New Normals

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Sep 192012
 

So there’s your Krampus photo. Definitely one of the most fun bikes I’ve ever ridden. Ever.

Today, I got to catch up with friends and ride everything from a Pinarello Dogma with Campy EPS to a Santa Cruz Tallboy LT. Hit a whole new trail with Tallboy that made a hell of a lot of sandy climbing worthwhile.

I started the day off on the Pivot Mach 429 Carbon, which was a serious mistake for an owner of a perfectly good aluminum Mach 429 to make. Of all the 29ers I’ve ridden at the show this year, the head tube angle of the 429 just always feels perfect.

I also noticed that all of these bikes pedal great now. The 429, the Yeti and the Tallboy LT all climbed without any discernible bob. Such a great group of bikes out there right now. Efficiency really has finally arrived.

Disc brakes on everything has just about arrived, too. I finally rode a Volagi Liscio, a bike I’ve wanted to try out for a long time now. I was happy to find one at TRP, who’ve contractually obligated me to mention the new Parabox is redesigned and features (among other things) a mounting clamp/headset spacer that’s now only 5mm high (down from 14mm). The Volagi had room to spare with 25mm tires, and accelerated well for a bike built around all-day comfort and sporting hydraulic discs. Really enjoyed this bike.

Big day tomorrow. Meetings and such.

Krampus, Switch Suspension and Partaking of Surly Meat

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Sep 182012
 

And you thought dual-wheel-drive bikes needed to be complicated.

Highlights of my day (other than seeing that thing and getting a big hug from Maurice from Dirt Rag) included riding a Surly Krampus. Apparently I was so busy grinning and partaking of a sandwich being passed around the Surly tent like a peace bike that I forgot to take a photo. And yes, sharing a sandwich with the guys from Surly is a little like Russian roulette, but in a good way. If I survive the night, I’ll get some photos tomorrow.

Suffice to say, the Krampus is a hell of a lot of fun to ride and has not only “vertical compliance,” but “horizontal squirmy tire compliance,” which means you pretty much just ride and rock crawl over everything stupid enough to ride up before you. Glorious.

I also spent some time on Yeti’s Switch system. I’ve been hoping to ride this design for quite some time–ever since I noticed how similar it was to my own system–so I was a pretty anxious to get some miles on a Switch system bike. It didn’t disappoint. In fact, it was amazingly good. So good that I came away more fired up than ever to see Danzig come to life.

Most of the rest of my day was spent trying to avoid pinch flats while riding ‘cross bikes on the trails. Good times. More tomorrow.

Going Vertical and Krampus Worship

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Jul 232012
 

Bike build area in the new house is starting to come together. Still plenty of work to go around, but I managed to make some progress this weekend. Also found some time to build a new upper link for the vertical shock placement on Project Danzig.

Last week I tried to explain what I was thinking in the development of Danzig’s instant center, which starts right at the intersection of the chain and middle ring and travels largely backward, along the path of the chain.

There’s also a set of reasons that went into the axle path and the final shock orientation of the frame. After endless hours trying to model exactly what I wanted out of the rear axle, I finally dialed it in using a few simple pieces of paper. In locating the instant center primarily behind the center of the bottom bracket, the swingarm rotates almost on its own center. This allows some pretty interesting shock placement options, but my favorite is the vertical shock. Because the swingarm nearly pivots on its own center, the upper link can drive the shock straight down. I hope to be able to redraw some of this over the coming weeks, but what I like about it is the inherent simplicity. Really short links mean less weight, but also economy of motion. Economy of motion was something I really hoped to build into the design. The vertical shock orientation also means the bottom of the shock anchors right beside the bottom bracket, an inherently strong area.

Really, it’ll take the prototype to see how all of this works out, but I suspect developing anything like this is a matter of balancing all the things you want, and I was really happy with the way all the characteristics seemed to work together on the design. The pivot placement that kept the instant center where I wanted it also led to the axle path; the axle path led to the economical upper link and shock motion and location.

Times like this I wish I were a much faster Solidworks user, instead of a self-taught hack. I’d love to be able to redraw Danzig from the ground up at this point, and I guess that’s what I’m doing while we work to put everything else in place.

In the meantime, I’ve been more than a little unhealthily fixated on Surly’s Krampus.

And how great that the first decent Krampus sightings seem to’ve come from Tae’s blog. (A finer gentleman, you will not find.)

Krampus is so much more than just a 29er with 3-inch wide tires. It’s a reassertion of Surly’s dominance in the realm of blowing minds. Once again, Surly has made the world a little better.