The Arantix Mountain Bike by Delta 7 Sports is a high performance XC racing mountain bike that is designed around a revolutionary technology called IsoTruss™. The story of how the Arantix was born has to begin with how the IsoTruss™ technology was born.

IsoTruss™ technology is the combination of two light-weight, high-strength technologies, one is structural, the other is material:

First is the light-weight structural technology of trusses. Truss technology has been around for quite a while and is a time-tested method for transferring high loads through very lightweight structures. Everywhere you look you can see trusses carrying very heavy loads, from large crane masts, to bridges, to roof supports, to airplane frames, to skyscrapers. Trusses have a very high strength-to-weight ratio and stiffness-to-weight ratio. In fact, a traditional double diamond bicycle frame itself is just another kind of specialty truss, which is why it has remained virtually unchanged through the years, all across the cycling industry as the most efficient shape for a bicycle in terms of strength-to-weight.

Second is the light-weight material technology of high-modulus carbon fiber composites. While carbon fiber is a relatively young material technology, it is completely mainstream in the cycling world. Carbon is such a stable atom with such a strong molecular bond that it can be found at the center of almost every highly-evolved molecule in nature. In its purified form, carbon fiber has one of the highest strength-to-weight ratios of any material and it can be combined with a wide variety of resins or epoxies in order to “tune” the characteristics for any specific application.

The fact that carbon fiber starts out as a completely pliable fiber or fabric and then hardens into whatever shape it has been formed makes it ideal for creating exotic shapes and curves. The possibilities for smooth flowing surfaces and shapes are literally endless. For that reason, many manufacturers have not felt a need to think outside the realm of “continuous surface” molded design.

IsoTruss™ takes carbon fiber composites technology in a totally different direction. It winds the carbon fibers into very efficient open-lattice trusses that are able to support themselves against very high bending, torsional, compression, and buckling loads, without using as much material as other composite structures. The very unique IsoTruss™ shape with its regular peaks and valleys is optimized to keep all of the primary load bearing intersections at their very strongest.

Many bicycle designers have wanted to use larger diameter tubing in their bicycle designs because larger diameter tubes are better at resisting bending. But there is a limit to how large a “continuous surface” cylinder can be on a bicycle because as it gets larger in diameter the wall thickness must decrease in order to keep the weight equal and then the tube is susceptible to local buckling (like kinking a soda can). But a truss design allows the bicycle frame designer to have it both ways. The IsoTruss™ can have load bearing members spread far apart from each other like an I-Beam, but the thick support lattice members protect it from local buckling.

The IsoTruss™ technology was originally developed at Brigham Young University under the direction of co-inventor Dr. David W. Jensen. For a number of years their research focused on very large diameter applications like power poles, cell phone towers, radar antennas, replacing re-bar inside concrete pillars, airplane wings etc. They were always looking for new applications and load scenarios with which to demonstrate the advantages of a composite open-lattice truss. The research team was looking for any application that required high strength, high stiffness, and low weight. Building a bicycle out of IsoTruss™ seemed like a good fit for the researchers because it was a product that gets people excited, it is a competitive industry that has a “cutting edge” image, and it presented a whole new set of challenges for the IsoTruss™ that had not been previously explored. The bicycle project pushed the envelope for small diameter manufacturing techniques, component attachment and connection issues, and performance tuning. In all, the BYU research team made four bicycle frames. Each one significantly more advanced than its predecessor. Some of the early frames were focused more on the IsoTruss™ members than the complete bike, they were intended to prove a concept more than create a bike, but each one came closer and closer to a bicycle frame that met all of the design criteria.

The 3rd IsoTruss™ bike frame caught the attention of a senior engineer at Specialized and he suggested that the bike frame needed some good lugs in order to be more credible so he donated two pairs of titanium lugs that were left over from an R&D project that never made it to market. With the new titanium lugs and a lot of lessons learned along the way, the BYU research team set out to build one last concept bike. The fourth IsoTruss™ bike is the one that people usually have heard about because it was taken down to Interbike and captured by quite a few cameras outside the show.

A few years later a group of entrepreneurs with backgrounds in composites fabrication and aerospace industries purchased the worldwide rights to IsoTruss™ technology from Brigham Young University. The company’s name is Advanced Composite Solutions. Their plan was to develop the manufacturing process further and create a fully automated IsoTruss™ braiding machines. They will also sublicense the rights to IsoTruss technology and spin-off a series of IsoTruss companies for each broad category of applications. Rather than wait for the machine to finish development, Advanced Composite Solutions decided to begin creating subsidiary companies for applications that can still be viable using hand-built IsoTrusses™. Delta 7 Sports is the first company created by Advanced Composite Solutions and their focus is on all bicycle applications for IsoTruss™ technology.