Bikes – Page 11 – CanooterValve

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.

McFly

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Jul 032012

You’re looking at the new DeLorean bicycle. Yes, that DeLorean. After the streak of genuinely interesting brand collaboration bicycles that included the mini-moto Audi/Ducati bike and the Aston Martin Factor bike, I’ll admit I’m having a bit of trouble situating the stainless steel DeLorean somewhere on the continuum between “losing all desire to live” and “hey, that’s pretty OK.”

Normally, it’d be a goof-magnet, and at almost $5500, it certainly meets the Decadent Excess criteria, but I’m thrown off by the president of DeLorean, Stephen Wynne’s meta-like realization that he’s being asked to participate in the bullshit fashion world accessorizing of bicycles:

When Wynne was first approached about the idea, he was skeptical. ‘I basically, said, “Yeah, I’m interested, but I don’t want to do a $5,000 bike that’s really a $200 Asian bike with a badge on it,” he says, ‘which you customarily see from other brands.’ Wynne was quickly persuaded, however, that expanding the DeLorean name from four-wheels to two wouldn’t be a shameless, superficial exercise in branding. This is because the bike and the car share a core strand of DNA: the stainless steel body.

‘They said, “No, we want to do a stainless steel bike because stainless steel is the new cool, if you’re into bikes,” he says. ‘It’s sort of taken over from carbon fiber.'”

All this begs the question, “Is it still a shameless and pointless tie-in if you know it’s a shameless and pointless tie-in?”

Or if you believe stainless steel has “sort of taken over from carbon fiber.” Nice as it is, stainless steel certainly won’t be replacing carbon fiber any time soon, but I can just picture the bullshit meeting at which a line like that squeaks out into the room. Besides, everybody knows it’s granite, not stainless steel, that’s taking over from carbon fiber.

Best to ponder that while we move to SRAM’s 1×11 group, which is apparently going to be a reality, based on some near production looking photos popping up at Bicycle Retailer, Bikerumor and Bikeradar.

Remember the impromptu and completely unprofessional poll I took on the 1×11 group, in which the vast majority of readers needed to know the cost, but many others just plain hated all over it? Based on current info. I doubt those original results are going to be overturned. SRAM’s beast of a cassette will, it appears, require a proprietary hub from one of a few wheelset manufacturers (DT Swiss and SRAM are mentioned, but by now we all know Mavic is also fond of longer than currently fashionable cassette bodies, too). So it’s coming, and it’s going to need a new kind of cassette body.

The problem I see here is that if you can’t show a new item with at least some connection to Enve Composites–and preferably sporting the Enve rims–it’s not technically possible for anyone to consider it cool. Here then we encounter the unfriendly intersection between Proprietary Cutting-edge Gadgetry and Artisanal Badassery–at least until somebody somewhere can capture a photo of the igloo-sized Powerdome 11-speed cassette on a wheel sporting an Enve rim.

For what it’s worth, my own wide range cassette idea–zip-tying a 53t chainring directly to my spokes and running it just inside my 34t “large” cog–is unable to be patented due to some extremely narrow-minded thinking on the part of the U.S. Patent Office re. the use of zip-ties as “structural members.”

But they’ll come around eventually.

Virtually Identical

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Jun 292012

I know enough about suspension systems to understand how unbearable life must be for engineers sometimes. Bikerumor posted this info about the new Merida suspension system–the “~~VPP~~, er, uh, VPK” yesterday. Some of you will no doubt realize just from the photo above that this thing’s only similarity to a Santa Cruz VPP bike in that it has a couple short links and two wheels. Other than that, it’s sort of the opposite, which Santa Cruz engineer and dude who makes thinking cool, Joe Graney, took the time to clarify with this comment:

Merida’s VPK suspension uses two short links that rotate in the same direction. This is a similar configuration to DW Link, Maestro, CVT and others. VPP suspension patents and the mechanisms are based on links that rotate in opposite directions. This is the key differentiator that gives VPP the ability to tune shock rates and pedaling behavior independently.

While Merida may have designed a bike that descends with aplomb, their design is not based on VPP, but their marketing angle for their (recently renamed VPK from VPP which is trademarked internationally by Santa Cruz) most definitely is.”

