If you’re really into cycling and are on this site, chances are that over the years you’ve at least toyed with the idea of making your own frame. There’s something truly special and deeply rewarding about riding something that you’ve built yourself, and being able to choose whatever custom geometry and extras that you want only adds to the appeal.
At that point you probably looked at everything that you needed to do to make a bike. And that’s when things start to get daunting. Before you’ve even thought of the bike, you need to think about the jig. Fabricating a jig with basic versatility and functionality for framebuilding takes time and patience, and the raw materials costs are at least $200 [Instructable example!]. Rapid-prototyping has pushed the costs of pre-made bike jigs from $1000s down to $300 or so [such as the Jiggernaut], but if you don’t know how many frames you really want to make, it’s still money that you aren’t putting towards your first frame.
Next, you need to consider the tools that are specific to typical framebuilding. If you want to learn to braze steel frames, an oxy-acetylene starter kit with everything you need to get brazing is something over $200 (plus the price of an additional gas cylinders, brazing rods, and flux that you’ll use). A TIG welder suitable for working with thin-walled steel and aluminum bicycle tubing is more like $1000.
Next, the materials for the bicycle frame itself. While it would be possible to braze a frame with commodity straight-gauge 4130 (chromoly) steel tubing, it would be very heavy and wouldn’t ride very well - bike specific tubesets are double- or triple-butted to save weight and place extra material at the lug junctions. Bicycle specific tubesets will cost you upwards of $100, and a set of lugs and dropouts is about another $100.
If you’ve been adding up the tally, you’re already at more than $600 for your first frame – hopefully you won’t make any mistakes!
I wanted to design a process for building bicycles that allowed an enthusiast to spend less overhead, less time on finicky details, and put the emphasis on actually designing and making a bike that you want to ride.
At that point you probably looked at everything that you needed to do to make a bike. And that’s when things start to get daunting. Before you’ve even thought of the bike, you need to think about the jig. Fabricating a jig with basic versatility and functionality for framebuilding takes time and patience, and the raw materials costs are at least $200 [Instructable example!]. Rapid-prototyping has pushed the costs of pre-made bike jigs from $1000s down to $300 or so [such as the Jiggernaut], but if you don’t know how many frames you really want to make, it’s still money that you aren’t putting towards your first frame.
Next, you need to consider the tools that are specific to typical framebuilding. If you want to learn to braze steel frames, an oxy-acetylene starter kit with everything you need to get brazing is something over $200 (plus the price of an additional gas cylinders, brazing rods, and flux that you’ll use). A TIG welder suitable for working with thin-walled steel and aluminum bicycle tubing is more like $1000.
Next, the materials for the bicycle frame itself. While it would be possible to braze a frame with commodity straight-gauge 4130 (chromoly) steel tubing, it would be very heavy and wouldn’t ride very well - bike specific tubesets are double- or triple-butted to save weight and place extra material at the lug junctions. Bicycle specific tubesets will cost you upwards of $100, and a set of lugs and dropouts is about another $100.
If you’ve been adding up the tally, you’re already at more than $600 for your first frame – hopefully you won’t make any mistakes!
I wanted to design a process for building bicycles that allowed an enthusiast to spend less overhead, less time on finicky details, and put the emphasis on actually designing and making a bike that you want to ride.
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The process that I came up with takes advantage of the growing availability and affordability of CAD and 3D printing to allow people to build themselves a unique custom bicycle with unparalleled design flexibility. 3D-printed socket-style lugs are used to join commodity tubestock, and those joints are then reinforced with carbon fiber and epoxy. Since the rigid 3D-printed lugs define all the angles and the sockets provide a hard stop for the ends of the tubes, once the tubing is cut to the appropriate length all the pieces simply snap together, removing the need for a jig to accurately maintain the frame’s geometry during construction. 3D printed pieces can also be used to create 2-part molds for the carbon fiber lug reinforcements, improving both strength and appearance.
In addition to eliminating the jig, this method of construction has some major benefits. Since the design is generated in CAD, it lets you create whatever geometry you want, rather than using standard preset angles that brazed lug construction requires. Whether you want road, mountain, track, even cargo or recumbent geometry, the freedom is there. In addition, since the tubes are bonded together with epoxy and carbon fiber, you can use whatever material you’d like for the tubing – aluminum, steel, carbon fiber, titanium, or bamboo! My goal was to shift away from being restricted by the materials required by the tools, and instead enable you to realize your personal creative vision for what you want your bike to be.
Disclaimer: While I'm not a composites engineer or a framebuilder, I'm an industrial designer working in the aerospace industry who has prototyped carbon fiber aircraft parts and has read an awful lot of composite manufacturing theory. Still, when following these instructions and building your frame, think critically and safely and design conservatively.
In addition to eliminating the jig, this method of construction has some major benefits. Since the design is generated in CAD, it lets you create whatever geometry you want, rather than using standard preset angles that brazed lug construction requires. Whether you want road, mountain, track, even cargo or recumbent geometry, the freedom is there. In addition, since the tubes are bonded together with epoxy and carbon fiber, you can use whatever material you’d like for the tubing – aluminum, steel, carbon fiber, titanium, or bamboo! My goal was to shift away from being restricted by the materials required by the tools, and instead enable you to realize your personal creative vision for what you want your bike to be.
Disclaimer: While I'm not a composites engineer or a framebuilder, I'm an industrial designer working in the aerospace industry who has prototyped carbon fiber aircraft parts and has read an awful lot of composite manufacturing theory. Still, when following these instructions and building your frame, think critically and safely and design conservatively.
