The end of derailuers?
05-27-05, 08:26 AM
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The end of derailuers?
https://www.signonsandiego.com/uniont...27nogears.html
Fallbrook inventor's CVT a product of many 'Eureka!' moments
By Bruce V. Bigelow
STAFF WRITER
May 27, 2005
Don Miller was in his mid-30s before he began to shift for himself.
Not that he was a shiftless kind of guy. But Miller says it wasn't until the late 1990s that he felt like he was gaining traction in his life. That was when the backyard inventor began tinkering with his ideas for a transmission without gears.
At the time, Miller was running his own real estate sales and mortgage company. He had graduated from San Diego State University in 1983 with a degree in journalism, after growing up in Hermosa Beach.
"The real estate business was really a means to an end," Miller said. "I got my real estate license in '88 and my broker's license in '91. By 2000, I was fairly competent. But it was never what I wanted to do. I spent all my spare time and my spare money developing this."
What Miller conceived was a different approach for a CVT, or continuously variable transmission.
Now, after almost a decade, the business that coalesced around Miller's idea has begun to commercialize the technology through a series of manufacturing partnerships. The startup now known as Fallbrook Technologies expects its CVT will be introduced in bicycles, light electric vehicles and other products by this time next year.
Unlike a conventional transmission, which uses a set of gears with specific fixed-speed ratios, a CVT uses a gearless mechanism that changes progressively as a drive train accelerates and decelerates. In effect, the system provides an infinite number of gear ratios between its lowest and highest speeds.
In developing his CVT design, Miller said he studied a variety of mechanisms based on chains, pulleys, belts and various doughnut-shaped designs.
Miller's transmission uses a set of steel balls that can be tilted as they rotate around an axle. Tilting the balls changes their contact diameters, which varies the speed ratio of the transmission.
"There were several Eureka! moments," Miller said, though he declined to describe them in detail. "Eventually everything came into place. It worked quite well, and we were able to attract a lot of talented help, which was a big part of it."
The business started to gain momentum last year, after the company Miller started was renamed Fallbrook Technologies and William G. Klehm III was recruited to serve as chief executive.
"I was brought in to commercialize the company and to get it out from a science/experiment phase to the commercial phase," said Klehm, the former president of San Diego's Newgen Results Corp. and an ex-Ford Motor Co. executive. The privately held company now has 24 employees and consultants.
Klehm, who also has guided Fallbrook's corporate strategy as a technology licensing company, credits Miller for years of perseverance in pursuing his idea.
"As you run through this as an inventor, and you're not trained in science, a lot of people will tell you that it won't work," Klehm said.
Miller was making progress
Yet by the time Klehm joined Fallbrook, Miller had won financial support from angel investors and completed an engineering assessment of his CVT design at the Southwest Research Institute near San Antonio, the nation's third-largest engineering research center.
Klehm said he was encouraged by the results, which indicated that Miller's design was simpler, smaller and easier to manufacture than most other CVT designs. The company's bicycle transmission, for example, consists of less than 25 components.
"It's very rare that (an inventor) wanders through the desert, gets a finance group to support him and then gets validation from an established research group," Klehm added.
Fallbrook announced the launch of its new "NuVinci" transmission technology last month, saying it has the ability to improve vehicle fuel economy and performance in a variety of industries.
The company also said it recently closed an $8.2 million round of venture financing from a consortium of private investors.
After introducing its CVT for bicycles, Klehm hopes to "island hop" through other industries by adapting the NuVinci transmission for use in light electric vehicles, tractors, automobiles and even power-generating wind turbines.
By steering Fallbrook toward technology licensing, Klehm said he has followed the model used by San Diego's Qualcomm in its development of proprietary digital wireless technologies.
While continuing its own design and development work on Miller's original CVT design, Fallbrook plans to license its technology to manufacturers in a number of other industries. The company has obtained 25 patents, with 75 patent applications pending, and expects to share in technical innovations developed by others, Klehm said.
The idea is to create a "technology community" that advances development geometrically across a variety of industries.