I’ve always found–with no exceptions whatsoever–that reading things written by People Who Know Something tends to always be way more entertaining than reading things written by people who just write. I’m not sure if Joe’s response above is hilarious to everyone, or if a few bike nerd-gencia snorted milk out of our noses at it, but I can tell you that if he’d put “aplomb” in quotation marks, I would literally have spit coffee all over my monitor.

Joe’s a gentleman, though, to have only pointed out the marketing thing. There’s a lot more about this situation that he wisely choose not to get into. I’m neither tactful nor wise, though.

For starters, the marketing thing is offensively bad. You can’t really blame Bikerumor for inferring a connection between a frame that literally has “VPP” stickers on it, and some kind of Santa Cruz connection, if not an actual licensing deal.

I have no idea what the hell Merida was thinking with such a blatant copyright violation. They’re a huge company–is there no one on the payroll in charge of preventing obviously stupid shit from happening? At least they’ve since come up with their own horrible acronym: “Virtual Pivot Kinematics.” That combines the flagrant rip-off of Santa Cruz with an added bullshit word currently enjoying some popularity. Brilliant.

But the copyright issue seems the least of their problems. If this new “VPK” doesn’t infringe on at least one of Dave Weagle’s patents, it’s not for lack of trying. This is, in fact, the same off-the-rack Taiwan suspension system that’s been showing up at Interbike every few years, and finally ended up on a Look full-suspension bike, which might manage to stay off DW’s lawn only because the pivot seems to have been pushed so far back as to lose the benefits of a DW-link entirely.

My salty bitching really comes down to this, though: there’s nothing new or interesting going on here. What we have is a design that was being used for Look (I’d not be shocked to find out Merida builds the Look frames), that Merida re-tooled just enough to make worse. How so? By stranding the upper link’s lower pivot in the middle of nowhere, they’ve forced a whole extra chunk of metal to be added to this thing, just to support that. They’ve also figured out a way to position the shock in the worst of all locations–the one that gives you no water bottle options and requires a stronger, heavier downtube that’s capable of handling the stress of a shock nearly t-boning it.

On paper anyway, that bike is a mess. Which brings me back to my point.

If you’ve turned yourself inside out to engineer a really different suspension system–one that tries to do very specific things–and you see something like “Virtual Pivot Kinematics,” you die a little inside.

Maybe the Merida rides OK. The company certainly supports athletes and wins races in Europe, and more power to them, but to compare the time and energy that went into the Merida suspension system shown there with something like a Santa Cruz just doesn’t seem fair, because I promise their development cycles were completely different.

New Directions

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Jun 282012

It’s pretty hard to write about bicycles while Colorado is on fire. The photos that have surfaced so far are horrifying, and we can only hope for a break in the weather and continued safety for everyone in harm’s way–especially the people fighting the fire. Red Bull athletes aren’t too shabby, but the men and women on the front line of that shit are brave.

Speaking of horrifying photos, have you seen Pinarello’s mountain bike? While I’d hate to be the person in charge of warranty service there, I have to give them credit. In a world of “me-too” cookie cutter carbon fiber 29ers, it takes some serious orgoglio to say, “Screw that, let’s overlap the seatstays and see what happens.”

And why the hell not? I mean other than killing off your demographic, which I’m pretty sure is a marketing mistake. At any rate, they’ll die doing what they loved: riding a $10k mountain bike around on bike paths.

In better news, it looks like Aston Martin is continuing the trend we first saw with Audi’s insane electric bike, and releasing an Aston Martin bicycle that isn’t just another hybrid with a decimal out of place in the price tag.

Don’t get me wrong. They forgot the decimal point entirely in the rumored $40k Aston Martin/Factor One-77 collaboration bike, but at least it’s sufficiently bizarre to warrant a freakish price. I’d thought this was the same Factor chassis Steve Domahidy helped design, but apparently this predates that, so now I’m all confused by Factor. Even their name is a mathematical thing. Intimidating.

I like the bikes, though, and they’re a legitimately different animal, but this isn’t surprising. Aston Martin actually has a bit of a history of getting custom bike collaborations a little closer to “right” than, say, Porsche or Chrysler. They’d previously chosen to work with small frame builders instead of slapping their badge on just anything picked out of a catalog–and they were able to articulate why they made that decision.

