Bicycle Design

Tag: suspension

  • Two bike designers ahead of their times

    Two bike designers ahead of their times

    I first saw the news on Bike Biz that engineer and inventor Dr. Alex Moulton passed away this week at the age of 92. For any of you who aren’t familiar with his work, Dr. Moulton pioneered the small wheel bicycle in the early 1960s with the launch of his first full suspension bicycles.  He…

  • Alpha bike and more

    Alpha bike and more

    While I was traveling last month, my ‘to post’ folder really started to back up. It will take a while to get to it all, but I want to quickly mention a few of the projects and links that I missed today. The Alpha bike is “the first fully internal drive system that includes a…

  • Archibald Sharp’s classic ‘Bicycles and Tricycles’

    Archibald Sharp’s classic ‘Bicycles and Tricycles’

    I have mentioned Archibald Sharp’s 1896 book Bicycles and Tricycles: An Elementary Treatise on Their Design and Construction on this blog several times before (here is one post that comes to mind). I personally have a pretty big collection of books about bicycles, but Sharp’s classic stands out as my single favorite. When it was…

  • SR Suntour Swing Shock

    SR Suntour Swing Shock

    Suspension for the road is not exactly a new idea. Many of you probably remember the Paris-Roubaix SL fork that Rock Shox introduced in the early 90’s. Prior to the Roubaix fork, a hundred or so years prior to be specific, there were many other ideas floating around for suspension systems to take the edge…

  • Cannondale Simon electronic suspension and more

    Stanley Song, an engineer from Cannondale, was at CES with a prototype electronically controlled bicycle suspension system called “Simon”. This design replaces many of the internal mechanical parts (springs, valves, etc) with an electromechanical device that can vary the suspension based on rider weight and current riding conditions. Check out the videos of the prototype…

  • Old suspension bikes

    I found a really great thread on the Ridemonkey forum last week. I noticed on Statcounter that someone had linked my Pong magic fork post to a thread named “Pictures of old and obscure suspension bikes”, so I followed the link over to check it out. What a great collection of old suspension designs. If…

  • Old bike patents

    A few months ago, I linked to Bob Shaver’s Patent Pending blog in one of my posts. For those of you who missed it, the bicycle technology section of Bob’s site is definitely worth a second mention. Yesterday, Treehugger wrote about the blog and featured the above pictured full suspension bike from 1890 as well…