Yeah, I didn’t intend anything I said to be cynical. A question was asked and the answer is that a handful of companies make most of the bikes, and they do so with basically the same materials
For every material, there is some versions of the secret sauce, but those are usually only available as custom frames from a handful of builders, or as $5-10k racing specific super bikes from Trek and Specialized
AMA about frame and fork manu logistics. I will try to answer asbestos i can.
How does using lighter steel frame and fork materials translate into total costs and to what degree is that even feasible for Taiwanese made frames/forks?
We’ve seen limited “noodle” frames come in from Taiwan (some radlawn stuff comes to mind), what hoops need to be jumped through to get those to market?
I don’t ask as a noodle bike enthusiast and am happy with my 858 OS frames, just curious why we don’t see more of those when it seems that there is a market that wants em
Tubes themselves (at least not Italy, UK, or Japan made tubesets) are not terribly expensive. The big difference is what application they are used in and how they can be worked to achieve the desired result (be it the main triangle, fork, or stays).
The real expensive part is the tooling. Tooling is several thousand dollars and if you do low business, then the price of the final frame (to you) is higher. Higher business and it’s obviously lower. Our tooling pricing is typically pretty high because we have a ton of custom bends, clearances, crimping, alignments, and stuff on each frame and fork we make. But we sell enough frames that we can keep costs fairly low. Margins say we should be selling them higher, but that would make them unobtainable for most folks. Plus, if you decide to ride someone else’s frame because of cost, then you aren’t riding ours.
There’s also the cost of the all the doodles and braze-ons you put on the frameset. Dropouts, lugs, re-inforcements, all that jazz. While individually they are cheap, but when you have 13 star re-inforcement dingles on a frame and fork, they stack up quick. Oh, and if you design your own dropouts, cnc them, or cast them. $$$$
There’s different levels of testing. I have ridden a lot of older production and second-hand custom frames that I know would not pass testing standards today. Taiwan values safety and standards very highly which is why super lightweight frames for a variety of riders is very hard and time consuming to build.
Oh and all that above goes same for a fork.
Once you get into fancy, non-made-in-TW tubing from Columbus and Reynolds, the timeline is tripled. And is that stuff notably better than the equivalent butted and designed madeinTW stuff, I don’t think so. It’s the same, just with a sticker.
I’m looking to turn my old phone into a bike GPS, I need a reliable way to mount it to 31.8mm bars across multiple bikes. Original plan was to get a gopro bar clamp and the matching piece to glue/epoxy/vhb to the back of my phone.
I can’t find the 2-tab piece as an attachable separate piece anywhere outside of a tripod adapter or built into a device/case. Help?
do you need the other side of this, or this piece?
https://gopro.com/en/us/shop/mounts/curved-plus-flat-adhesive-mounts/AACFT-001.html
I need a big flat base like this to glue to the back of my old phone:
But I need it to be 2-prong like this so it can mate with a gopro handlebar clamp:
I was trying to do something similar over the summer and couldn’t work it out with available GoPro accessories.
So this but with more surface area?
Would be an easy part to design and print.
Exactly!
How big of a base? Should the prongs be centered or do you want them offset towards one end or side?
Get @Rusty_Piton to make you a porcelain mount, just to combine all possible frustrating projects into one
Dang!
Offset to the top/bottom, 5cm x 5cm base.
how’s this?
That’s beautiful as a newborn baby tarckbear.
Quad Lock phone cases are good.
There’s no shortage of actual phone cases and mounts meant to attach one’s phone to their handlebars. I’m not interested in them right now.
I’m going a different direction to suit my needs. My battery powered headlight mounts via gopro standard so I’ve already got a mount and any future mounts I get will work with both. It’s also a pretty common standard and pretty much any other barounted accessory I’d like to mount there ony bars has this mounting or a compatable adapter.
I’m not terribly concerned with keeping the phone safe either, it’s an old thing I was about to send off to e-waste when I realized it could live a second life helping me get lost in the woods. If I break it, maybe that’s a sign I need a dedicated GPS or just a lifeproof case on another junk phone. When I get another new phone in a year or two I can glue another gopro mount to it and keep on rocking in a free world.
What lightweight/low security/low cost locks does tarck like right now? I’m talking like day-drinking lockup
