Artefact Bikes

Daniel_Y · January 28, 2024, 5:37pm

This year (2024) I am working on a new bike project: Artefact. It is the culmination of everything I have learned in the last 2-3 years of building and designing bikes. I am “launching” it at Philly Bike Expo (Mid March). I am building these bikes with Nick out of the NMW shop!

I don’t know exactly where this project will lead, nor its commercial viability, but I felt that the bike industry, bike designs, components, and framebuilding needs some new perspectives: a metal bike renaissance

I have a lot of projects cooking: rim brake road bikes, EC37 headsets, custom dropouts, DM brakes, CNC yokes, custom tubes, etc… and I’ll use this thread to provide updates. Mostly photos, since words are hard for me

Daniel_Y · January 28, 2024, 5:44pm

Custom EC37 Headtubes

Randoms

Chainstay Disaster

I spent an entire day trying to miter chainstays the traditional way. I admit I have been spoiled by 3D-printed yokes. Doing it in titanium did not help. RIP one pair if chainstays.

90deg head on the bridgeport:

Nick welding a giant stay to a tiny dropout:

sikocycles · January 28, 2024, 6:52pm

I will see you there

truth · January 28, 2024, 9:04pm

Awesome! What ever happened with your tapered 1 1/4" carbon forks?

Daniel_Y · January 28, 2024, 9:33pm

Still working on it, projects like that take time and a lot of $$$. I am heading to Taiwan next month, part of the reason is to scope out carbon forks!

truth · January 29, 2024, 2:17am

Please make the clearance huge and keep the anything mounts absent!

Daniel_Y · February 14, 2024, 6:03am

Finished the build!

Thoughts:

The frame build had some hiccups: First time building a titanium frame, traditional stays, quick release, rim brake, etc… A big thanks to @Neuhaus_Metalworks for welding up the frame. Welding Titanium is way out of my league right now.

EC37:

So far so good with the custom headtubes. I think for the next revision I am going to bump the wall thickness to 40mm. Since I am making hte headsets too, I can modify the design to make sure it all matches up!

Chainstays:

The CS to dropout weld/miter was the most stressful part of the design. There is not enough wiggle room on the Paragon 1.125 QR dropout. I don’t like how the1.5 DR

I think there needs to be a 1.25 QR dropout design, but I need more traction on this project to introduce a new hanger into the world.

I had to reach out to some friends in China and Taiwan to obtain a 22.2 and 25.4 tapered (to 16mm) chainstay to land it on the dropout. Even then, the space was tight! Luckily Nick was able to skill fully navigate the welds

Paint [TBD]

Paint is still the pain point of custom framebuilding. We are going to try a cerakote + raw finish. Ironically, when you factor in the cost of paint, a titanium frame is cheaper than a painted steel frame. I have a few mockups, but I don’t want to spoil the PBE bike!

Future stuff:

Building the bike was difficult, but the bigger challenge was to create a beautiful, marketable, engineered bike that was efficient to manufacture.

There are things that I still want to improve:

slightly shorter chainstays (410CS)
bigger, custom dropouts. Likely 1.25in diameter
In-house finishing
new direct mount rim brake standard

Will this bike be enough to bring back the pure road bike? Or will it flop? At least I tried!

bushtrucker · February 14, 2024, 10:01am

What’s the tyre clearance again? I feel like pure road in metal bike is all but dead but all-road / road plus / gravel certainly aint.

Brad · February 14, 2024, 1:40pm

This is the most compelling argument yet! Love the head tube shape.

I just want thru axle rim brake road. I will never understand why road took such a hard stance on disk and thru axle being exclusively tied together.

Daniel_Y · February 14, 2024, 2:45pm

Clearance: 700x32 max

That is certainly the gamble. All-road/gravel is hot, but it is a saturated market. Road bikes have evolved into niche race bikes which are fun to ride, but are expensive, hard to maintain, and not easy to fit. That leaves an opening for a very simple, sub $3000 road bike complete. Obviously, not going to get to that price point with a custom titanium frame, but this is a proof of concept to pursue a botique production frame in steel.

bushtrucker · February 14, 2024, 10:32pm

Nice. Honestly 70x32 sounds about right for a comfort road bike. It’s just a hard sell when everyone is being told they need either carbon fiber or disc brakes or fatter tyres (or all of the above). I’m trying to think what options are out there on the wide tyre (+30mm) rim brake road market right now.

Rivendell Roadini - 700 x 42 - $1300 Frameset (Taiwan)
Soma Pescadero - 700 x 38 - $800 Frameset (Taiwan)
Crust Malocchio - 700 x 35 - $1275 Frameset (Taiwan)
Ritchey Road Logic - 700 x 30 - $1600 Frameset (Taiwan?)

Also the Surly Pacer was avaliable until 2018 (rim brake, 700 x 32) but discontinued in place of the Midnight Special (disc brake, fat 650b). Never rode a Pacer but always liked the look of them.

In low trail/650b rim brake there are many more options such as the Brother Mr Wooden, Velo Orange Rando and any number of offerings from Crust but you’re defo getting away from pure road there.

Anyway, if the above bikes are selling well then I could see a market for a domesically produced comfort road bike. Especially at the pricepoint you’ve mentioned. I guess it all comes down to the marketing. Interested to see how you go!

