I’m currently studying mechanical engineering and am fed up to the back teeth of doing endless amounts of math. 😡

I really wanna start designing frames and wondered what people use. Send me in the right direction STers.

Solidworks?

Definitely as you can get it in student spec for peanuts and it’ll stand you in good stead in the real world.

Aye, Solidworks is a good choice.

Let me guess – 1st or 2nd year?….. the maths is worth it/necessary come the 3rd+4th year and beyond….

1st year. I like the math but it all abstract concepts at this time. No meat and gravy yet.

http://www.bikechecker.com/
http://linkagedesign.blogspot.co.uk/ (good reading)

…and there won’t be for a while. If you’re lucky you might get a design and build project after the exams. A-level physics (and maths to a certain extent) is such a step down from what is required at degree level now that you have to think of yourself as being just about able to crawl by the end of the first year, stumbling like a chimp on two legs by the end of year 2 to be running by the end of year 4.

If you’re really lucky you’ll get a job doing it really for real at gone 8pm on a Friday evening…. 😉

Statics is as rough and dry as an old knacker at times.

I’m doing it distance so i dont have the luxury of saying. How do you do that?

I’m basically a mathemetician at the mo and am seriously considering electrical coz i know that mechanical is way harder due to the nature of physics and the whole world that it involves. Dilemas. Perhaps i just like math on its tod as opposed to as a tool.

You mean MATHS and you’ll be needing learn SolidWorks & Math(s!)cad.

Cheers,
Jamie

Behave yourself. Semantics. Tomatoes spring to mind. Most of my textbooks are American and tbh are vastly superior and im a Yorky.

I use rattleCAD, better than the free Bikecad and give you jig setup parameters as well. Enjoy.

Made this in Solidworks, might even be able to pick up a copy for free at uni, we all got given a year licence in my final year.

Album

electrical coz i know that mechanical is way harder due to the nature of physics

Hahahahahahahahahahaahahhahahaa…

Behave yourself.

No you behave and treat our wonderful language with respect. The Americanisation of the English language really pisses me off- I bet you refer to any medication as ‘meds’ too, don’t you?

Cheers,
Jamie

I never bought into all that patriotic bull. Are you an expert on Linguistics now?

Next you’ll be telling me the English are responsible for creating the English Language. LMAO.

Come on. Dont be ignorant. Yes i’m bilingual.

I never bought into all that patriotic bull.

I’ve never seen a patriotic bull, let alone bought into one.

I’ve always wondered why Americans call it math. Isn’t it short for mathematics, so it should be maths.

Anyway, all engineering is just applied physics.

Aye electrical engineering ignore physics and goes by the laws of magic

A patriotic bull earlier…

BlkeCAD all the way – tried RattleCAD, didn’t get on with it. General CAD software like Solidworks is okay, but it’ll take you absolutely ages to design anything.

Solidworks or Catia.

Both good, pro-engineer will also do it.

Some people, design and, make bikes using experience and an enquiring mind.
Both fabrication experience and bike riding experience.

http://vimeo.com/45364301
http://www.pinkbike.com/video/306521/

and some people just make pictures.

I can’t say I’ve tried to use the structural analysis side of it yet, but I’m pretty keen on Solid Edge…

In fact what I hear from the CAD community is mostly that Edge is getting ahead of Works, these days.

Pro Engineer is generally the industry standard so learn that if you want to be really prepared for a possible career in bike design. Solid works is also used but less so I think.

Learn about kinematics and the forces in the suspension systems and how to manually analyse them, rather than plugging numbers into linkage. If you try and develop your own knowledge and methods, you might not get it all 100% right but you’ll learn a lot.

Pay attention in the material science lectures too, in particular about alloys, carbon fibre and manufacturing techniques.

Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor will enable you to design a frame quite easily, Pro/E Siemens Catia are all a bit highend for this application.
Both of these offer modelling and FEA, you could try your hand as programming and gathering data on linkage movements.

If you want to get into styling (most frames are sold on this basis), try and get you head around Autodesk Alias, which can then be used in conjuction with Inventor for FEA.

Then get yourself a copy of Keyshot or 3DS max with Vray and render up a nice image and post it on here.

PS you should have done Product Design, I use the above day-in day-out, great fun

Auto desk Inventor would be pretty good for this. With a student/uni email address you can also download a full free version from their website (or any if the other auto desk suites)