NewConceptsCafé

Before going to the café I went to the kiosk to buy LAMOTO Magazine. While I was tasting the first coffee I was reading the new article about the Demonstener D1200R. It´s the first time it rides at full throttle and it wasn´t too bad, as you can see in the picture. The system worked well and as I tell you in the last post, the main problem was the boxer engine.

 I learnt a lot spending the day with the Speed Racing CEV Suzuki  team at the new Motorland racetrack and with Capirossi anb Bautista. It´s incredible to see how this pilots ride. They can´t just ride fast, they push always to the limit while they are on the track. In fact Bautista crashed into the barrier. They take advantage of this chance to learn the track because they couldn’t train with the  MOTOGP because it´s forbidden by the competition rules.

They loved the D1200R but unfortunately they couldn´t ride it.

I invite Spanish people to buy the magazine. The article is a comparison between the different Center Hub Steering and other alternative suspension systems, really interesting. 

I´ll publish the article here for people around the world, but this will be of course after the next number gets published. I´m sorry!

After this report we have established a really good partnership with the magazine and we are thinking about a really interesting OPEN DESIGN PROJECT.

In less than a month you´ll know everything if it´s successful.

I need some help… I heard that even in the BIKE UK magazine have been published some photos, have you seen them??

I´ve added a new picture to the wall of the Café. There are a lot of them, tempus fugit…

Carlos Beltrán Carrión

While I was opening the doors of the Café I was thinking about a conversation I had with a reporter of  ‘LA MOTO’, a really good spanish bike magazine. I met him in MOTORLAND, the new MOTOGP racetrack. He came to test our bike, the Demonstener D1200R. We were sharing box with Álvaro Bautista and Loris Capirossi (Suzuki MOTOGP Team) that came also for an article . It was really a nice day! 

The magazine article will be posted the 15th of this month so I´ll share it as soon as possible. 

The reporter pushed to the limit the Demonstener and then he discovered that the limit was the BMW boxer engine. The cylinder was scratching the asphalt and making him loose the front wheel grip. He was annoyed because he felt that the steering and suspension system could go further. 

Our bike has a type of steering commonly known as Center Hub Steering. He thoughts, as I do that this kind of systems have been underestimated and that their time is still to come. This idea keeps hanging on from the early 60s and may be it will never success. But let me think different, as I usually do. If we prove that it´s better it will success. And the only place we could prove this it´s of course the racetrack! Do you want to help us?? Soon you´ll know more…

This post plans to be the first of a series about alternative bikes suspension and steering systems, so let me start from the beginning…

 At the corner of the Café, just under the pictures of some beautiful caferacer bikes there is an strange two wheeled piece of metal. is that a bike? 

Well… let me introduce the V2R, friendly known as the StreetDumper. V2R is the Spanish acronym of Two Wheel Vehicle and it´s our first attempt to create an absolutely new vehicle (a bit ambitious may be!) . It was a low cost project that I lead in Vinci Innovaciones Tecnológicas that surprisingly worked well. 

We started with an enormous report filled of differential equations and an old man patent about a steering system. 

The report was made by CARTIF 

The old man was Juan Elizalde. 

The project was a Center Hub Steering scooter with a 150cc Scarabeo engine. 

The bike he built didn´t work.

The CHS is a system were the steering is not in the headstock but inside or at least closer to the wheel hub. It´s normally mounted on a swingarm that extends from the bottom of the frame. This allows new settings in a bike like the antidiving or the variation of the castor angle while the suspension gets compressed among other possibilities. We´ll have time to talk about CHS. 

Looking at the Elizalde´s patent we understood that it was an interesting start point, there were lot of good ideas even if the adopted solution was not so good. The steering was a complete chaos because was made of universal joints with angles of almost 45º between the axles. When you turned the handlebar for about 15 degrees the wheel didn´t turn. But if you turned a degree more then suddenly the wheel turned the 16 degrees. This phenomenon it´s called bump-steering and it was common (in a smaller way) to all the Center-Hub-Steering until we designed the StreetDumper.  

The other big problem to solve in the Elizalde´s bike was the heavy swing arm that caused a bad sprung mass ratio. However it had a new interesting concept that was connecting both front and rear suspensions. In fact, as you can see, the idea of the project was unconsciously to put automotive technology on a bike. 

The way we solved the bump steering was based on a phrase we used to listen in math class: ‘An straight line is a curve of infinite radius’ And that was the solution. 

When the front wheel travel in a fork upwards it goes on a straight line. So we choose a point sufficiently far to simulate this. We choose an 1 meter radius front swingarm. It was big but light. To filter the small displacement we hanged the handlebar from a swinging connecting rod. So it moved back and forward in a negligible way. So we had the first non bump-steering CHS bike!

Next we did was linking front and rear suspension making front and rear swingarm work together. The bike is really comfortable, kind of new featherbed chassis! even though the studies shows that over 70 Km/h it becomes unstable. Only my dear friend and test pilot Guillermo de Oya Jiménez (A.K.A. Cuco) rode over that speed and I couldn´t see the fear in his eyes. At that time our resources to measure things were just our five senses. 

In the Demonstener we have removed the suspensions link. You can never ride a bike like that under 70 Km/h! 

The system worked. But it had a problem. When the rear wheel was compressed by a bump, it made front suspension to extend. It was surprisingly comfortable but risky. Here you can find an old PowerPoint explaining the systems of the bike. It has lots of mistakes but it was the beginning. Hope you enjoy it as a museum piece!

This was the theory, in the next post you´ll see a young version of the Bikers Build Off! But this will be in the next coffee… 

Carlos Beltrán Carrión 

Follow also this links if you want to know more about CHS: 

Our bikes: Demonstener D1200R

One of the inventors: Difazio

Other builders: the amazing Harrier , Tryphonos, Vyrus and  Bimota Tesi 

And of course: The guru Tony Foale

Designing dreams was a Myspace that once I opened. Perhaps I never returned to use it, perhaps once. When I thought seriously about beginning a blog I considered making something really different. The simply idea of writing messages and sending them in a bottle did not convince me. That´s the reason why I have created a meeting point where people interested in technology, design and engineering can participate. A gathering if you prefer it, where armed of talent, paper and pencil, ideas are shared. Where Open Design Projects will be proposed and we all will be able to collaborate with our work and our means to materialize them. Where published papers become a reference, creating therefore an innovating community.