Journal: A Tract About Some Qualities of Common Water

Monday location:  Seven  |  Studio

Time Marker:  8:35 am – 9:55 pm

• Product Design:  Working on Seven Cycles chainstay designs.  The design is somewhat infinite because every bike is custom.  Within that infinity we have roughly 50 design parameters or templates account for about 99% of our bikes.  I’m working on two design aspects right now:

1. An updated version of Seven’s 1″ chainstays – these are the stiffest titanium chainstays on the planet.  Not suitable for most riders, these stays are definitely for a small number of specialty bikes.  And, I’m working on a couple ways to incorporate thsese stays on more bikes – making the 1″ stays more versatile, more adaptable, and more appropriate for a wider range of riders and bike designs.
2. Fatigue testing program that relates to titanium as a material.  I’m hoping the testing program goes well becuase we’ve got some ideas I’d like to implement.  More variety.  More specialized applications.  But many of these ideas require pushing the technical parameters of the material a bit farther – hence the testing to determine where are the boundaries.

• Business Thinking & Design Standards:  Good standard, bad standard.  When is a standard helpful and when does it hinder progress?  This is a big conversation that I’ll try to write about another time.  It’s a topic that’s been rearing its head a lot lately.  I think I know why and it’s a bit disturbing.  Standards exist for many reasons – not all of them good.  It’s often difficult to decipher which are good and bad because those paths are often intertwined.  So much to say about this.

• Bike Projects:  I tried to organize my list of bikes in process for the Ride Studio Cafe today.  I think I stopped organizing at 25 bikes.  I ran out of time to organize; I have to actually do some work beyond organizing if we’re going to actually deliver on my promises.  Twenty-five bikes is a lot of custom projects going on all at once; I’ve been there before but it is a bit unexpected at this time of year.  I’m so fortunate that every single one of the customers is a great person and it’s either a lot of fun or a great learning experience for me to be working with each person.
• New Hire:  Dan Cariolo started today.  Seven Cycles’ latest framebuilder hire.  This was an interesting hiring round because we have seven individuals that made the short list; usually we have one or two.  We narrowed that down to four people.  It was a difficult decision to turn down three of them.  However, Matt and I are thinking that we’ll be hiring again very shortly.  We’re hoping that the people we didn’t hire in this past round will hang in there a bit longer.
• Design:  Campagnolo EPS equipped test bike.  Assembled a Campy electronic bike today.  Thanks to Karl B. and Bryan H. for setting it up.  We’ve designed a number of EPS frames to Campy’s spec but this is the first bike we’re actually testing.  The bike is a Diamas S with a full Campy kit.  We have a very generous customer that’s letting us abuse assemble his bike.  Maiden voyage tomorrow.  Some nice features to the kit.  I’m looking forward to a full report.  Wish I was going to ride it.  I have a Dura Ace electronic 11-speed bike in the queue so I’ll have to wait for that.  We’ll see how DA11 works in cold weather.

Post title:  All about the leidenfrost effect.

Image source.