Bicycle Design

Year: 2007

  • Update to the Kestrel/ Orbea post

    In response to my “You be the judge” post, someone from Orbea USA left a comment pointing toward an open letter that was written jointly by the top executives at Orbea and Kestrel. Both companies feel that any similar elements on the frames are just coincidental. With the letter, they want to let the cycling…

  • Navitas bicycle trailer/generator concept

    As a final year design student at the University of Derby in England, Paul Smith designed a bike trailer that doubles as a generator. “It’s a pure concept in sustainable transport” explains Paul. The trailer concept, called Navitas, is the first to create its own renewable energy. The rear wheel splits 3 ways to become…

  • Freewheeling in House and Garden

    I was planning to post another student concept today, but I am taking a short lunch and don’t have time to pull it together. In the mean time, you can check out an interesting Australian student design concept over at Spinopsys. I mentioned recently that I am seeing bikes a lot more often in design…

  • Cadence concept bike

    First I want to thank all of you who have emailed me with design submissions in the last month or so. I really do enjoy seeing conceptual designs from students or from anyone for that matter. I have quite a few submitted designs in the queue to post, but I just have been insanely busy…

  • You be the judge

    I was visiting a factory in China last year and saw a very distinctive element from a product that I designed on a competitor’s prototype (it was not a bike related product for the record). As if it wasn’t blatant enough, my product was sitting on the workbench right next to the competitor’s design. The…

  • Folding bike design article

    Mark Sanders sent me a link to an article that recently appeared in the UK based magazine Design Week. The article is about the design of folding bikes, a subject that Mark knows quite a bit about (you will notice that he is quoted several times in the article). For those of you who don’t…

  • Materials in Bicycles Conference

    I mentioned the Materials in Bicycles Conference late last year, but with the 2007 Tour de France set to kick of in London in just a few weeks, it is worth mentioning again. Dr. Alex Moulton, Chris Boardman, Mike Burrows, Cannondale engineer Chris Dodman, and several others are set to speak at the conference, which…

  • Great shots of the new Madone

    I wasn’t planning to post additional pictures of the newest Trek road bikes today, but these shots are really just too good to pass up. Trek’s art director Paul Rogers took these pictures of the bikes at the Milwaukee Art Museum on the event’s opening night. As you probably gathered from my last post on…

  • The JANO dual bike

    I recently ran across the molded plywood JANO “dual bike” concept while I was doing a Google search for something else. I immediately forgot what I had been searching for in the first place as I starting reading about this concept bike that Roland Kaufmann designed, with Christoph Pauschitz as his supporting tutor, for his…

  • The 2008 Trek Madone

    Neil at Road Magazine was at the Trek Launch yesterday and posted the first pictures that I have seen of the new 2008 Madone. See more pictures on Neil’s blog. I like the graphics scheme on this bike. I have said before that I like the graphics on Ridleys and Orbeas because they are not…

  • A reader’s design

    Carlos sent me these nice renderings of a frame that he would like to build. He wants a classically designed frame, but he plans to make the front triangle out of titanium and the seatstays and chainstays from carbon fiber. He asked in his message why titanium and carbon are not commonly used together like…

  • A new compact Trek?

    I know, I know, most of you have probably already seen these images. They have been floating around the web for some time now and I never bothered to post them. I remember seeing them here back in January of this year. Well, a reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that the final design…

  • Bikes in design mags

    I previously mentioned that I have noticed quite a few bikes in design magazines lately. Yesterday, I decided to thumb through a few of the recent magazines in the growing stack on my desk, and I was not surprised to see something bicycle related in each one. The April issue of Metropolis featured David Larsson’s…

  • Create your own mutant bike

    I try not to make a habit of posting the same pictures over again, but I like this shot and it has been a while since I originally used it. Anyway, if you live around NYC and you are interested in Frankenbikes (and who isn’t a little bit interested) check out the Mutant Bicycle Mechanics…

  • Ligfiets

    I am no expert when it comes to the subject of recumbents, but I am always interested in seeing new designs. Jack Dekker, the editor at Ligfiets, does know a lot about recumbent bikes and he recently shared a few interesting articles from his site with me. He pointed out a couple of interesting developments…

  • Advocacy

    I have seen a lot of bicycle advocacy content on the web lately. By now, most you have probably already watched the clip of Trek president John Burke’s speech at the Taiwan Bicycle show. A month or so ago, I saw several good posts about advocacy, as bloggers were returning from the National Bike Summit…

  • Finally, bikes for sale in DWR

    Look what I saw this morning when I opened my latest Design Within Reach catalog; Biomega bicycles for sale on the first two pages. Not that I was surprised. I mentioned not long ago that the DWR store in Dallas had a discussion about transportation-oriented bikes. Biomega bikes were the focus of that discussion, so…

  • Tour de Georgia Stage 5

    OK, this is going to be another post with no design content. Still, I thought some of you might be interested in the race pictures that I took yesterday. I will add more soon and still I need to edit titles and tags, but here is what I have uploaded so far. This picture shows…