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Not particularly, just making sure people are aware of what the No-Fork project is and what it isn't.
col has been fixed's comment amounted to:
No-Fork project has circular wheels
Circular wheels are a good thing
Therefore, No-Fork project is a good thing -
That advantage has already been exploited by many previous single-sided designs without recourse to canting the wheels....
Since riders can already handle this issue when riding on cambered surfaces....
You are lost in your spagetti of fiddled arguments and keep on contradicting yourself time and again.
Get your act together.
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Not particularly, just making sure people are aware of what the No-Fork project is and what it isn't.
So what is it that you are showing us that we humble people cannot see for ourselfs?
col has been fixed's comment amounted to:
No-Fork project has singlesided wheels
Singlesided wheels are a good thing
Therefore, No-Fork project is a good thingftfy
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Get your act together.
I should refrain from engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man, but I will ask you once again:
What is the novel feature of your bicycle?
What advantage does this feature confer in comparison with prior art? -
ftfy
You could have used that pointless (indeed moronic) response by substituting any of the following in place of "circular wheels"
1: handlebars
2: chain drive
3: tubular frame elements
4: pneumatic tyresetc.
The point is not what you have derived from prior art which is already known to be a good thing, but what novel feature you have added which solves some problem with the existing state of the art designs.
If you don't understand this, you are wasting your time and money with the patent application.
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I still think this project is awesome, the fun-factor of this thread on the other hand...
What would really interest me are some practical experiments, like putting some drop-bars on it and letting an experienced rider go at it on the velodrome. I'm curious about the difference someone with years of riding a 'Yes-Fork' around the track will encounter.
Or we could just talk some more. -
A good guide in engineering is that you shouldnt make thing more complicated then necessary.
In bicycledesign the constructions around the front and rear wheel have always looked unnecessary complicated, and in the desire to simplify that construction the singlesided suspension of the wheels has a certain attractiveness to it. The numerous attempts to achieve simple constructions with singlesided suspension endorse that I think. The problem with singlesided suspension until now has been that the construction still needed to guided around the wheel itself, still compromising the simplicity of the construction, because it requires bends and joints.
The novelty of the No-Fork is that it has its wheels in an angle to the frame, removing the necessity for the forks to be constructed around the wheels, allowing for the most simple construction: a single straight tube. Cant get any simpler then that.
But, as is often the case with innovation, there is an old generation that has grown satisfied with the limitations of historical engineering... often it is also hard to discuss with these people, so we might better leave them to it. They will conform later on... for now we can probably satisfy them best with ancient engineering...
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OK I've read most of this very entertaining thread and learned a fair bit about bicycle engineering in the process (I've realised I was talking very inaccurately about shaft v. chain drive to a motorcycling friend recently).
I'm convinced by No-fork and I think the bike looks really cool and seems to work perfectly well enough for most people's cycling needs i.e. getting from A to B.
This does seem like the exact kind of debate which should be settled with a duel/ race.
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In bicycledesign the constructions around the front and rear wheel have always looked unnecessary complicated
As in all engineering, the structure is a matter of compromise. The conventional fork with multiple separate parts welded together does seem to be complex to manufacture, but a cheap and nasty unicrown has only 3 parts* and two welds (fork ends are just the blade tube squashed flat), where the No-Fork has at least 2 parts and one weld (the leg and the tube at the base to take the axle), so in terms of simplifying manufacture, you have little if any advantage. At each step of design, tooling, component manufacture, assembly and finishing, we can argue back and forth over the points of difference and the costs incurred, but the market has already made the final calculation - conventional frames are very cheap to mass produce, and allow for cheap components (hubs, brakes, drivetrain) to complete the bicycle. I am sometimes surprised by the choices made on BSOs, but every part, and its effect on the final assembled article, will have been analysed to the last cent. Many alternative forms of bicycle frame exist in the prior art, yet we keep building diamonds with two pairs of stays and two fork blades where economy of manufacture is of high concern. The only place where this is not the case is in the structural replacement of the top tube with a much larger down tube in some step-through designs.
Where the conventional fork scores is in economy of material - supporting the wheel on both sides allows the axle to form part of the overall fork structure, so the desired mechanical properties are achieved with less metal. Taking your example of the Eiffel Tower, it would have been a much simpler structure if it were just a single conical tube, but it would have used such a vast amount of material that the huge expense of manufacturing and assembling the thousands of beam elements in the actual structure ends up being cheaper. In other words, the conventional design is not unnecessarily complicated, it is exactly as complicated as it needs to be, no more and no less.
All of which is irrelevant - your project does not introduce us for the first time to single sided forks and stays, so whatever claims there are for such things are a matter for the many previous implementations, which go back almost as far as the two sided structure. If your patent is to succeed, your claim must lie in the matter of inclining the wheel axles. You must demonstrate that it hasn't been done before (novelty test), that it solves a problem which exists in the conventional designs (objective technical problem test), and that any competent bicycle engineer would not have come to the same solution to the problem (non-obviousness test).
The objective technical problem test is where you are consistently evasive. Since your decision to incline the wheel axles seems to be the only source of a problem (i.e. it doesn't even exist until you came along), the problem/solution question seems to come down to this:
Problem: How would one construct a bicycle which handled like a convention design, presuming that the wheel axles were inclined
Solution: Adjust the steering geometry to neutralise camber-steer
I think the solution fails the non-obviousness test, since any competent bicycle engineer would have come to the same solution when presented with the stated problem (it is not necessary, in patent law, to conclude that any competent bicycle engineer would never have created the problem in the first place :-) )*Some primitive forks are even made in just 2 parts, with both blades formed by a single U-shaped component
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Funny how you never respond to the way your arguments have been addressed, but that you always come up with new objections, or past objections that have been refuted..... the simplicity of a construction need not be cost effective. And you will appeciate that were the bicycle industry used to produce No-Fork bicycles and that someone who came along and suggest to make forked bicycles you would have laughed at the same way. Going on about how multiple part forks would inherently be weaker, and not cost effective... ie. your arguments amount to nothing. but we already knew that.
I wouldnt worry too much about the patentability... and i'll spend my money the way I like, just like you do. And there will be people questioning that too, wont there.
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As I said earlier, this is a battle of wits in which one side is unarmed. I trust to the audience to decide which.
You have not refuted any of my objections - at best, you have dismissed them as not relevant to a clown's bike. That I am prepared to accept. I am also happy to let you waste your time and money on a pointless patent application - you are not the first, and won't be the last, to do this. There are worse ways to go bankrupt, and the diversion of your talent to this end doesn't seem like a great loss to humanity.
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Is it possible to order a giraffe according to the latest cost effective fashion?
yeah sure man, glad you asked. not had my patents through yet but i'm really getting into this design hacking gig-this lazy four legged fucker is now running around like Usain Bolt. And I got to keep the spare limbs for an interesting conversation piece in my lounge too, win.
Hope you like it
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No-Fork project, bicycle geometry hacked
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bad day at work again?