I was recently inspired by a couple of different folks, most recently the folks at Guru in Canada, and thn some crazy kid in Slovenia who is doing amazing things with carbon. There is something that I really like about working with carbon fiber. I like that it's a flexible material, that there are almost limitless options for how it can be made, and that with enough time I could do almost all of the operations in my basement. Sure a full-on prototyping facility would be grand, but just wait until I get the new basement set up. It's going to be sweet. |
| Top tube and modified chainstays in anticipation of my new bike. |
The chainstays are merely a modification of the ENVE stays that I've been using for years. I added a sculpted block of styrofoam filler and then overlaid the carbon. to make what is essentially a giant gusset along the inside of both stays. Should be stiffer, and not a whole lot heavier. I can definitely tell that ENVE spent a lot of time working on their commercial products, but frankly not a whole lot of time engineering their framebuilder supplies. It seems like it was basically just my man Carl Turner cranking stuff out to order. Oh well, now it's on me to figure out how to make cool stuff.
The tube was all me though. I dissected a Scott Addict top tube to figure out generally what goes on inside the layup of a good bike, and found that it went something like this:
From outside to inside the unidirectional plies were laid up in the following orientation (degrees):
+45So I just worked to mimic that layup with the various types of fiber that I have at my disposal. I wouldn't say that it worked perfectly, but I would give my first top tube a B- all things considered.
- 45
90
+60
- 60
+45
- 45