Taken together, I think the One-77 and Pinarello Dogma 29er are really positive signs. Sure, the Pinarello scares me to death with seat stays anchored with a stem faceplate badge, but both bikes are legitimately something different, and we need more of that.

http://www.luxurylaunches.com/transport/aston_martin_one77_bicycle_launched.php

Flying Bikes and Electric Brains

Bikes, Gadgets 2 Responses »

Jun 272012

Forget 650b. If you’ve seen the Czech flying bicycle, you know he future of bicycles is all about air travel. Sure, this thing is a catastrophe, but also an enigma. What, for instance, is the Surly connection here? Check out the video and see if you can figure out why this thing has fat bike tires?

Landing gear, I guess.

In other gadget news, Google is officially scaring the hell out of me now. Self-driving cars and googly eyes were one thing, but Lolcat-loving artificial intelligence and electronic brains are just a bit much. Fast Company is reporting that Google has created an artificial brain.

Google’s brain, more or less undirected through a process of repetition, developed a ‘concept’ of human faces and the different parts of a human body from these images, and also a concept of cats. ‘Concept’ here means a fuzzy ill-understood pattern that it could use to categorize a new image it had not seen before, based on its previous learning. The cats concept was a surprise to the researchers, but given the fact that YouTube is a skewed data set, and that we humans do love Lolcats and their like, perhaps it was inevitable.”

Not scared yourself, yet? Check out the human face “concept” of Google’s fake brain.

Starting to look like zombie apocalypse could be our best case scenario.

Carrying a Torch

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Jun 262012

I have no idea what that picture means (I found it on a blog called SentimentalMechanic.com), but I wish Jesus would teach me to weld. If Evel Knievel’s regret was that he never killed anybody (certainly not for lack of trying, if suicide counts), my great regret is that I never learned to weld. Also, that I don’t have my own CNC machines. Not that I have a lot of free time, but if I did, I would love to be a complete menace to the entire neighborhood with Tesla-grade mad scientist hardware in the garage. If I’d learned to weld and machine, at least some version of Project Danzig would already be done.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, when I thought I’d lost my trusty Pivot 429, a frame I’ve had almost as long as I’d been working on my own frame. I love it, but a part of me hoped I’d have a prototype of my own frame by now. For one terrifying moment, I thought I’d lost the 429, and a bunch of years have gone by without a prototype.

I’d run into Wal-Mart to drop off a Redbox movie this weekend–we have no TV right now, so we’re watching recent Nicolas Cage movies and seeing who cracks first. I hadn’t planned on stopping, so my Pivot 429 is on the back of the car, unlocked.

Off I scramble toward the Redbox kiosk inside the store, constantly looking over my shoulder. Still there. Still there. Still there. And then I’m inside the store, at the Redbox machine. I click “Return.” Nothing. Unresponsive. Again. Again nothing. The Redbox machine does not want Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance back, which I understand completely. Still, as the person who paid to watch a Nicolas Cage movie, I feel a Redbox representative should’ve already come to my house to pick it up and apologize. In fact, I’m thinking Nicolas Cage should be personally traveling across the country to check this movie out of every Redbox in America permanently, and Stan Lee should probably be driving the dumptruck.

This is what’s going through my mind when the machine finally, grudgingly, accepts Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance back into its bowels.

And I’m off. Boom, out the Wal-Mart doors and moving across the parking lot toward my unlocked Pivot, which is no longer on the back of my car.

Um.

Oh.

Temporarily, I’m not sure if one continues walking toward the car in this case, turns around, or starts hopping up and down, hands on cheeks, screaming. I go with walking toward the car. And then I notice my car, and my bike. In just the time it took me to return the movie, another white Subaru Outback pulled in only a car away from mine. In the Northwest, only VW vans outnumber Subaru Outbacks.

I’m not good at interpreting dreams–particularly when they happen in broad daylight in a Wal-Mart parking lot and aren’t dreams–but I think I need to find a way to build myself a prototype. So many things are still going on with the patent license, but more than anything, I just want to ride one of these bikes.

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