Re-use, obsolescence and shit design.
A few days ago I went on a bit of a rant on Instagram. It was prompted by a carbon fibre frame that was dropped off with me to see if I could repair it. It was a few years old, maybe 5 years, something like that, and it had a seatpost with an odd clamp. The sort of clamp that seems to have made it’s way onto a few other carbon fibre frames. This was a Canyon but I’ve seen the same, or more accurately (and pertinently) similar, clamps on other bikes. It was a sort of clamp/wedge design that sits inside the frame, and it had cracked. The original owner had contacted Canyon to be told that they no longer ‘support’ that particular model he had, and they had no stock of the spare part he needed. When prodded, they had no suggestions for him; his bike was 5 years old and was effectively broken beyond repair. His options were to try and find someone who had a clamp he could buy, maybe from a broken frame somewhere, find a machinist who could make the part he needed, or discard the frame and get a new one. All for a simple part that holds the saddle up.
The thing is, we’ve needed clamps to hold seatposts in position for about 100 years and there’s a perfectly good solution. Admittedly, not every frame is the same size and so we need a few different diameters, but I think that up until the proliferation of carbon frames, I’d be confident that about 99% of all frames used a seatclamp that was one of three sizes (28.6mm, 31.8mm or 34.9mm). Note this is the size of the frame tube that holds the seatpost, not the size of the seatpost itself. A lot of carbon (and some aluminium) frames don’t have a round portion of a seattube on the frame that one of these clamps fit to, so they need to find an alternative. And that’s where I think the whole thing deteriorates. A designer sitting in an office working on these bikes has failed to address the issue of sustainability. How long will this bike last, and how can we make sure its useful life is as long as possible? That bike could absolutely have been designed to work with a standard seatclamp but the designer decided to roll their own solution. And this wasn’t a solution that they then advocated as an improvement and could be made available on all bikes in the future. No, this was a closed, proprietary design that would work on this frame and nothing else.
Seatclamp that’s worked for about 100 years on the right, stupid fucking design on the right.
Just a quick point here, I’m not against new design, new products or innovative solutions to solve a problem or move the landscape along as our requirements change or as new materials become available. Right now, there are 33 parts listed as seatclamp spares on the the Canyon website and none of these parts will work for the guy I mentioned at the start of this article. Is this good design? I don’t think so. I think it’s short sighted and lazy.
Selling bikes is hard, the market is hugely saturated and every brand is scraping around on the design room floor looking for some USPs that can push their bike to the top of the customer’s wish list. In retail, we used to call this ‘swing tag bullets’. As a customer, you’d go into your local bike shop and be faced by rows and rows of bikes and every bike had a swing tag dangling from the bars. These swing tags gave you a nice bulleted list of why you should buy that particular bike; “18 gears!”, “Quad Butted Tubing”, “Modern Geometry for Comfort and Control”. Mostly marketing bullshit but they had to try and make their product stand out. And I think this is the problem with a lot of modern bike design, the customer, and their riding experience is sliding down the list of priorities when designing a bike or frame and is being replaced with ‘features’, something that in past would find its way onto a swing tag and now is an H2 on a website. For example, this piece of gold : “Check out our highly-praised Canyon engineered seatposts and clamps, designed to maximize the performance and comfort of your bike.” Really? Come on, it’s a seatclamp, it doesn’t maximise the performance or comfort. It’s just made up crap, to label shitty design to make the customer think their experience will be better if they choose a bike with that kind of seatclamp.
I’m picking on seat clamps here specifically, but every bike has a few parts that either the rider will have to interact with, or is a crucial moving component that may wear out, or makes up the fit or comfort of the bike and can be changed. Saddles, bearings, chains, grips, pedals etc. These are all adjustable or moving parts and will probably, over the life of the bike need to be replaced or changed at some point. Either because they’ve broken, worn out or need to be replaced to make the bike work for an individual. So as a designer, it’s crucial that you make sure the life of the bike isn’t going to be cut short because you’ve designed proprietary parts that wear out, or break and can’t be replaced.
I get riled up by this sort of thing because the impact of the way we design and manufacture things is long-reaching. There’s the obvious side of my example which is that someone’s bought a bike for a lot of money that’s now no use to them, that makes the bike a very, very expensive purchase. Then there’s the waste of resources, in the initial manufacturing of the bike and the transportation of that bike from Asia to the UK. The environmental and financial cost of that is not insignificant. All so someone can ride that bike for 5 or 6 years. And now what happens to the bike? In this case, the frame is carbon fibre, and right now, I know of no consumer-level way of recycling things like carbon bicycle frames or parts. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I just don’t know of an accessible way of doing it. While I think that the ability to recycle the raw material is important when choosing what we’re going to manufacture things from, being able to reuse the product beyond the original owner’s use is a way more efficient way of reducing the environmental impact that producing a product has. The longer the life the product has, the better for all of us. Even better is not to buy anything new in the first place, but that’s a more complicated (as well as philosophical) point. And this is why intelligent design with recycling, reusing or re-manufacturing in mind is really, really important.
