Bike Builder Adrian Smith – have 3D printer, fettle, make bike.
Here’s the video from Red Bull…
“Fettler (n); an individual craftsman or group of craftsmen committed to achieving perfection via hands-on moulding, sculpting and working of raw materials. Typically found in sheds.”
In the second feature of our Fettlers series that looks at some of the most incredible home-made bikes, the focus turns to carbon and specifically the process used by one bike builder to make his own carbon fibre-based mountain bike frames and components.
Adrian Smith uses 3D Printing technology to manufacture the moulds for his CAD-based designs, and then uses carbon fibre fabric to lay over the moulds and produce the final part.
The costs of 3D Printers have come down in recent years and are no longer the preserve of big businesses. In Smith’s case, he built his own 3D Printer up from scratch at relatively low cost. Since then he hasn’t looked back and has built several inexpensive XC and Downhill bikes under his Carbon Wasp brand name in his home garage in Leeds.
The first Fettlers episode featured the tale of Michael Johnson’s SplinterBike, a bike made from wood…
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That’s cheating surely?…
I saw this somewhere else the other day, just a link to the vid, should have known immediately it would have been Ady. He’s been making his own bikes for years.
The availability of this level of technology to those men on the street with the skills, ingenuity and imagination to produce stuff themselves could well tear apart the whole corporate/consumer model as we know it… it’ll be interesting to watch corporates respond over the next few years
Impressive. Both composite bikes.
I ‘wood’ love a wooden bike. They look amazing.
The next step is to skip the mould and just have a 3D printer that can print carbon fibre, like this one:
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/3d-printer-that-prints-carbon-fibre-how-long-till-we-can-print-bikes-at-home