interesting:

https://techau.com.au/mass-production...-set-to-crash/

may take a few years to trickle around, but definitely exciting stuff...

Its not the fibre, its the layup thats expensive.

I had a carbon fiber breakthrough where my seatpost entered the seat tube ... so i decided to switch to alloy until I lose another 40 lbs.

Subscribed.

How long did it take you to lose the first 40 lbs?

And the tooling. Tooling costs are not an issue if you can build and sell enough units but short runs of a shape and size get expensive.

Ben

Well... I broke my collarbone, then twisted my knee, then got a lung infection .. . and managed to gain a lot of it back.

It took a lot of hard work because I am a lazy fat man ... and now I have to do it all over again. And, now I work almost twice as many hours each week so I ride less.

Man, it is tough having so many First-World problems.

But ... the upside is that because of my job I could afford a Ritchey seatpost which was twice as expensive as the CF, so I didn't gain much weight over CF ... and it still only cost $40 delivered.

The manufactures would collude to keep the prices as they are

Diamonds are not rare, they are fairly abundant and not that hard to mine either.. yet.. you get the idea, supply control.

ever wonder why sneakers don't cost $10.. textile and plastic. and the design of shoes has not changed in 2,000 years.

Need Humans to make so never gonna be cheap, that and resin is KEY

I had a similar kind of thing where I fell, tried to land on my ski pole, and snapped it. But the end result was the opposite, I'm trying to find the same one.

The article basically says there's a new producer of raw carbon fibers. I guess that can only be good.

You can buy $10 sneakers.

So, when do we get long fiber nanotubes?

not al diamondas are gem quality. diamonds are expensive because among other things they are hard to cut and polish.


gemstone diamonds are expensive because enough people were convinced theyre expensive to sustain the demand.


sneakers are $10. so long as theyre not labeled nike/converse/vans. i bought a pair last week on vacation because i didnt anticipate tramping around on the beach and in the dirt as much as i did. retail store - selling them for 5-15$ street price. TIENDA DE ROPA ONLINE PARA HOMBRE Y MUJER - INSIDE although fashionable kids probably wouldnt shop there.

my business shoes are handmade old-world style at a price im too embarassed to share.

layup as in the labor, tooling, overhead, etc? alloy bike tubes are also cheap - like $100 for a name brand columbus, reynolds, tubing set... its everything else that cost money. raw materials have always been a small part of the price

Yeah ... diamonds are a complete scam. No scacity, even of gem-quality stones. They are seen as a luxury item, so people charge luxury prices. For some reason Air Jordans are treated the same way .... people have their tastes (by which I mean, there are a lot of stupid people out there--from my K-Mart sneaker perspective (Yeah, I know I could jump higher, run faster, and dunk if I wore Jordans ... right?)

CF doesn't really have an expensive portion of production, as I understand it---the expense comes in design. Once the weave, shape, and direction of each piece is determined, anyone can lay the pieces in a mold. Not everyone can figure how to get different parts of the frame to flex in the right directions and not in others.

Thank you.

/Thread

Thinking about this, I wonder if CF will ever come down in price so that it will be as cheap as fiberglass? Cheaper?

But, there may be a lot of people in the industry that want to restrict production and keep the prices inflated.

How many of the manufactures can make it as cheaply as the article indicates, but try to keep a huge markup on it. Then more markups in the weaving and distribution. And more markups in the layup.

So, suddenly a $50 plastic bicycle costs $5000.

You can buy rolls of CF for not much money on ebay all day long. And then get the epoxy/resin stuff from boat repair catalogs. I did just that 7 or so years ago and fabbed up some cosmetic motorcycle stuff for kicks. It's not as simple as that when you're talking about a mass produced bicycle frame.

Seriously though, could you guys put down your tinfoil hats for a minute and realize what all is involved in the creation of a bicycle from concept to showroom floor? Yes, the raw materials are cheap. The overhead is insane. How many different companies at more than one level have their hand in the production of a single bicycle? Wheels, components, tires, etc. are all factory direct to the bicycle manufacturer, but there is still a whole level of R&D, production, distribution, etc. for each of those pieces. The frame is designed, tooling made, materials sourced (and the people making those materials also require some base engineering, raw materials, tooling, distribution, etc.), layup for carbon, welding for Alu/Steel, assembly, distribution, etc. And everyone at every level has some form of management, HR, employees, real estate, utility bills, and on and on. And THEN it gets to your dealer for final assembly, storage, etc.

You CAN NOT look at the price of CF per yard and assume a 20 percent reduction in that price will translate to a 20% reduction in the cost of an entire bicycle. You'd be lucky if it even made a 1-2% dent.

CF doesn't dent, so a 1-2% dent in CF would not be lucky - it would be assplosive.

If you want to get really annoyed, watch this 20+ year old episode of Frontline:

You'll never want to buy a diamond again.

You have to respect DeBeers for their evil marketing genius, though. They've duped people out of a several months' salary for 100 years over a chip of worthless glass-like material without the majority of people even understanding why diamonds cost so much, who DeBeers is and how they operate. It's absurd.

The only reason anyone is ever willing to pay $5,000 for a $50 bike (as mentioned above) is because elves from the Trek factory brake into our houses every night and hypnotize us.

If one looks at my Colnago C-40 (or the C-50), it is pretty much round tubes (fluted) glued into carbon fiber lugs.

I presume it is actually relatively easy/quick to build.

Most of the new frames are at least in part molded (perhaps in pieces, then glued together). But, one could likely make a relatively cheap tube and lug frame. Modern frames, however, have moved the joints somewhat away from the corners.

The problem with racing bikes, of course, is that everything has to be made as light as possible. But, I could foresee a greater divergence between the cutting edge frames, and those sold to the masses. Will we ever see Walmart selling $200 Full Carbon bikes?

We may also eventually see more automation in the layup, especially for US and European manufacturing.

As far as I can tell, CF does have some flex. I have a CF saddle that does move a bit. Actually, squeaking is a big problem with it.

I have another cheaper saddle that also flexed, but unfortunately it was held together with globs of unreinforced epoxy that didn't flex as much as the saddle. So, the flexing CF is just fine. The non-flexing epoxy isn't.