path tomorrow.
How great was Marianne Vos’s Olympic Gold? First Wiggins hauls some major sideburn action into Paris and then Vos takes a brutal-looking rain-soaked women’s race in–if I’m not mistaken–a skinsuit. It was tough to explain to the kids why I was waving a cowbell at the TV.
It’s been one hell of a busy few weeks. The 2013 NoTubes catalog looks to finally be ready to head to print. I’d written parts of that all across the country, including a Holiday Inn laundry room. Cyclocross.com, on the other hand, is just kicking into high gear in anticipation of a launch date that already can’t happen fast enough. It’s all been sufficiently panic-inducing to pull a guy off his pet personal project, which by necessity has to get whatever time I have left at the end of the day start of the next day.
Still, I was able to do a little reworking during my last round of PF30 conversion revisions. I wondered how short I could possible get the chainstays.
Now, there are a million and a half ways to cheat on chainstay length. My favorite is probably cranking up the bottom bracket height, but in Danzig’s case, that wasn’t an option. So the question becomes: how short can I get those chainstays for a bike with 29-inch wheels, a 12.77-inch bottom bracket height (can always go higher, but that’s as low as I’d go) and (let’s just figure) 130mm of travel. With some adjustments I went ahead and made, looks like Danzig might be able to drop chainstay length down below 17.4-inches.
That’s pretty short. It’s not a done deal, yet, but it’s close enough for me to say that’s now my target.
