New form of bike manufacture, will it catch on?

rudyardmtb

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12664422

Interesting possibilties i think for the future.

Northwind

Looks like the world's biggest balance bike!

redvee

Saw an item on the bike on Inside Out West and the gearing on it looked suitable to climb a 1:3 gradient.

andyrm

Potentially it could - but where I reckon the real advances could come is in the form of metal foams. My sister's a research physicist and was telling me about these. They have a mould that a special metal matrix material is blown into at high temperature and it expands a bit like one of those foam sprays for filling cracks in walls. You then skin it for an overall finish and the end result is something that is as stiff and strong as a solid piece of metal, but lighter than a tube.

They're currently doing this with a scandium foam and testing for the motorsport/aerospace industries, but I can see this working really well for bikes in the future.

toby_winkler

The sound it made at the end didn't sound very promising...

Northwind

I do love those laser beam manufactory things, they are completely and undeniably awesome.

chrischris1315

:shock:


That is evil, I would love to have a bike made out of that stuff.
But I wonder how much flex and strength it has in it?

Regards

Chris

chrischris1315

:shock:


That is evil, I would love to have a bike made out of that stuff.
But I wonder how much flex and strength it has in it?

Regards

Chris

Anonymous

The idea of encouraging high-end manufacturing businesses to set up in Britain is a great one, but I think it's also falsely pushing their technology as cutting edge, when in fact it has been used in rapid prototyping for ages.
I'm also not convinced that the economies of scale would work out. I don't know for certain about nylon, but doesn't aircraft grade aluminium (which most current bikes are made of) have higher a higher strength to weight ratio than nylon?
It's also very quick to manufacture standard bicycle frames, certainly faster than any rapid prototyping method I've seen, could churn out the mainframe of that bike.

Iwingstein

Basically it's 3d printing.

We cast works of art into bronze, and we were cheaper casting one of our clients sculptures in bronze than he got his piece "printed" for in plastic.

Says it all really. I've no dount it has some excellent possibilties in prototyping etc, but mass manufacture at 1/10mm per pass. Dream on.

ATB

Simon

Anonymous

Is the proper name Stereo Lithiography?

MountainMonster

Ver cool, just been reading your posts in here, but this stuff sounds quite awesome from what i know. I wish the video would work on my phone.

dot1

yeehaamcgee wrote:

Is the proper name Stereo Lithiography?

Yup. I had a set of pedals manufactured in the same way but out of ABS. And I'm not too hot on the in's and out's, but the pedals I had done had a lot of extra plastic on it to support it whilst it was being made, and was an absolute b*tch to get off. Took me about 2 days to do one pedal. Imagine how long a whole bike will take?!

bennett_346

Got to see one of these machines at work at uni today, cracking stuff and very clever, even if it has been around for years.