28 Jul 2010

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Posted by warwick @ 5:26 am

25 Jul 2010

Honestly, I don’t understand mainstream bicycle manufacturers. Almost every road bike we’ve ever done, the customer has shown us his current bike and the seat has been slammed all the way back on it’s rails, and yet manufacturers still think a 73 degree seat angle is still a good mean.

This is Cadel Evan and George Hincapies bikes, courtesy of the journalistic geniuses at cyclingnews.com (btw fellas, these aren’t the same frame). See the saddles? Slammed all the way back on the most layback seatpost I’ve ever seen.

Now with tube based designs, there is a limit obviously to how far you can layback the seat tube angle, and how short you can have the stays, before the tyre crashes into the seat tube, but with carbon? No such excuse.

And the short chainstay myth? With any given material, through wall thickness and shape optimisation, you can make any length chainstay as stiff or as flexible as you like. Length has almost no bearing on stiffness, so any designer really can create any length chainstay they like and still have it stiff.

All this boils down to then is simply the inertia of a paradigm devoid of meaning, from companies that are so scared to do the right thing that they will only be as different from one another as they dare.  In the process, they bring along the baggage of a time when bicycle design is more about cost optimisation than anything meaningful like real world ergonomics and individuality.

So thanks BMC and all you other Tupperware manufacturers for keeping this nice point of differentiation between yourselves and us custom guys. It makes the job just that little bit more rewarding.

Posted by warwick @ 1:12 am

04 Jul 2010

With alarming re-occurrences of shorter and shorter intervals, there seems to be always some sort of bike industry related retardedness that I have to prevent from crushing my soul. Whether it’s the parochial attitudes of parts wholesalers, the incessant retroism of the custom crowd, or the repeated denigration of design as an important part of creating custom bicycles (?), there’s always something to keep me amused, shocked, or running to the toilet.

About a month ago, I posted a fairly inane comment regarding a frame with ‘faux’ truss forks, putting forth a fairly benign challenge for anyone to come up with some engineering backing up the design.

This is a Pereira, but it could easily have been a Mclung, or half a dozen other builders paying ‘homage’ to the design. I commented -

Find me a structural engineer that will concur that those struts to anything whatsoever and I’ll eat a kangaroo.

And then came the comments from the peanut gallery. It’s tone is akin to chiming into a Christian forum and proclaiming “What proof do you have?” (Names have been deleted so I don’t get emails along the lines of “how dare you repeat my public comments” or something equally absurd. Except my own because whatever I say online is exactly what I’d say in reality).

Thylacine Cycles said:
Find me a structural engineer that will concur that those struts to anything whatsoever and I’ll eat a kangaroo.

What A Pear said:
Warwick,
I’m pretty sure that any structural engineer would concur that they do something. I have nothing but experience to believe that those forks wouldn’t hold up without them. I’ve raced my own version of this bike at 24 hours of Moab (a rocky and punishing course) and ridden it all over Oregon for a few years. I can’t imagine that the fork would have held up to such use without the struts. But, then again, I’m not an engineer. I’ll have to ask one.

Fanboi001 said:
Über-cool, as always!!!

Denouncing Engineer said:
I have a degree in mechanical engineering XXXX. They do something, but I would trust your real world experience over my text books…they don’t call it a B.S. for nothing! Fucking hot bike bro.

Oblivious said:
All I can say is……WOW, that’s beautiful!

BigGob said:
I wonder if Kangaroo tastes anything like Crow?

Spewhi said:
Crow/Kangaroo… Both probably taste like your foot. I’ve been lucky enough to have the second Roaring 29er that Tony Built. Essentially, it’s the been my “go to” bike for the past year and a half. While I won’t say anything about the fork specifically I will say that mine is the best riding rigid mountain bike I’ve ever thrown a leg over. The ride qualities of the frame (geometry, mat …

Thylacine Cycles said:
Yeah, I’m eating crow with all the wonderful counter arguments such as “I wouldn’t trust my ME textbooks”, “I won’t say anything about the fork specifically”.

