
Interesting concept bicycle design by Bradford Waugh - elptacek
http://www.behance.net/gallery/bike/111883
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jdietrich
Dear design students:

The standard upright bicycle has looked almost exactly the same for over a
century, for very good reason. The basic diamond-frame design is very close to
perfect. A derailed-chain drivetrain can exceed 98% efficiency, is cheap to
build and is trivially easy to repair and maintain. I love folders, I love
recumbents, I love full-sus mountain bikes, but for 99% of riders and 99% of
journeys, precious little has changed since the baby boom.

There have been four meaningful breakthroughs in bicycle design in the last
fifty or so years. Shimano's indexed derailer gears, Rohloff's SpeedHub, Mike
Burrows' Compact Geometry and Andrew Ritchie's Brompton Bicycle. All of them
were painstaking developments that took years of work. Burrows' Compact
Geometry is a change as trivial as sloping the top tube on a standard frame,
but it took years to get right.

I see dozens of these bicycle design concepts every year and every single one
I have seen has been absolutely terrible. In the case of this design, the
wheels would be so lacking in lateral stiffness as to make the bicycle
frightening to ride and the epicyclic rear wheel would be lucky to go ten
miles before self-destructing on road debris. Won't work, never will work,
never should have been committed to paper.

The designer had seemingly no interest in the century of development behind
the modern bicycle and no inclination to investigate why the status quo is as
it is. He bumbled in and designed something cool-looking but useless, because
he obviously has no interest in such trivia as the laws of physics.
Personally, I think that these bicycle concepts embody the antithesis of good
design - a useless, style-led attitude that rarely leads to anything but last
year's model wearing this year's tailfins.

If you want to design table lamps and dribbly teapots, keep churning out this
hogwash. If you want to change the world, start designing with your brain, not
your felt tip pens. The world is full of vital, urgent, life-or-death design
problems, but they need substance, not style.

~~~
elptacek
I can't tell if you're saying that bicycle design is a 'solved problem' or if
everything that can be invented has already been invented. Either one is a
perfectly valid excuse for not looking at anything in an entirely different
way, I suppose. People thought that fire solved all their energy needs for
thousands of years, right?

Though the seat does look a little far off the center of gravity to me.

~~~
beoba
I think he's saying that the designer should've started off with understanding
_why_ the components of the modern bicycle exist in their current form, in
order to more effectively find ways to truly improve them.

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beoba
Not sure how the rear wheel won't be getting sheared off. Same with those
cranks -- a single bolt like that for each arm looks like it wouldn't be tight
enough. And that bottom bracket doesn't look terribly serviceable.

Where's the front brake?

What happens when a sideways pressure is applied to either wheel?

How much weight will end up being added to the frame and wheels in order to
keep them stiff? Removing tubes from the normal diamond frame design mean you
need to make up for the support they provided elsewhere.

~~~
awakeasleep
Some group of students actually built a bike similar to this and posted it on
Reddit in 2009 or so.

What I never understand is how people imagine the drive on the rear wheel.
You'd need an impossible gearbox to spin the gear that interfaces with the
rim, and even that gear would need to spin like 10 times for every revolution
of the wheel.

To me, that kills the fantasy so thoroughly that it isn't even fun to look at
a picture of the device and imagine it in perfect world scenarios.

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nazgulnarsil
hubless wheels are _stupid_.

~~~
SMrF
Why? No chain is a pretty nice feature. I think a lot of casual commuters
would be willing to accept quite a bit of downside to get their hands on a
chainless bike (that isn't a penny-farthing or a unicycle).

~~~
jrockway
What problems do people have with chains? They're dirty? Well, yeah, you have
to keep them clean or put them in a chaincase. They break? Never happened to
me, but keep a $5 chaintool in your bag and you can remove the faulty link
more quickly than you can fix a flat tire. The gearing doesn't work? Don't
ride a geared bike if you don't know how to shift, and don't ride a racing
bike when you're commuting. Get an internally geared bike and you will never
have gearing problems again.

The chain is one of the least problematic of any bicycle part. But then again,
there aren't really any problematic parts on bikes, which is why people like
them so much.

Also, the reason why a hubless wheel is stupid is because there is nothing
keeping the wheel round. The hub and spokes on your wheel are not there to
look good, they are there to give the wheel strength. A metal rim like the one
in the article will be bent unusably seconds after someone mounts the bike. A
carbon fiber rim will just break explosively the first time you go over a
bump.

Anyway, what I've learned from this article is that people associate all the
problems they've ever had with bikes with the traditional design, and want a
non-traditional bike because they think it won't have problems. The actual
solution is to get a traditional bike that's setup for actual use instead of
racing. Racing bikes are not fun to ride to work. Commuting bikes are.

~~~
sliverstorm
Chains have very real problems and frustrations that crop up often- when used
on motorcycles. When it comes to bicycles though, I suspect it is the other
problem with chains that drives people;

They aren't pretty, symmetric, or aesthetically pleasing. Strangely, this is
apparently a _very_ serious problem for many people.

Note: All the problems with a motorcycle chain apply to a bicycle chain, but
motorcycles travel massively greater distances, at higher rates of speed,
through tougher environments, while transmitting anywhere from 20-400x as much
power as a bicycle chain.

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egypturnash
I just look at this and hear a loud SNAP as the whole thing falls apart when
you sit on it.

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wallflower
Evolution of the venerable Slingshot MTB and not necessarily one that will
survive

<http://www.slingshotbikes.com/>

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sliverstorm
My favorite part is wondering how exactly the front wheel is supposed to
support any weight. Besides the part where the hoop will buckle from the
weight being applied at the top-dead-center, how exactly is the force
transfered!?

Not to mention the rake looks too small (aka zero), and the axis of rotation
of the handlebars is not centered with the actual axis of rotation of the
front end. That will be fun to pilot.

