Concept Bikes & Bike Innovation - for better or worse

I wonder if it will ever change

The main things holding back change are economics and sporting regulations. If there was a cheaper way to join all the bits of bike together in the desired arrangement and with adequate stiffness and strength, somebody would be doing it and making a killing. If there was a way of doing it which made cyclists faster, the UCI would ban it :-)

That's why I find it so fascinating. This ad dates from the 1902s I believe:

It's what basically half this forum is riding right now, over a century later! The bicycle really is an amazing piece of technology.

This 1890 Irwell has 11 tubes laid out exactly as we now know them

It also has a sloping toptube!

This one even has a curved seattube.

Which thread is this again? ;)

Just came across this Scott Robertson vid, explaining how to design around given hard points

Heh, fun video, this is the super-slick side of industrial design that makes up about 5% of my job... the other 95% is trying to prototype them...

Which thread is this again?

The "nothing new under the sun" thread :-)

Simple inflation adjustment makes £17 in 1890 about £2k now, although taking account of the faster growth in wages, that Irwell would have cost today's worker more like £8k if we hadn't got better at making bicycles in the last 125 years. If there's a miracle, it's not that the layout of the bicycle frame had pretty much been nailed within 5 years of Starley's first Safety, but that what once took 4 months of an average workers wage can now be paid for with a day's labour.

what once took 4 months of an average workers wage can now be paid for with a day's labour.

I doubt if one would sell a 1890s Irwell today, a day's labour would be enough to pay for it!

Interesting (bike) history lessons, however I'll stop continuing to talk off topic now.

I doubt if one would sell a 1890s Irwell today

It would certainly struggle in today's market against the likes of the BTwin Kemmel, which is an objectively superior bike at approximately 1% of the cost in terms of hours worked to earn enough to buy one. Putting it another way, the cost of the Irwell is almost exactly the same as the new Cervelo C5 with 9070 Di2 which people are complaining is too expensive to be used on the quality of road which was the universal norm in 1890 :-)

It's not off topic - the pricing of bicycles is an "Innovation - for better"

I mean it would go for a lot of money because it's so old and rare nowadays, right?

The last thing I want my bike to be is electric.
The last thing I want my bike to do is fold.
But I suppose some people might want these things.

I thought you above all would have liked some sort of Kers applied to brakes and drivetrain ;)

KERS is an interesting idea but with most bikes being ridden in flat cities and at low speeds.... it's not viable against the extra weight and added complexity.

Hilly terrain and higher speeds, then we're talking.

Hilly terrain and higher speeds, then we're talking

I want KERS for riding H25/2, F11/10 and HCC175 :-)

Shouldn't be too hard to implement with a small flywheel in a coaster rear brake.
Just for the sprints

http://thatsflawesome.com/2013/06/13/lumigrids/

New light Steel, lighter and cheaper than titanium

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/scientists-develop-steel-alloy-as-good-as-titanium-only-cheaper/018859

Steel is real.

Wait, is that the good Korea or bad Korea?

South is good? No?
West is best though (now)

"the bicycle industry would surely benefit from such a material"

Nope. We already have high strength steels, certainly strong enough that you run out of stiffness long before you run out of strength. I can't think of a single place on a bicycle where the strength of steel is the limiting factor.

^ this is all conjecture since none of us knows any of the specific properties of the new steel, but the Nature paper mentions improvements to the specific strength (i.e. the yield-strength to weight ratio) of the material, which is important.

As a material, aluminium is significantly less stiff than steel. But its specific strength is far greater. This means you can build a thicker-walled aluminium tube at the same weight as a normal thin-walled steel tube. The result is a stiffer tube - and if you oversize the tube, taking advantage of the thicker wall, you can have a tube that's both lighter and stiffer.

So if the new steel has a greater specific strength whilst retaining similar Young's modulus (stiffness) to cromo or other common bicycle steels, we could get stiffer or lighter frames (or both, if oversized), and potentially cheaper than Ti.

Not to take umbrage at your comment regarding limiting factors, but it depends entirely on what you mean by strength (yield, ultimate, tensile, compression, fracture, creep? The list goes on!), and also what you mean by 'limiting factor' in the first place (stiffness, weight, durability?). For example if someone invents a steel with a greater yield strength, our chains could be thinner and lighter for the same performance characteristics, but consequently could be less durable - so which is the limiting factor, weight or durability?

So if the new steel has a greater specific strength whilst retaining similar Young's modulus (stiffness) to cromo or other common bicycle steels, we could get stiffer or lighter frames (or both, if oversized), and potentially cheaper than Ti.

How oversized do you want to go? Reynolds already make a 34.9mm 953 tube with walls just 0.4mm thick. If you push too far in that direction (ratio of diameter to wall thickness), you get something which has to be handled with care to avoid dents.

"Cheaper than Ti" is setting a pretty low bar, and if money is the problem then both aluminium and carbon fibre already easily win.

if someone invents a steel with a greater yield strength, our chains could be thinner and lighter for the same performance characteristics

I'm not sure that yield strength is the limiting factor for chains even after you have accepted faster wear from thinning the components. At some point, elastic extension under load will make the rollers start to ride further up the tooth flank, and the loss of efficiency will probably outweigh any gains from having the chain a few grams lighter. A chain which is 2% longer thanks to elastic deformation should be as inefficient as one which is 2% longer thanks to worn pin holes, I think :-)

On 39/23 gearing at 500W input and 80rpm, chain tension is about 750N. Not sure how strong road chains are, but if they are only half as strong as track chains then 5000N should be the minimum breaking load. Using some quick and dirty assumptions, we're probably running our chains at no more than 0.5% elastic elongation. If your miracle steel allowed you to halve the thickness of the plates, you'd save no more than 100g and you'd be running at up to 1% elastic elongation. That doesn't seem like much of a bargain to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqq68x8WMBo

Is that any different from Recon's version? Theirs has been around a while now.
http://www.bicycling.com/bikes-gear/previews/heads-display-coming-cycling-sunglasses

@mdcc_tester and @lae

Flash Bainite?
http://www.gizmag.com/flash-bainite-automotive-testing/40774/

Stronger than Ti by weight and still ductile.

Box section stamped out frames - if light enough would be strong and cheap, maybe not for racing cycles but I imagine useful in a DH mountain bike or cargo bike.

Box section stamped out frames

No real need for that, it can be made in conventional tubes and is obviously easy to weld if car companies are interested. If it allowed mild steel to replace low alloy steels like 4130 in low cost fixie bieks and MTBs, I could see it being useful as a way to further cut costs, but in the high-end steel and Ti markets, people are buying jewellery, not performance, so I can't see Pegoretti or Moots taking it up even if it objectively outperforms what they are currently using on every measure.