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After watching Hardtail Party gush I'm intrigued as to who the designer is. I know it was Brant, and his DNA still seems to run through them. Is it still him or someone else?
It's one of the chaps that works for CRC/Wiggle/Hotlines as Ragley is one of their brands. Based in NI IIRC. There was an article on Pinkbike I think.
Makes you wonder. There are the big boys with CAD and stress/fatigue software and their product is if anything poorer. Or is it that this technology is now available to all?
Makes you wonder. There are the big boys with CAD and stress/fatigue software and their product is if anything poorer. Or is it that this technology is now available to all?
CAD with FE built-in has been available for 20+ years now. Even when I was at uni we could run it better on student spec laptops than the ageing university desktops. The maths behind it isn't that complicated. Although more computational grunt has made it easier to get results without having to be that proficient at creating the original mesh. When I did it you had to spend hours refining the mesh because otherwise, it took even more hours to come to an acceptable convergence. e.g you can get away with a coarse mesh in the middle of a tube, and need a much finer one around the joins. These days you could probably just split it into a fine mesh all over and it still have it converge quickly.
For a hardtail though I'd say it's as much down to the luck/judgement/opinion applied to the geometry. It's not like they've lost any weight in the last 20 years, or got stiffer, or more compliant (the biggest change was CEN arguably making everything worse).
No one jumps on a massively oversized aluminium bike and suddenly decries that steel is dead despite them probably having quite different characteristics. People just like the geometry first and everything else is marginal at best.
“ No one jumps on a massively oversized aluminium bike and suddenly decries that steel is dead despite them probably having quite different characteristics.”
On that subject, I’m very curious about the Banshee Paradox, which claims to use some quite unusually shaped sections to join the stays to the front triangle, to give you a lightweight frame that is much less harsh at the back. Keith at Banshee is a clever chap who doesn’t seem to hype his products and I know the hardtail party guy is a fan of it.
Makes you wonder. There are the big boys with CAD and stress/fatigue software and their product is if anything poorer. Or is it that this technology is now available to all?
Makes me wonder how you think bikes are designed.
So where's the smooth ride coming from that Hardtail Party speaks of with this Ragley? Some kind of amazing butting internally? Weirdly soft aluminium? Or has he overstated the case? It looks outwardly like a fairly ordinary 6061 frame with big tubes, big welds, cross braces, straight seatstays and not particularly light.
No idea but do folks like Stanton and Cotic rely on it or seat of the pants incremental improvements? I'd be surprised if CAD is used nearly as much in steel as in ally.Just wondered as Planet X and Ragley seem to be able to produce relatively cheap smooth riding ally and steel frames. Is it just something UK designers try more to achieve?
Hardtail Party has stated that in his chats with designers in the USA most don't seem to factor in getting ally and steel to ride smoothly. They just don't want it to break, where as all the above's frames he's tested score right at the top for compliance, and pretty much everything else too.
I know Cotic do it because years ago Cy talked about coming up with the chainstay gussets on an early version of the Soul using FEA.
Looking at the Big Al, I can’t see much possibility of anything magical going on with the tubing. However I do think that we humans are often amazingly sensitive to tiny changes in feel. I also suspect that part of the smoothness of certain hardtail frames is actually from how well balanced their geometry is, so the back end doesn’t smash into everything and the fork does more than you realise.