Used bicycles at the Bike Station in Glasgow
There are loads of organisations/groups/charities that will take older and unwanted bikes, give them a service, a clean, a tune-up and sell them on. This is the best form of recycling. Not grinding or melting everything down, but reusing them for their original purpose. It’s friendly to the environment and financially sensible too. But this only works if you can get parts to fit the bikes. You need to be able to replace the components that wear out or have been damaged. I hear from friends and colleagues who work on older bikes for reuse that getting hold of parts and trying to get bikes back on the road is getting harder and harder. It’s a bit of a standing joke in the bicycle industry that the ever-growing list of standards in the bicycle industry is getting out of control. We have multiple headset standards, multiple bottom bracket standards, multiple axle standards and multiple brake fitting standards. Then you have compatibility issues with the different number of gears on bikes that have changed over the years. That can be frustrating, but mostly they are ‘standards’. The specification is published somewhere and many different vendors can, and do, make parts fitting into these standards. It‘s not ideal when you have competing standards, but things do change as materials and manufacturing techniques improve, and as I said, I’m not against improvement and advancement. But when these existing standards get ignored and proprietary designs make it onto bikes where there’s a perfectly good existing standard, then that just becomes shitty design. It’s short-sighted and it’s irresponsible. If you’re making a consumer product that costs thousands of pounds and you can’t service, repair or support that product for many years after you’ve sold it, then that’s irresponsible. I want to see bikes like that Canyon with a broken seatclamp make it onto the shop floor of a second-hand bike shop.
I think the reason this stuff winds me up so much is that if you’re a rider that just wants a nice bike and you’re not into all the tech details, you’ll have no idea if the bike you’re interested in will have been designed with re-use or recycling in mind. I suppose my final point in this mini-rant is that bike companies need to do much better. It’s not enough to chase customers with ill-thought out design ‘ideas’. Bike companies should not only quit adding useless, badly designed proprietary features but they need to be telling people about the design elements they’re using to make sure their bike doesn’t end up as landfill in 5 years time.
Peace out.
32” (ISO 686) Wheels
If you pay attention to the goings-on within the bicycle industry, particularly the MTB side of things, you may have spotted some chat about a new wheel size. But before I dive into that, it might be worth just recapping where we are with bicycle wheel sizes as of right now. I’m not going to cover every single wheel size since the beginning of bicycle history, just the common sizes from the past 20-odd years, sizes you’re likely to have come across if you consider yourself a bike rider.
Let’s start with road bikes, at the beginning of my bike riding life, most road bikes had 27” wheels. This was close to the 700c size that most road bikes currently use. 27” was a popular size in the UK and the US but become pretty obsolete as the 700c designation that was common in Europe started to take over. The diameter of the 27” was actually a little bigger than 700c. There’s also a 650c size (not to be confused with 650b - see below) which is pretty rare but makes an appearance on some time-trial and tri bikes as well as race bikes for juveniles and smaller riders.
When mountain bikes got really popular in the 80s and 90s they all had 26” wheels, in the 2000s several manufacturers introduced the 29” wheel that most MTBs currently use. Interestingly the 29” wheel size is exactly the same size as the road 700c size. Fast forward a few years and we have an in-between size, 27.5” (also known as 650b). Not only is this popular in the mountain bike world, but has become pretty common on gravel bikes.
You might be a little confused at this point with the way we’re describing tyre sizes, you’ll have noticed that we’ve been mixing units and jumping around quite a bit. For tyres that are listed in inch sizes (eg 27”, 29”) these numbers refer to a very rough estimate of tyre diameter. Same with 700 or 650 except in this case it’s the tyre dimater in mm. The ‘c’ or ‘b’ suffix designates the width of the rim for that size of tyre. It’s not a number you can rely on but it is a convenient way of grouping tyres together.
Thankfully there are some standards that very accurately define tyre and wheel sizes and all current manufacturers adhere to these standards. The ISO wheel standard for bicycles describes a dimension that relates to the diameter of the rim where the bead of the tyre sits. Sometimes known as BSD (Bead Seat Diameter). An example of this would be ISO622 which is what all 700c and 29” rims/tyres fit into. Expanding on the ISO standards is the ERTRO standard. This takes the ISO dimension and adds a tyre width value. Like ISO, this is described in mm. An example of an ERTRO size would be 32-622 which is a 700c wheel with a 32mm tyre. I’ve added a chart at the bottom of this page that lists some common wheel sizes and their current standard designations. Check the sidewall of your tyre and you’ll see the ERTRO size.