"We want to make money through the adoption of our technology and through licensing," Klehm said.
The CEO acknowledged that innovation in mechanical devices over the past decade hasn't been as exalted as advances in electronics and the computer chip industry. But with the price of oil increasing, he said, the automotive industry in particular has shown broad interest in innovations that might improve efficiency, extend fuel consumption and reduce weight.
"We are creating a blank technological canvas for transmission engineers and vehicle designers," Klehm said.
Klehm's strategy appears sound, but Fallbrook still ranks as an extremely risky proposition to Gordon Wangers, chief executive of Automotive Marketing Consultants, a vehicle evaluation and marketing firm in Oceanside.
High horsepower a problem
While CVTs offer the promise of better fuel economy and a more instantaneous drive-train response, Wangers said they generally have problems handling high horsepower.
So it makes sense that Fallbrook plans to introduce its technology in bicycles and electric carts, Wangers said. The key is the CVT's ability to operate with high-performance motors.
But Wangers predicted that Fallbrook will encounter resistance and nay-saying among tractor and auto makers.
"I don't know that the auto manufacturers are casting about for CVT technology, because most of them have their own engineering departments," Wangers said. The prevalent attitude among automakers, he said, is they have no interest in technologies "not invented here."
Some automakers, notably Nissan and Audi, have rolled out cars that incorporate their own CVT designs. So it will be even harder for Fallbrook to displace technologies that have become embedded, Wangers said.
Angelo Guido, a retired Ford transmission engineer, has evaluated Fallbrook's CVT, and agreed the bicycle transmission is a good entry point for the company.
"They are working on proving the durability of this," said Guido, who consulted briefly with Fallbrook in 2003. "That would be a good thing to get under their belt, to be able to say that it's gone this many hours, or gone through this many duty cycles."
Fallbrook's Klehm agreed, saying, "We're going to practice before we enter the automotive industry."
Klehm also wants Fallbrook to become profitable before it tries to penetrate the automotive market.
"We have to have a company that can be successful without automotive," he said. In this way, the largest industry in the world represents an opportunistic market for Fallbrook.
Despite the risks that Fallbrook faces, London investor James L. Alexandre still made a venture investment in Fallbrook and sits on the company's board of directors.
"Every new investment is a towering cliff of risks with a glimmer of light or sunlight that represents the dream," Alexandre said. "The days at Fallbrook are filled in some ways with wonder at the speed with which it is coming to market."
Fulfillment for Miller, on the other hand, might lie as much in the fellowship of the venture as in any financial success.
"At the end of this life," the inventor said, "I hope to look back and say that this core group of people became lifelong friends – and that we were able to change the world."
Bruce Bigelow: (619) 293-1314; bruce.bigelow@uniontrib.com
Fallbrook inventor's CVT a product of many 'Eureka!' moments
By Bruce V. Bigelow
STAFF WRITER
May 27, 2005
Don Miller was in his mid-30s before he began to shift for himself.
Not that he was a shiftless kind of guy. But Miller says it wasn't until the late 1990s that he felt like he was gaining traction in his life. That was when the backyard inventor began tinkering with his ideas for a transmission without gears.
At the time, Miller was running his own real estate sales and mortgage company. He had graduated from San Diego State University in 1983 with a degree in journalism, after growing up in Hermosa Beach.
"The real estate business was really a means to an end," Miller said. "I got my real estate license in '88 and my broker's license in '91. By 2000, I was fairly competent. But it was never what I wanted to do. I spent all my spare time and my spare money developing this."
What Miller conceived was a different approach for a CVT, or continuously variable transmission.
Now, after almost a decade, the business that coalesced around Miller's idea has begun to commercialize the technology through a series of manufacturing partnerships. The startup now known as Fallbrook Technologies expects its CVT will be introduced in bicycles, light electric vehicles and other products by this time next year.
Unlike a conventional transmission, which uses a set of gears with specific fixed-speed ratios, a CVT uses a gearless mechanism that changes progressively as a drive train accelerates and decelerates. In effect, the system provides an infinite number of gear ratios between its lowest and highest speeds.
