Doesn’t the Bird share some tubes with a frame that Kona don’t sell any more?
Yes and no. The seat stay is used by Kona, but its a current model AFAIK. The top tube and down tube are from a certain manufacturer that used to HQed at Bronson Street and again still current AFAIK, and The forward shock mount bolt probably features on a dozen different bikes from different places.
I guess the difference is you have catalogue tubing, and parts, and catalogue frames. The tubing literally has a catalogue, just like say Reynolds. Its not like you need to go opening molds all the time and make something brand new just for the sake of it. Our tubes are from open molds, made in China. We set the butting thicknesses etc. but the extrenal shape of the tube is the same from our frame to others that use it. In a few cases we have specific molds made to suit our needs if nothing else works. This might be hydroformed or manual formed.
If you pay enough attention you’ll spot plenty of the same tubes on small batch production bikes, and even on bigger manufacturers. Its just not making sense to solve a problem that doesnt exist if there’s a good tube already in production. Its probably not a cost issue either. Opening a mold for a tube costs about the same as you’d pay RRP for a mid range frame (Single) – its just a risk and delay that unless it needs to happen doesn’t really get you anything.
Where I guess frames trip over to ‘Catalogue’ is where they are a design from a factory, tweaked and modified or otherwise. Again thats not to say there’s anything wrong with that specifically. If you look at early generations of a current model from a certain European brand thats been very much in the press over the last few years, or maybe something current out of discounters closer to home, you’ll find something very similar in the catalogues of the Taiwanese manufacturers, and they aren’t knock offs of the Euro brands.
As for us – we design everything here in the UK from the ground up in terms of the overall bike. Bikes start life as stick drawings with pivots and lines for tubes only. Dan my clever boffin partner has built the equivalent of Linkage into Solidworks so we can move stuff around in the models (2d or 3d) and see in real time how that effects things like anti-squat, leverage curves etc. We then use open mold tubes and some parts to save on the lead time and cost of making everything custom when it comes to stitching the pivots together with some tubes, but the bikes are entirely designed by us in Solidworks.
Sometimes too you find the factory influences the similarity in the bikes too. Among many reasons why they will have input, assembly processes mean that they want to input into your design to ensure they can assemble the frame efficiently and without risk of damage or mis-assembly. This means they draw on expertise from other bikes they work with and influence your design too. Sometimes its good, sometimes its not so. As an example, one of the factories we’re working with also make bikes popular with Abominable Snowmen. When they wanted to change a certain part of the design to something similar to what the snowmen like, we had to tell them to stick to the plan as we wanted it another way for our own good reasons, and they couldn’t see what the issue was. That I guess is the flaw in rejigging catalogue frames – sometimes mistakes get repeated as often as good stuff if you don’t put your foot down or understand fully why you’d want to do it one way over another.