So what does any of that have to do with 32” wheels? Well, the bicycle industry seems to have decided that a new bigger wheel size might be fun. And it seems like the 32” size (ISO 686) is the current favourite to make it onto production bikes. I should say here that 32” isn’t really a new size, it’s common in the unicycle world (along with 36” ISO 787). So there have always been tyres and rims available (well, about 2 tyre choices and about 1 rim!) and some small custom builders have been making use of these parts to build big-wheeled bikes for a while. There are a couple of companies specialising in building bikes for very tall people utilising 32” and 36” wheels in a small production environment but they are very much the exception.
With industry support, we’ll see more trye choices and more rim choices. This is already starting to happen. I have two different types of 32” tyres in stock right now (bicycle not unicycle), 1 type of carbon rim and 1 type of aluminium rim. I know of two rim manufacturers that have committed to stocking a 32” rim very soon. That trickle will turn into a stream very quickly.
This new wheel size is going to be interesting in a couple of different ways. The movement for this new size has been driven mostly from the mountain bike industry. Back in the 2000s we saw MTBs adopt the 29” (622) wheel size, effectively replacing the previous 26” (559) size. Proponents of this size argued that the bigger diameter meant the wheel rolled over obstacles better, smoothing out the ride and allowing faster speeds and more control. There wasn’t much argument against this, and 29ers became popular to the point where they are now pretty much standard. The downsides to a bigger wheel, a larger rotating mass, are that it’s harder to get the wheel up to speed, meaning a little slower acceleration, especially when pedalling out of corners, that sort of thing. There’s also the issue of the bigger rotating mass making it harder to change direction, kinda like a gyroscope always wanting to stay upright and stable. So quick changes of direction are harder. If the bigger wheel change (26 to 29) makes sense, then the logical argument is that a jump up in size again will have the same sort of benefits. I think this is true to some extent, the 32” wheel rolls over obstacles better and is especially beneficial on gravel bikes; the oversized wheel smooths out washboard-style gravel trails. But the downsides to the bigger wheel size will also be present and will be amplified. Getting those big wheels up to speed will take more effort, and on tight twisty trails, the bike will certainly feel harder to manoeuvre (everything else being the same). I think initially we’ll see people adopting a ‘mullet’ approach to the 32” wheel. The ‘mullet’ refers to a bike with two different wheel sizes, normally a bigger wheel in the front. The idea here is that you get the rollover benefits of the big front wheel to flatten the trail a little but you don’t have the downside of having to spin up a big wheel at the back. That approach is already popular with a lot of riders opting for a 29” front wheel and a 27.5” rear wheel. So the first way we’ll see 32” adoption is in the MTB world. The big wheel size will be chosen for performance and handling reasons.
The second way we’ll see widespread adoption of this size is to provide a better experience for big/tall riders. While it’s relatively easy to build a bike with contact points in the correct place for taller riders, the limitation of 700c (622) wheels means that often the rider feels like he’s stitting high up above the wheels, it can create an odd riding experience and there’s an argument that aesthetically it doesn’t look great. The two bikes you see below have exactly the same fit points, meaning the position the rider has on the bike is the same, from a comfort point of view there’s little difference. But it’s not difficult to see what bike looks ‘right’.
The fit and riding position of both of these bikes is identical. The bike on the left has 700c wheels, the bike on the right has 32” wheels.
I’m excited to see more components (tyres, rims) become available for 32” wheels, I think this is going to be transformative for bigger riders who have traditionally had to opt for the biggest production size available and then try to tweak it to work. We’ll be able to design bikes that have the rider sitting between the wheel rather than high up on top of the wheels.
So if you’re either an MTB or gravel rider looking to explore this new wheel size or a taller rider looking for something that fits and rides better, get in touch and we can talk about what we can do for you. If you’re a framebuilder and want to dip your toe into the water, building big-wheel bikes then I can help out with the supply of rims, tyres and spokes that I keep in stock here. Getting hold of these parts still isn’t too easy without committing to big quantities.
Rantings, mostly.
If you know me, you know that it doesn’t take much to get me rambling on and on about bikes, bike design, framebuilding, fabrication etc. In the early days of Shand Cycles, I used to write a fair amount of blog posts (remember blogs? they’re back baby!) but when the business was sold, the new owners deleted over 12 years worth of content. I thought that was dumb. I miss having a space to write down what’s going on in my head so I’m going to start a blog again. This is the first post. I have another one already lined up and ready to go. I don’t know how much, or how often I’m going to write. But this is a start. I might even see if I can rescue some of those original posts, maybe the WayBack Machine stored some stuff. I’ll look. Peace out.