In developing his CVT design, Miller said he studied a variety of mechanisms based on chains, pulleys, belts and various doughnut-shaped designs.
Miller's transmission uses a set of steel balls that can be tilted as they rotate around an axle. Tilting the balls changes their contact diameters, which varies the speed ratio of the transmission.
"There were several Eureka! moments," Miller said, though he declined to describe them in detail. "Eventually everything came into place. It worked quite well, and we were able to attract a lot of talented help, which was a big part of it."
The business started to gain momentum last year, after the company Miller started was renamed Fallbrook Technologies and William G. Klehm III was recruited to serve as chief executive.
"I was brought in to commercialize the company and to get it out from a science/experiment phase to the commercial phase," said Klehm, the former president of San Diego's Newgen Results Corp. and an ex-Ford Motor Co. executive. The privately held company now has 24 employees and consultants.
Klehm, who also has guided Fallbrook's corporate strategy as a technology licensing company, credits Miller for years of perseverance in pursuing his idea.
"As you run through this as an inventor, and you're not trained in science, a lot of people will tell you that it won't work," Klehm said.
Miller was making progress
Yet by the time Klehm joined Fallbrook, Miller had won financial support from angel investors and completed an engineering assessment of his CVT design at the Southwest Research Institute near San Antonio, the nation's third-largest engineering research center.
Klehm said he was encouraged by the results, which indicated that Miller's design was simpler, smaller and easier to manufacture than most other CVT designs. The company's bicycle transmission, for example, consists of less than 25 components.
"It's very rare that (an inventor) wanders through the desert, gets a finance group to support him and then gets validation from an established research group," Klehm added.
Fallbrook announced the launch of its new "NuVinci" transmission technology last month, saying it has the ability to improve vehicle fuel economy and performance in a variety of industries.
The company also said it recently closed an $8.2 million round of venture financing from a consortium of private investors.
After introducing its CVT for bicycles, Klehm hopes to "island hop" through other industries by adapting the NuVinci transmission for use in light electric vehicles, tractors, automobiles and even power-generating wind turbines.
By steering Fallbrook toward technology licensing, Klehm said he has followed the model used by San Diego's Qualcomm in its development of proprietary digital wireless technologies.
While continuing its own design and development work on Miller's original CVT design, Fallbrook plans to license its technology to manufacturers in a number of other industries. The company has obtained 25 patents, with 75 patent applications pending, and expects to share in technical innovations developed by others, Klehm said.
The idea is to create a "technology community" that advances development geometrically across a variety of industries.
"We want to make money through the adoption of our technology and through licensing," Klehm said.
The CEO acknowledged that innovation in mechanical devices over the past decade hasn't been as exalted as advances in electronics and the computer chip industry. But with the price of oil increasing, he said, the automotive industry in particular has shown broad interest in innovations that might improve efficiency, extend fuel consumption and reduce weight.
"We are creating a blank technological canvas for transmission engineers and vehicle designers," Klehm said.
Klehm's strategy appears sound, but Fallbrook still ranks as an extremely risky proposition to Gordon Wangers, chief executive of Automotive Marketing Consultants, a vehicle evaluation and marketing firm in Oceanside.
High horsepower a problem
While CVTs offer the promise of better fuel economy and a more instantaneous drive-train response, Wangers said they generally have problems handling high horsepower.
So it makes sense that Fallbrook plans to introduce its technology in bicycles and electric carts, Wangers said. The key is the CVT's ability to operate with high-performance motors.
But Wangers predicted that Fallbrook will encounter resistance and nay-saying among tractor and auto makers.
"I don't know that the auto manufacturers are casting about for CVT technology, because most of them have their own engineering departments," Wangers said. The prevalent attitude among automakers, he said, is they have no interest in technologies "not invented here."
Some automakers, notably Nissan and Audi, have rolled out cars that incorporate their own CVT designs. So it will be even harder for Fallbrook to displace technologies that have become embedded, Wangers said.
