No-Fork project, bicycle geometry hacked

Gravity-only use, knee-crippling leg positioning and lack of brakes aside - not actually the worst looking concept bike I've seen.

No worries, its got coasterbrake

The blue bike has slightly more camber on the rear wheel then the front, main reason for that to get the ground patch right underneath the rider. Alignment is much more critical for the rear wheel.

Would one need to rotate their tyres to get even ware then?

adopted by all the major manufacturers

The goal is simplifying and having fun tinkering with geometry

I wonder whether a lo-pro geo (and smaller front wheel)

A smaller wheel would be fun to try! The stem makes that perfectly feasible! The bottom bracket would drop though..

Would one need to rotate their tyres to get even ware then?

Yess Ive done that on the blue bike :) The single sided suspension made it much easier to do ;)

I've not seen much that comes near this level of perfect simplicity in a while. Makes so much sense. As a human I have a hard time with the flagrant asymmetry, but once I abandon that sentiment the idea is palatable.

Love you comment!
"Flagrant" is probably the best word right after "scary" :))

As a layman I have looked at the videos it appears to be rideable but I can envisage a problem with run-of-the-mill, current tyre tread/construction. Tyres are designed in such a way as to provide an optimum contact patch for upright riding and cornering. Also tyre pressures are crucial to maintaining consistency in the tyre's known characteristics so when you ride a motorcycle or bicycle you can tell when your tyres aren't right. This canted wheel design is already riding on a portion of the tyre which would see infrequent use on a "normal" bike. So the left side of the tyre would heat up compared to the right side as it is, in a way, always cornering even when going straight. Then if you were to turn or lean left and increase the camber you would lose even more of the contact patch. I think the differing contact patches of the tyre would make cornering left and right feel very different especially as wear and pressures change. I believe it would probably steer in left and be inclined (no pun intended) to drop whereas turning leaning right would probably want to stand up. Add all these issues to a bit more speed than in the video and use of brakes and the left sidewall would probably blow.
I know what I want to say in the above but I'm not sure it is coming out right. Basically it's a wrong'un.

This canted wheel design is already riding on a portion of the tyre which would see infrequent use on a "normal" bike

Not really. We covered this 3 years ago, he has about 3-4° of camber, which is not much different from what we all ride on most of the time by having our road surfaces cambered to improve drainage. You don't need special wheels, tyres or even steering geometry to ride on that much camber, the standard structures cope perfectly well, and the rider can easily compensate for the small amount of camber steer without even thinking about it.

Too 'bespoke' for Dani Foffa

So it's all good then?

So it's all good then?

Well, it's not a total disaster.

This thread is both very interesting and really frustrating. I'm totally in favour of general arsing about with mechanical things because quite often the solution (or part of the solution) to a genuine problem is found in the tinkerings of someone decades before. So this may be the solution to a real problem down the line (although there's no problem it solves right now). My beef with this is that nothing has actually been solved in terms of the way the bike rides. 4 years ago, this claim was made:

My explanation is simple and Ive stated it some times now I think: After some thorough research I have found a way to compensate and neutralize the camber thrust force of angled wheels on a bicycle.

I wont repeat it again cause its becoming ridiculous....

...but absolutely no evidence has been given that this is the case. As @mdcc_tester has pointed out it's perfectly possible to ride a bike with canted wheels no-hands. I can back this up because I recently discovered that I'd been riding for 3 years on a front wheel that didn't locate properly into the fork ends and so was canted by at least 5mm at the top. I could ride it no-hands but always felt like I had to lean slightly; essentially what I was doing was to lean the frame out-of-vertical so that the front wheel was vertical to eliminate camber steer. I think this is what all the demonstration videos/photos actually show i.e., that any decent rider can compensate for canted wheels by un-canting them by canting the frame instead. This is ergonomically horrible, because you have to carry your weight off-centre relative to the frame, so it may well cause problems for your lower back (and knees, because you aren't pedalling straight up and down).

It's pretty obvious from the pictures of the bike that the geometry is not vastly different from normal, so the "special geometry" (if it exists) therefore presumably entails some pretty precision production of the fork/nork and dishing of the wheel to get the contact patch right, which may well counteract any manufacturing simplification. In addition a large number of problems have been created (including asymmetrical tyre wear, difficult mounting of brakes/racks/mudguards) to "open up the design space" in some way that doesn't seem to be any better than a normal "lefty" fork. As such, the whole thing just smacks of rather pointless self-promotion.

the whole thing just smacks of rather pointless self-promotion.

Yeah. Merry Christmas, motherfucker.

(I typed something fairly similar earlier, checked myself against baby-jesus-time goodwill before first trying to express it nicer, then just deleting.)

But hooray for persistence in the face of countless naysayers, health and safety and physics! If you can now invent a lightweight, bar-mounted machine gun or some kind of car-melting laser I'd be delighted to hear how you get on, fellow road users are ruining my riding much more than unsightly dual forks or horrendously vertical wheels.

motherfucker

trying to figure out how to post a gif here..
here's your laser

@ffm
I see what youre saying here and its been discussed over and over again. My daily bike has the same thing, the front wheel is canted due to a damaged fork... you can immediately feel the difference. That said, makes it completely obvious its easy to feel the difference between a bike that needs compensation and one that doesnt. The NoFork bike needs no compensation. If you reed back there have been a number of people riding the bike who have acknowledged that.
I can also see why it turns your otherwise comprehensible world upside down... what kind of "proof" are you looking for?

I think what people are looking for is for you to explain how you have done it exactly, put it out to peer review. Headtube angle, rake tyre size etc etc.. Basically something verifiable.

aha... wasnt aware of that,I thought all that was clear... :|
Headtube angle..Ive been using some rregular frames, peugeot Y10, Koga gents racer and a Romany custom build. headtube angles are slightly different but all are in the usual range. The make of the triple triangle frame i dont know. The headtube angle seems a bit slack.
Depending on the hight adjustment of the wheel-stem the headtube angle may vary a few degrees.
Rake... Ive used a couple of different stems but i tend to use a relatively short one, its about 40mm. If i sweep it forward its about 50mm. Another I use is 60mm, which makes steering a bit more responsive. Downside of the longer stem is that the trail offset needs to be considerably larger.
Rims.. Used various for those as well. Started with Kris Holm 40 mm wide in order to move tyre contact patch more to the middle, kind of wrap the wheel around the hub. Rigida was so kind to make me a couple of asymmetrical rims (i believe they are 25mm wide) to accomplish the same for more narrow tyres.
The Tires... it get dull, Ive used various as well. From Big apple 2.35, regular 40mm, now there is bontrager 25 mm on there, but my fav are the continental 30mm..
The thing is, the system is adoptable to a wide variety of choices.
The adjustable camber axle is the only real requirement which I had to make myself. I will try and make some pictures later on.. but its basically what Tester has pointed out already. Im curious if the stem he posted could be used for the same purpose. Then (?) anybody can put it together with off the shelf parts

Im curious if the stem he posted could be used for the same purpose

It might work if you rotated the angled inserts by 90°, so they canted the stem sideways rather than changing the stem rise angle. I don't know whether the inserts are indexed to stop you from doing that. Would a choice between 2° and 4° camber be enough? In fact, that's really the root question which you have never answered - just how precisely does the camber have to be dialled in to make a NoFork bike which can be ridden without having to lean over on the straights?

Just took a few quick pictures

The axle

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and the bush

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and another

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does video work?

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• Video.MOV