Some inspiration and reconfiguration

Some good posts recently on Bike Rumor which have solidified my idea of making a full carbon bike for myself.  I'm even thinking that I'm going to take a stab at molding my own tubes around a mandrel.  I've done some dissecting of a Scott Addict top tube, and will delve into some other bits and pieces to get a better idea for what other companies are doing.

Also, I gotta give a shout out to my friends Richie and Max at Philly Bikesmith.  They took about 2 hours last night to fit me and go over all of the crazy details that go into bike design.  My current plan is to let them come up with a frame design for me and then build it up.  After picking their brains last night, I have utmost confidence that they'll come up with something that fits and handles well.  The rest is just up to me building the dang thing.

Lots of pondering, not much doing

I've been test-thrashing my second version of my bamboo CX bike, and in general I like it. The steering is a bit on the slack side compared with anything else I've ever done, trail must be close to 60 mm, which makes for some awesoeme high-speed turn carving ability, but some unusual sensations at lower speeds. I 'think' that I like it, but it's different enough from any of my other bikes that I'm honestly not sure. My other issue is that with my general strength imbalances, it feels like the bike pulls right. That said, most of my bikes feel like they pull to the right, so this isn't necessarily indicative of anything wrong. My hunch is that it's mostly the difference between the handling sensations and my own lopsidedness. Eventually my plan is to get an alignment table set up in the basement of our new house, but that project kind of depends on the state of the basement over there. It's not finished yet, so the granite alignment table will have to wait.


 My other recent brainwave is that maybe I want to make a full-carbon bike. I've spent much of my time thus far designing around the limitations of bamboo--it it can split, it's not as light as carbon and the torsional rigidity is not so spectacular. I read an interesting interview with Nick Frey, proprietor of Boo cycles about how they deal with these issues, or don't. I general find the guy pretty irritating, too much spin and wide-eyed optimism for my liking, but he seems to be living the dream and his grad school project did inspire me to do my own work, so hard to fault him there.  Maybe for a full on race bike, it'd be more awesomer to build a bike out of carbon fiber ONLY!  Might be on to something here, as all of the top bikes in the world are carbonium these days.  I'm trying to decide if I'm going to try to make my own tubes.  Well, specifically, my own top tube and seat tube.  I've got remnants from ENVE for all the other pieces, but nothing that strikes me as particularly appropriate for a top tube or seat tube.  If Kirklee can build their own tubes, why not me?   Oh yeah, because they do this professionally and have sunk hundreds of thousands into tooling.  Me, just twos or threes of thousands. I really enjoyed looking through this guy's photo album of how he built a couple of fantastic looking road bikes.  Looks like he got frozen out by ENVE as well.  They are capitalist bastards after all.