What A Pair said:
Warwick,
Reviving this after two months? What’s the point? Truly it really doesn’t matter whether they do anything or not. People like the way it looks and the way it rides. What else matters? You got a bone to pick?

Actually yeah, I do.

Firstly, I’m questioning the validity of the design. Despite the exchange and despite the fact that Pereira did not come up with the design, nothing was put forward to change my hypothesis.

Secondly, I did not attack Tony, yet the fanbois are very quick to jump to his defence. I’m sure he’s a grown-up and I hope that like any professional, he’s mature enough to accept some questioning regarding design. It happens in every other sector of the design community, but more often than not, people can’t tell the difference between a ‘personal attack’, and a ‘call for debate’.

Thirdly - and almost most absurdly - one poster reportedly with a degree in ME is espousing ignoring any engineering!  That’s kinda like a doctor letting the patient treat themselves. “Just go with your gut feeling!  I’d trust that over my 7 years in school anyday!”

The pearler was left for last. Apparently, if you question a design, and then someone supposedly to be qualified to assess said design says “Just ignore the facts” apparently that’s a big win for the originator of the design! It’s like being forced to watch an American teen movie and everyone is high-fiveing eachother because someone farted.

Of course I have to put this disclaimer in because that’s the atmosphere of the custom bike industry. I’ll say this once, so if you don’t get it, read this next part 10 times so it sinks in :

None of this is an attack on Pereira, it’s an call to arms to question aspects of bike design that really need it. At no stage did I attack him personally, I simply asked for a critique of the mechanical aspects of the design. THAT IS ALL.

And now my critique of the fork design. In case you’re as bored reading as I am of typing, it doesn’t do anything worthwhile short of look like something that was made 100 years ago. Even a five year old could be shown what a truss is and how it works, and this fork design is not a truss. There’s no question that it would add to the ‘feel’ of the fork, but any strength addition….I’d like to see the sums. Nobody has been forthcoming as of yet, but naturally I’m very open to constructive assessments of any interesting designs such as this that people seem to take for granted because “it’s retro cool”. Including my own. Tony mentioned that he believes that without the struts the fork would’ve broken, but the forks are not dissimilar to what was being ridden 20 years ago and there wasn’t much issues then; not to mention the increases in tubing and casting technology today etc.. Has he taken them off and repeated the process of ’seat of the pants’ testing to back up his ‘beliefs’? Has Mclung? Has anyone else?

Not to my knowledge, and that’s the point.

To my Industrial Design brain where for years we were taught to be self critical, to critique ours and eachothers worth minus the ego, I’m always surprised at peoples’ defensiveness. I don’t really see where the personal attack is and I’m surprised when people take it that way. If something is done on a bike ‘because it looks cool’, then that’s great, but I can’t advocate the attaching of some performance gain because of ‘a belief’.

My philosophy when it comes to what I put into Thylacine Cycles is fairly function based. I really like retro-styled bikes (including the frame and forks above, they’re gorgeous), but I can’t stress enough how much the unwaivering, unquestioning mentality of some people grates with me. This kind of dialogue is the exact same thing that people who questioned the fact that “hey, maybe the earth isn’t flat”, or, “L. Ron Hubbard is the next coming and we must give him lots of money” would’ve had. I can’t abide that, and in the bike industry which appears largely built on bullshit, smoke, and mirrors, I think it’s really important that we engage in some sort of real and positive questioning of what’s going on. It happens in every other part of our lives, so why not our bikes?

*edit* If you want to know what a real truss fork looks like, the only one doing it even vaguely properly is Jeff Jones. I contacted him recently and he does actually have plans for a steel version of his fork, which would be one to look out for.

ps: I had kangaroo for lunch today. It was tasty.

Posted by warwick @ 7:27 am