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Custom frame design??

665 Views 6 Replies 6 Participants Last post by SuspectDevice, Jun 29, 2006

hardcore newbie

Discussion Starter · Jun 28, 2006

Tonight i found out that my dads friend makes his own custom frames, i am thinking of having him build me one. what designs do you think are good for a fr/dh bike that can pedal, isnt too heavy and has 8-10 inches of travel??

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free rider

· #2 · Jun 28, 2006

hardcore newbie said:
Tonight i found out that my dads friend makes his own custom frames, i am thinking of having him build me one. what designs do you think are good for a fr/dh bike that can pedal, isnt too heavy and has 8-10 inches of travel??

8.5 inches of travewl....and super sick bike

http://www.chumbaracing.com/f4.shtml

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XSL_WiLL

· #3 · Jun 28, 2006

Weight depends more on material used than design.

Get a Yeti 303 clone. Haha.

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KomodoRider

· #4 · Jun 28, 2006

Ok if the guy is wicked good he can slap together a DW-Link frame, you're going to have to do the steal/buy the plans from Iron Horse becaue they own the rights. And to the calculations to get the 8.5 inches. Or a simpler route would be to make a single piviot bike like a Bullit, or go with a progressive single piviot design like the Judge. Or somewhere in the middle with a four-bar link design like an Azonic Recoil.

Either way you're going to have to do the calculations to find your travel. Its going to deal with the vertical length between the swing arm pivot and the end of the shock, the throw of the shock and the length of the swingarm.

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davec113

· #5 · Jun 28, 2006

Take advantage of all the $$$$$$$$$$ put into frame design by the industry. If its custom you dont have to worry about copyrights... so I'd copy a current design, maybe a Giant Faith...

Has this person built a big bike before? I'd really have to trust someone to actually ride a custom frame hard... the industry has also put a lot of effort into building frames that don't fail. It takes complicated engineering programs for it not to be a trial and error exercise. You need a CAD model of the frame, then finite element analysis needs to be done to determine if the stresses in the frame will cause material failure. Even this is not an exact science, so to be safe it would need to be at least slightly overbuilt compared to a commercial frame (It will be heavier).

I've though about building a frame, a road bike/hardtail with standard tubing and construction would be relatively easy and fairly safe to build. It would not require failure analysis either, its been done before so many times, so we know what tubing to use, and what heat treatment will work... a fs would be a much larger challenge.

Maybe vsuro will have some ideas for you...

:eekster:

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