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Question: Did you think about using carbon fiber tubing in lieu of the aluminum, There appears to be tubing built and sold for bicycle from Rock West composites(http://www.rockwestcomposites.com/)?
I have used some of their tubing for small parts of a DIY handcycle.
I just joined instructables so I could thank you for taking the time to post this, the way you set out the info and your detail is amazing. Also, an awesome idea I had pondered before, but you well and truly beat me to it!
How is the bike holding up?
I can't thank you enough for sharing your build. In particular, the 3d printing aspects. It's a perfect way for home builder to build the bike of their dreams.
Fantastic! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.
Rod
San Francisco
Are there any 3d printing services you would suggest for a project like this?
What type of material is the print made of and how strong is it?
And just to clarify...are you using the actual print for the lug and then wrapping additional carbon fiber around it - or are you just using the print to make 2 part molds with which you then make carbon fiber lugs? (I wasn't exactly clear on this)
Amazing work and thanks!
As far as 3D printing materials and services go, I used ABS plastic printed using the Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) style process. This was popularized by manufacturers like Stratasys and Dimension. It's also the process used by just about every inexpensive desktop/DIY 3D printer. It's cheap, and the parts are quite rigid and reasonably tough. The compound curvature and smooth transitions of the lugs also makes them quite strong. The detail is not as good (you get a bit of the 'stair-step' effect), but that's not as important here.
Most 3D printing services now are using Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) nylon/polyamide because it's relatively cheap, produces great detail, and the parts are very durable because they are flexible. The downside to that flexibility is that unless you use a high wall thickness on your parts (read: expensive, heavier) you lose the dimensional accuracy that you need to make this work.
As services go, Shapeways no longer does ABS, but Ponoko has it and calls it Durable Gloss Plastic (http://www.ponoko.com/make-and-sell/show-material/348-3d-printed-durable-gloss-plastic-black). You might be able to get away with Shapeways Alumide, but I'd be concerned that it's too brittle and not very forgiving. There are loads of other rapid prototyping services out there, but I can't vouch for their pricing or user friendliness.
As far as the moulding process, the answer to both of your questions is "yes." I printed the actual lug that defined the geometry of the tubing, but also printed 2-part moulds to compress the carbon fiber around the lug mould. This means that the plastic 3d-printed parts are still inside the frame, but they don't weigh much, and I figure it can't hurt to have a little bit of impact resistance (especially given that this is a prototype process).
Hope that helped!
I've wondered for a while: is there any merit to the idea of using 3D printing to deposit carbon fiber directiy? Usually you're printing with a filament anyway. I imagine someone has to have tried that.
It would be a pretty different print head, adding epoxy as you laid down the fiber instead of heating. You'd probably have to take it into account in the path the print head would take. And you'd probably have to print a negative to do needed compression, like you did here.
Also, did your front wheel hit the pedals?
Here's a company that uses an unusual winding technique to make bikes.
http://www.delta7bikes.com/delta7-bikes.htm
I know I saw at one point a bike frame maker that used a single carbon strand to make an entire frame out of, but couldn't find it.
One option would be through the use of a dual-nozzle printer with carbon fiber and a thermoplastic composite rather than thermosetting (i.e carbon-fiber reinforced ABS rather than epoxy). You'd likely need to reheat and compress the final part in a mould, as you say, to get the plastic matrix to encapsulate the CF properly, but you'd potentially have a pretty amazing, absolutely customized finished part with much better impact resistance than a standard epoxy part.
...and finally, yes, there is a little bit of toe overlap during tight cornering due to the geometry. The pedals don't touch, but the tips of your feet can at times. I had the wheelset lying around so I used it, but this could be alleviated by using a suspension-corrected 26" fork (to keep the overall axle-to-crown offset the same) and a 26" front wheel to reduce the diameter.
Frame alignment post-finishing was spot on, to the best of my measuring abilities - as soon as all the 3d-printed joints are glued into place in the early steps, there's very little opportunity for the frame to shift during moulding.
The frame weight disappointed me a little bit - it was about 2300g. Given the unusual geometry and the sheer amount of tubing (call it an XXXL frame) and the frame's stiffness, that actually isn't terrible, about the same as a nicely built 4130 chromoly frame. This frame also has a thick MTB headtube, BB shell, and dropouts that I'd salvaged, which are not very lightweight. For this iteration, ultimate weight reduction was not my priority, so much as to make a more accessible way for people to build custom-geometry bikes. In my next version of this frame, I may experiment with vacuum-moulding the 3d-printed lugs, which will allow me to significantly reduce the amount of resin in my moulds. I expect that dropping 300-500g of weight would be very easy, and even more would be possible with some care and optimization.
However, I'm curious about the proportions/geometry? The seat post seems much too angled so that raising the seat actually means pushing it further back making it harder to reach the handles. Was this intentional? I'm just curious what the benefit of this geometry is? It doesn't look like any bikes I've seen before.
google for "RAN" bicycles, This biks is modeled on that form.
You are correct that pushing out the seatpost increases your reach to both the pedals and bars - it's actually an advantage when it comes to accommodating different sized people. Me and four of my friends ranging from about 5'5" to 6'1" rode the bike in one session and all of them were actually okay - try doing that on a regular frame!
With the ... unusual... geometry you chose, I would be worried a bit about the seatpost, if it's carbon fiber ( I can't tell from the pictures, but it looks like it might be). They really aren't designed to have as much side load as yours will, because usually the seatpost is much closer to perpendicular to the ground.