Angelo Guido, a retired Ford transmission engineer, has evaluated Fallbrook's CVT, and agreed the bicycle transmission is a good entry point for the company.
"They are working on proving the durability of this," said Guido, who consulted briefly with Fallbrook in 2003. "That would be a good thing to get under their belt, to be able to say that it's gone this many hours, or gone through this many duty cycles."
Fallbrook's Klehm agreed, saying, "We're going to practice before we enter the automotive industry."
Klehm also wants Fallbrook to become profitable before it tries to penetrate the automotive market.
"We have to have a company that can be successful without automotive," he said. In this way, the largest industry in the world represents an opportunistic market for Fallbrook.
Despite the risks that Fallbrook faces, London investor James L. Alexandre still made a venture investment in Fallbrook and sits on the company's board of directors.
"Every new investment is a towering cliff of risks with a glimmer of light or sunlight that represents the dream," Alexandre said. "The days at Fallbrook are filled in some ways with wonder at the speed with which it is coming to market."
Fulfillment for Miller, on the other hand, might lie as much in the fellowship of the venture as in any financial success.
"At the end of this life," the inventor said, "I hope to look back and say that this core group of people became lifelong friends – and that we were able to change the world."
Bruce Bigelow: (619) 293-1314; bruce.bigelow@uniontrib.com
05-27-05, 08:37 AM
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Be nice to see one in action. I believe one of the problems that CVTs have historically had is greater parasitic power loss. Part of the power you're expending is working to select the proper ratio in the CVT, as opposed to your regular transmission where when you select a gear, that's what you're in until you change it.
Of course you can get greater efficiency with a CVT since your gear ratio is more optimized, so it will be interesting to see if this turns into anything.
Of course you can get greater efficiency with a CVT since your gear ratio is more optimized, so it will be interesting to see if this turns into anything.
05-27-05, 08:42 AM
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CVT's are already in use on several automobiles. Nissan (Murano), Audi (A4), Ford (Freestyle) and others are all selling cars with CVT's. Most of these use a very heavy type of chain that drives through compression rather than tension. This model looks like some kind of internal hub driven by a regular (tension) bike chain. It makes me wonder how it would respond to changes in cadence. Would it force you to ride at a consistent cadence? How would it respond on hills? Would it be sensitive to pedal pressure? And the weight. It's hard to beat a chain/derailleur mechanism for weight efficiency.
05-27-05, 10:17 AM
#4
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Bike riders have limited power/torque, which means the ideal situation is one that promotes the absolute maximum efficiency, thats the direct drive chain method, no derailler, so no, I dont think this CVT will be a big hit with bike riders.It may be used by some folks that insist on having the latest and greatest neato toy,but im guessing even a derailler system is cheaper.Derailler systems are bad enough, most guys I know that ride alot wont even use on of those, I know I sure as heck wont.
05-27-05, 11:34 AM
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Assuming that they can solve the effficiency problem, wouldn't these force all riders to use the same cadence?
Paul
Paul
05-27-05, 01:11 PM
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A truly useful CVT would be a mechanism that allowed you to set the gear ratio to any value between the extremes allowed by the mechanism.
Not this auto-cadence variety in the article.
I know one way to do it, and in a few years time, I'll probably build a model of it to test. I just don't have the means now.
Not this auto-cadence variety in the article.
I know one way to do it, and in a few years time, I'll probably build a model of it to test. I just don't have the means now.
05-27-05, 01:41 PM
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is it more efficient, that's what it boils down to, does the costs and efficiency out perform derailleurs
05-27-05, 02:47 PM
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Originally Posted by PaulH
Assuming that they can solve the effficiency problem, wouldn't these force all riders to use the same cadence?
Paul
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05-27-05, 02:52 PM
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What's the benefit? With a 9 speed cluster, the gaps are small enough to not be a problem.
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05-27-05, 09:11 PM
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That thing looks a bit big, but what the heck, he's a fellow SDSU alum...
05-28-05, 06:05 AM
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Sounds like someone wants to one up the Landrider people. It may work for city bikes and crusiers, I don't think it will work for MTB and road bikes.
