I'm Building a Wooden Bike!

[ArborVelo]

Rough Concept

After much wrestling in Fusion, I’ve got down a rough concept of the bike outline.

For version 0, I’ve decided just to copy the gravel geometry of the Trek Checkpoint in a 58CM frame:

I’ve spent a lot of time on YouTube learning fusion. The most valuable advice came from CFF’s own @Daniel_Y. Here’s the link to his canonical “how to draw a bike in Fusion" tutorial posted up here on CFF.

[Video Tutorial] Drawing a real mountain bike in fusion360

Thanks for the push to try this is SolidWorks! There a a few items SW users need to be aware of- beware these are coming from a total novice so there are certainly better workarounds . 1-Make your axle path construction geometry or the Extrude Cut for the dropouts will make it go away. 2-Make a new Plane and circle sketch for the dropout cut. If you Use the center line sketch, that sketch becomes assigned to the cut. 3-The Combine feature is not the same in SW. I was told to use the Split fe…

I also blasted through a quick class on Fusion on Udemy. Well worth the $15 bucks! https://www.udemy.com/course/fusion-360-complete-course/

After copying Daniel’s tutorial a couple times, I was brave enough to venture out on my own in Fusion.

It immediately became clear that given the different profiles of the wood frame I’m using, I’d have to adapt the “centerline” approach that Daniel is using. (Round tubes can easily be swept down the centerlines. I needed a different approach given the wood tube intersections I had invisioned.) Additionally, the geometry of the Trek created some pretty tight chainstays that needed some creativity (which is possible in wood!) to compress that dimension.

I ended up with a wild mess / cludge of sketches. Mostly things are constrained, but I left a lot of the control point splines unconstrained at the moment given my iteration. But in the spirit of perfect is the enemy of the good, I’m pushing ahead on this design and then will go down and fully constrain everything once I’m fairly comfortable with it.

You can see some unconstrained splines in there. And also you can see the projection of the “Base Sketch” concept that Daniel uses as the underlying layout model.

Probably the best thing to do in the end will be to start from scratch and design the whole thing. I’ve learned a lot of lessons and probably could get the whole thing done again in an hour or two. The parametric model pretty much works now, but I’m sure I can make this much more simple at the end.

Next steps are for me to finalize the dimensions based on some of the inserts I am awaiting in the mail for the BB, seat tube, and headtube. I’m leaving the dropouts as a problem for Future Me. I will likely use some Paragon dropouts, but they will need some custom attachments.

Additionally, I have some innovations on the “clamshell vs box beam” construction method that I want to model out and share next.