@freiheit you're lucky, then. I can't test ride most of the commercially available bikes I'm interested in, in the country I'm in. If I got into materials it'd be flat out impossible "something like the M5 high racer, but with an aluminium frame" would mean a lot of work from someone to build one, then compare to the existing options.
Once someones specifies materials it gets ugly, because it's rare to find two bikes that are almost the same except for the material. Even when it's Reynolds 753 vs 731, let alone carbon vs magnesium
It's also hard to distinguish quibbling pedantry from actually answering the question :)
@freiheit yeah, that is what I suspect the underlying question actually is.
The flip side is that for me, the question is often "can I get this, but in steel", because I care about being able to repair it in the middle of nowhere.
@andy256 hence the dude with the perspex bike, for example. He made a laser cut plywood design then looked at it and went... "what other sheet materials can I use" and it was all downhill from there. I suspect cardboard might work as well. I am not, I think, going to ask
I worked on the Sydney Uni cardboard house assembly project. That was just standard corrugated cardboard, then varnish to make it slightly water-resistant.
Which was much less fun that the Chch cardboard cathedral, IMO
abc.net.au/tv/newinventors/txt/s1343212.htm Col, sadly, died a couple of years ago. He was quite an entertaining guy and pushed some boundaries in useful ways. Making remote area housing for the users, rather than at them, for example.
@Criggie yeah, you'll note I said "fun" not "useful" or "practical"... although as a symbol the cathedral did work fairly well (I tought, at least from a long way away)
Col's "cardboard tent" thing was a bit like the pure-wood bicycle - it was an entertaining stretch for the material, and he did design quite a nice house with it, but it wasn't at all practical. It was a good learning exercise for the students, though.
@Criggie no, but interestingly 6 or 8 people wandering round up there seemed to be fine. Were fine, whatever.
It wasn't public access AFAIK when the thing was open to the public, but when we were assembling it at one stage we had more people than should have been up there, up there.
I suspect you could get really tick wall cardboard tubes like they use in rolls of newsprint and make a bike out of them. Actual paper might be harder, maybe lightly rolled sheets of newspaper and strapping tape holding it into the lugs... but once you go composite, why not just epoxy the whole thing into a solid lump.
So... Stack Exchange is discontinuing the community blogs, like ours. The way they're doing that, the current content will stay up (minus ability to comment, add new stuff, etc). If somebody is interested in continuing the bicycles.se blog on some other platform, let one of us mods know and we can see about getting a data dump.
Stack Exchange is discontinuing the community blogs.
Their default plan is to convert everything to static files and keep that up. That would mean that the current content would be available, but nobody could comment on it, nothing could be edited and nothing new could be posted.
If there's suf...
Stack Exchange is discontinuing the community blogs.
Their default plan is to convert everything to static files and keep that up. That would mean that the current content would be available, but nobody could comment on it, nothing could be edited and nothing new could be posted.
If there's suf...