I recall Subaru having a CVT in the late 80s.
I recall Subaru having a CVT in the late 80s.
05-28-05, 07:27 AM
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CVT's have been around for decades. What most inventors miss is the extreme low amount of power people put out and how any waste or extra weight is a negative.
The cost and weight is just as important as the efficency. It has to be reliable and easy to fix too. Nothing will beat chain drive.All the derailleur does is put the chain in another place.
The cost and weight is just as important as the efficency. It has to be reliable and easy to fix too. Nothing will beat chain drive.All the derailleur does is put the chain in another place.
05-28-05, 07:55 AM
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DieselDan is right, there are some entry-level riders who might like it. Some people are really intimidated by shifting. I think that's irrational, but that's the way it is. I don't see any safety hazard, so if it gets those people on bikes, more power to them (actually, given the power drain the things cause, maybe I should say, "less power to them"). I can't imagine that they will become common.
05-28-05, 10:05 AM
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Originally Posted by 2manybikes
CVT's have been around for decades. What most inventors miss is the extreme low amount of power people put out and how any waste or extra weight is a negative.
The cost and weight is just as important as the efficency. It has to be reliable and easy to fix too. Nothing will beat chain drive.All the derailleur does is put the chain in another place.
The cost and weight is just as important as the efficency. It has to be reliable and easy to fix too. Nothing will beat chain drive.All the derailleur does is put the chain in another place.
more than any of the complexity of motorized machines. I'd have to agree that while not pretty or
smooth looking the derailluer/ chain system is the least wasteful of all methods to transfer human
power to a driven wheel.
Internal hub gears are also less wasteful while being more reliable than a CVT in the selection of the
riders perferred cadence.
05-28-05, 10:22 AM
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I think with 10 speed dura ace, record, centaur, ferengi, ultegra, 105, you're only moving 1 tooth or so at a time anyway, no need for CVT.
05-28-05, 10:24 AM
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Originally Posted by genec
Bruce Bigelow: (619) 293-1314; bruce.bigelow@uniontrib.com
05-28-05, 12:16 PM
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This may be more popular on small electric vehicles (heck, even velomobiles). They use a DC motor, which is happiest when it's spinning at a constant speed. Therefore, a CVT is the perfect match because it allows the motor to spin at a constant speed (right?)
That said, all of this is useless discussion until the company actually starts producing transmissions in quantity. Sure they have prototypes, but until I see these things on bikes at the LBS, I'll consider this technology vaporware.
That said, all of this is useless discussion until the company actually starts producing transmissions in quantity. Sure they have prototypes, but until I see these things on bikes at the LBS, I'll consider this technology vaporware.
05-28-05, 04:39 PM
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I like being in control of my bike...which means I decide what gear I am in. To me there is more freedom in that...then having some gizmo do it for me. It takes out the fun and challange for the bike rider in my opinion.
05-28-05, 06:02 PM
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Originally Posted by paintballdude
I like being in control of my bike...which means I decide what gear I am in. To me there is more freedom in that...then having some gizmo do it for me. It takes out the fun and challange for the bike rider in my opinion.
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This is Africa, 1943. War spits out its violence overhead and the sandy graveyard swallows it up. Her name is King Nine, B-25, medium bomber, Twelfth Air Force. On a hot, still morning she took off from Tunisia to bomb the southern tip of Italy. An errant piece of flak tore a hole in a wing tank and, like a wounded bird, this is where she landed, not to return on this day, or any other day.
05-28-05, 07:53 PM
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Originally Posted by dobber
Having watched the demo clip, I believe you actually do shift, or control, it.
05-28-05, 09:29 PM
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I read their website, and I thought, "Why bicycles?" The bicycle industry is notorious for making poor people out of rich people. Except at the high-end it's ruthlessly price-sensitive. Unless it gives an edge to racers, or cuts the manufacturing cost, you're not going to make any money putting it on bikes.
05-28-05, 10:34 PM
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Originally Posted by operator
Intimated by shifting? That's why we have single speeds.
