Originally Posted by
RatonLaveur
I disagree with the crazy bombastic review...if one can call that a review above.
That being said, not to put too fine a point on it jipe because you've been mostly helpful in this thread but you're dead wrong.
he had a functional prototype that was already well engineered by himself in the kickstarter. He really turned on the charm and waffle of marketing for the kickstarter but not much more after that. It's hardly a Fyre Festival with no skill behind it.
He scouted and tested many technologies once he had the unexpected income of funds. And yes gluing of tubes can be considered. There are bike companies using the combination of manifolds and gluing to only assemble straight and bent tubes instead of welding. None of this is the mark of a bad engineer. Far from it. He is an accomplished designer, prototypist and engineer. He sucked at communication throughout and probably missed on manufacturing. He could have used a manufacturing engineer on staff. Also he spend a hell of a lot of time patenting which is questionable at this scale. But the man has plans i suppose.
All of this considered the bike is heavier than advertised, quite a bit more expensive than advertised (even if doubling kickstarter price) and so far no professional review has been outputted. Which is quite surprising if not downright disappointing.
The kickstarter bike wasn't a mature bike at all, everything had to be redesigned afterward.
Yes gluing is used, but this wasn't what was promised during the kickstarter campaign (I think that nobody would call a glued frame a titanium frame even if the tubes are made of titanium). I mentioned that as an example of the fact that at the kickstarter campaign time, he had no clue how he would build the bike. The subcontractor mentioned during the campaign wasn't a solution even for a much smaller number of bikes because this company wasn't able to build a very complex frame like the one of Helix.
The kickstarter campaign was a pure communication and marketing exercise with plenty of fake statements: best, lightest, smallest, safest... folding bike + the usual miraculous titanium material claims (yes titanium can be a very good material but not miraculous and not all titanium alloy are good and not all titanium bikes are good, a titanium bike isn't necessarily a good bike just because its made of titanium) + the very low, under estimated, price. All these fake claims of the kickstarter campaign participated to the extraordinary success of this campaign.
The only excuse is that such fake claims are quite usual for kickstarter campaigns and very little kickstarter projects fulfill all the promises of the campaign.