Year: 2013
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City Speeder recumbent by Roel Verhagen-Kaptein
Fresh on the heels of my last post, we have a reader submitted design from Roel Verhagen-Kaptein (perfect for a day like today when I am pressed for time). Roel explains that the City Speeder is “a recumbent bike made for commuting in a fast and comfortable way. The streamlined body makes the bike fast and…
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Tips for having your design featured here
I have been amazed and delighted to see the traffic to Bicycle Design increase over the years…especially in the last year or so. The fact that more and more people are reading is great, but with only a few hours each week to spend on this blog, it has become much more difficult for me…
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An e-bike for Deutsche Post by Luke Guttery
Luke Guttery, of Axon56 design lab, recently sent me these images from a project that he has been working on for Deutsche Post. The electric bike, designed specifically for use by the postal service in Germany, is a collaborative design effort with Grace GmbH and Nicolai GmbH (a company that Luke believes is the highest…
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Wood and leather commuter gear from Nisnas Industries
I briefly mentioned Nisnas Industries a couple of years ago when it was a new venture by founders Yossi and Max. At the time, I referred to them as “a small workshop dedicated to custom commuters in the city of Haifa in northern Israel.” That description is probably still fairly accurate, though it appears that…
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Wooden bike by Yojiro Oshima
Yojiro Oshima is a student in the Craft & Industrial Design Department at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. For his final project before graduation, he designed and made a wooden bike (complete with wooden wheels, handlebars, and saddle). His goal with the design was to incorporate the benefits of a beam frame and a standard…
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NAHBS 2013
The North American Handmade Bicycle Show took place over the weekend, and there is no shortage of coverage around the web. As usual, Urban Velo has one of the best photo galleries from NAHBS, with nice side view profiles and detail shots of many of the bikes. There is also good show coverage at CyclingNews,…
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An electric bike design competition from eBikeTec
“Are Electric Bicycles the Future of Cycling?” Bicycling magazine asked that question recently on Twitter in reference to an article on the growth of e-bikes as a category. The article by David Howard quotes Pat Hus of Interbike, who estimates that “there are now 150 million e-bikes in use worldwide, mostly in China. By 2025,…
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Backbrat bike grill by Mathias Hintermann
“The joy of cycling, now with brat and beer.” That is the tagline at the bottom of Mathias Hintermann’s webpage for his Backbrat design, a portable grill that attached to a rack on the back of your bike. Mathias explains the idea behind his design. “In Germany we love cycling, and we love to grill…
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The Dream Machine by Jonny Mole
The Dream Machine, a futuristic racing bike by Italian design studio Jonny Mole Design, recently was selected as a winning entry for the Bicycles category in the Taipei Cycle D&I awards 2013, an event organized by iF DESIGN to reward the best projects in the bike industry. The award will be presented on March 23rd…
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Vote for the winner of the ISUDA bike share design competition
The ISUDA Bike Share Design Competition ended about a month ago, and I am long overdue in posting the entries to be judged and discussed by all of you who read this blog. We didn’t get as much participation as we hoped for (far fewer than the previous design competition held at Bicycle Design), but…
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Google Currents and other ways to connect with Bicycle Design
Many of you may already subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. If you usually read Bicycle Design from a computer or large tablet, a feed reader is probably the best way to be alerted when new content is available. Increasingly though, many of you are visiting the blog from smaller mobile devices. I don’t know…
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Bicycle Lock Dock and other locking concepts
According to industrial designer Douglas Schaller, “the bicycle theft industry is at least $393 million annually in the United States and the crime costs Americans between $800 and $1 billion.” That problem was the reason for the Bicycle Lock Dock, a 2009 team student design project led by Schaller along with Cassie Tweed, Seung Kim, Mike…
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A collection of concept bikes
At first glance, the Clarity bike by designaffairs studio looks like a typical fixie or singlespeed road bike. Closer inspection though reveals a transparent frame that appears to be made of glass. Actually, the material is an advanced polymer that, according to the designers, “combines high impact resistance, lightweight properties and a gentle flexibility that…
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Bike sketches- fast and slow
The deadline to submit entries for the ISUDA Bike Share Design Competition passed while I was traveling home from Asia over the weekend. We didn’t receive as many entries as the last design competition staged here at Bicycle Design, but it is still going to take a while to discuss them with the jury and…
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Organic Transit ELF
Not all that far from where I live, a small group of people are building innovative solar/pedal powered velomobile trikes in a former furniture warehouse in downtown Durham, North Carolina. I have been meaning to discuss the Organic Transit ELF for a while now, but it is one of the many posts that I just…
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2012- The year in review at BicycleDesign.net
Another year has come to a close, and that means that it’s time for the annual recap post for this blog. Compared to 2011, traffic was up slightly with 1,236,847 page views in 2012. About 30% of the visitors in the past year came from the United States (where this blog is based). The United…