While I do pretend to have a reasonable idea about how to fix many bits on a bike, and have developed a knowledgeable-looking nod that I use when people talk about the properties of different frame materials. There are some bicycle developments that I won’t even pretend to understand.
I came across this project bike recently and I’ve read through the article several times without ever really totally understanding what the bike can do – although I’m more and more convinced it’s simply awesome. Probably.
To be more specific I hang onto these very few facts about frame materials, all hidden behind my encouraging and enthusiastic nodding:
- Steel is a bit flexible and “softer” to ride, and you can bend it back into shape if you wrap it round a tree.
- Aluminium is lighter, stiffer and more prone to cracking not bending.
- If you combine aluminium and steel in a warm damp shed for a good number of months then you’ll develop an unintentional integrated seatpost. This is great provided you never want to move the saddle, and never intend to sell the bike to anyone who’s not the same height as you.
- Butted tubing is thinner in the middle of the tube than at the ends and you can look terribly well informed if you flick the tube and listen to the change in note at different points, although you do run the risk of looking like the tosser in a restaurant who tastes the wine like he knows what’s going on. (Therefore the only way you’ll catch me flicking any bike tubes is to remove something that’s stuck there.)
- Carbon fibre and titanium and other fancy materials are more expensive and therefore must be better and lighter and stiffer and more forgiving while not losing any acceleration. Or something.
I think it’s clear I’m no material scientist, and can barely get my head around the actual tangible differences that frames offer. While I can eventually give you some sort of answer about carbon fibre involving the weave of the material and how it’s light and strong (but can’t understand how it would ever stand up to being hit sideways into a lamppost without shattering) it boggles my mind when the article talks about using a frame as an electrical power distribution network, instead of wires. All I can imagine is a bike that’ll constant be giving you electrical shocks through some of the most sensitive bits of your body, as they’re in contact with the bike. I’m sure there’s a very good answer to it all, and I will try and remember to ask a friend who knows. I will almost certainly end up resorting to nodding and then offering to go to the bar.
Having not really got beyond that part I pretty much gave up on the other technical bits of the bike. Apparently it uses “regenerative braking technology to “fuel” the batteries” (although the prototype has no brakes that I can see), and a “counter-turning axle”, but I don’t think I’ve ever read so many words I understand on their own but which make so little sense to me together.
At least the wheels have hubs, by the time you get there you half expect some cutting-edge reinvention of the wheel, which seems so popular these days.
I guess I better stick to the relatively simple bit of cycling; Just riding the bikes.
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