RufGo · February 19, 2024, 4:12am

Looks awesome! Copywriter here with an annoying spellcheck for you: renaissance

Daniel_Y · February 21, 2024, 5:50am

I wanted to highlight some of the graphic design work my friend AJ did. It was a very fun process because we speak the same language (art), but our mediums are different. I work in 3D and numbers, she works with colors and shapes. She has the skills and knowledge I simply don’t possess!

Design Goals:

I wanted the aesthetic vibes to be timeless, moody, dark, and sophisticated. There were also technical limitations:

the headtube badge had to be laser-cuttable
the typography had to be legible on a tube
the graphics needed to have surface area so vinyl masks could withstand sandblasting and paint

This is as far as I got on my own, not bad, not good either:

AJ’s Drafts:

Finished Product

It’s cool to see how she works and the tools and language she uses to describe the designs. I learned a bunch, which was the biggest prize.

The market for fancy titanium and steel bikes is 40+ years old. With that in mind, I threw it all out the window and picked a bold, youthful aesthetic. After all, the future is in younger people.

The real magic is how effortlessly the colors, designs, and motifs can be combined, even by a complete noob, to look professional:

In real life:

I am still playing around with the placement of the downtube logos. I wanted the giant downtube logo, but for Philly Bike Expo, I needed the branding to be legible!

This was my first time using Fusion360 renders to test out paint schemes:

Conclusions

It was awesome working with AJ. She is a professional graphic designer for a cycling clothing company, and it shows! I’m stoked that we were able to come up with something unique. The brand now shows the boldness and energy that I need to make it successful!

bushtrucker · February 21, 2024, 10:10am

I’m into it. Head tube logo looks like some kinda ancient rune/carving. Could be a neat idea to get that milled/engraved rather than using a badge. You see it a lot on Ti frames but even on painted steel it looks pretty sharp if done right. Also means the logo will survive a few paint jobs.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3PwdMVMU8I/?hl=en&img_index=1

sikocycles · February 21, 2024, 12:27pm

Very very nice. Looks great.

@Daniel_Y Can I buy a shirt at PBE?

Daniel_Y · February 21, 2024, 3:46pm

Yes! If I get around to it by then

I am also giving a talk on Sunday about bike manufacturing in Taiwan!

sikocycles · February 21, 2024, 4:29pm

I will be at the show Saturday and spending St Pats day out and about in Philly.
Hope to go to Paddy pub.

Matt · February 21, 2024, 6:36pm

Would be nice to have that recorded and made available for who is interested but cannot be in Philly

Daniel_Y · May 25, 2024, 10:33pm

Spring Update:

On the bike-building business side of things that January through April is a massive sprint. Bike shows, lots of marketing, product launches, etc… You gotta make a lot of noise to get noticed. But we finally turned the corner through Spring and into summer.

Builds:

I finished up a rim Artefact Eterna for my friend AJ. She was the one who helped with the amazing graphic designs of Artefact

This build went much smoother than the first. I finally got the hang of working with titanium. Ti is much less forgiving than steel when cutting and forming. I also have a much better feel for “real world tolerance”. I realized all my clearance bodies in CAD are very conservative so I was able relax my expectations.

Nick welded it up:

EC37, rim brake, 3D printed Y-yoke

Designs:

Artefact DR30 Dropout:

I wanted to design a compact dropout for steel and titanium frames. The dropout I designed is 30mm in diameter with enough hoodspace for 22.2mm chainstays with 16mm seat stays.

I am also experimenting with titanium and 17-4 stainless hangers. The hanger shape is designed to be versatile. It can be used in 30mm, 38mm, 3D printed dropouts.

A sample run of 5 dropouts is in the works!

Here is the dropout in a road bike design:

Artefact Open Source (OS) UDH:

I am working on an “Open Source” frame project. More details coming soon! After much back and forth, I think the UDH Hanger is the best candidate to use for an open source frame. This is the dropout that I came up with:

It has a compound hood radius (38mm for CS, 51mm for SS). This allows the dropout to be more compact.

The way the hood is designed, you can have very large SS offsets to create space for CS mounted brakes:

The dropouts are nice and compact, but they still push the chainstays out an extra 3.5mm. On road and gravel bike this will lead to more heel rub, but for an Open Source design, it is more than enough.

Once the dropouts are tested (in a bike), I will release the CAD to everyone.

Random Thoughts:

Surface Modeling in Fusion360 is finally starting to click in my brain. I used it to model the tapered hood shape of my UDH design:

I found this video very helpful in understanding how and why to use surface modeling:

That video reminded me of the importance of sharing knowledge, so I have been working on some much better bike design and fusion360 tutorials. I have a “chainstay sub-assembly” video recorded and edited, but I know I can do better, so I am re-doing it.

Finally, here is a teaser for a bigger project we are working on at Neuhuas:

Daniel_Y · July 26, 2024, 4:10pm

I spent the last few months working on some really technical stuff. I got pretty burned out and stressed from it. It gets pretty scary ordering custom dropouts and 3D printed parts in titanium. Parts are expensive, and it takes a month or two for parts to show up. If you screw up, its an expensive mistake and a huge setback. Luckily (knock on wood), things are working out.

Luckily, building bikes and seeing everything come together has been rewarding. Every new design and every bike I build, I feel like I am still getting better.

ETERNA Rim

This is a rim brake ETERNA I built for my friend AJ. She helped design the Artefact branding, which everyone loves.

We experimented with a giant downtube logo with a contrasting matte and brushed finish. I think it turned out great. I am starting to prefer raw finishes because they are better for the environment.