Originally Posted by
Ironfish653
Pretty much all of the previous shaft drive systems have used bevel gears, ie: teeth-on-teeth. Whether it's been straight cut or helical, it's pretty much like what you'd find in a shaft-drive moto, just smaller scale.
What CS did, and you can see it pretty clearly on their 2018 interbike demo, is replace all the 'teeth' on the shaft pinion 'gears' with individual bearings.
There were companies making roller gear shaft driven bikes before 1900. The picture that most of us have seen of Major Taylor shows him on a roller gear bike, for example. One thing is almost guaranteed, as far as bikes go, it has all been done before. I see this was noted earlier in the thread.
I appreciate what CS has done here, but shaft driven bikes went out of favor for a lot of good reasons. The main one being that you can't make a rear triangle stiff enough to make it work well. And it seems like CS is limited to 250 watts at this point because of that. OTOH, I am impressed they made it shift, didn't think that was going to happen
I think the reason it was plugged in was that they didn't want batteries to die in the middle of a big show. And they probably haven't developed their own batteries yet. It will be interesting to see if this ever makes it to market. I thought it was just a
PR stunt last year, but it sure looks like they are serious about it now.