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Anybody remember the 'Kirk Revolution' magnesium frame? It had both MTB & Road versions - nasty purple things with a good 2" of frame flex! Hold the bars & stand on a pedal & twist - wahaay! (Prone to cracking in normal use....even though the advert showed it being run over & remaining in shape.) "Made from seawater!"

Or that other one...can't remember it's name that used steel cables for one of the tubes that was held in tension.... (looked like a Pro-Flex) you were screwed in a crash when it was needed for its 'compression' abilities!

Then all of the early 'Ti' frames, Raleigh DynaTechs & clones with the incorrectly bonded tubes popping out of the lugs....had to laugh! Warranty claims abounded!

Is innovation dead? Or is it good riddance to idiotic ideas?

not Ti but you mean like this???

i actually saw a kirk at a triathlon recently..... very retro... i was almost jealous.

vaguely recall the cable thing.... always seemed like a bad idea.
the lefty suspension fork looks similarly.. wrong!

plenty of fairly exotic things in triathlon, but generally if the pros arent allowed to ride it the demand isnt there and the manufacturers probably dont bother to build it! and the powers that be wont let the pros ride anything that doesnt look like a proper bike

Ahhh, good times. A friend of mine had the MTB one - available in any shade of purple you wanted as long as it was a particularly horrible one. It was evidently some kind of cutting edge magnesium/lead alloy since it was about three times the weight of my Reynolds steel frame.

trimble !!!

I think the only word to describe that is... fugly.

I think the two are probably mutually inclusive, if you have innovative designs then you're likely to get some dodgy reject ones at the same time!

Bicycle design does still have a lot of innovation, especially in the Mountain Biking area (not really surprising as this is the most fashionable sector right now):

In full suspension designs, the FSR, VPP, i-drives even the basic single pivot bikes from Kona and Orange are very well built and do the job a treat! The advances in suspension technology with inertia and platform valves, -ve and +ve air pressure chambers. Even the materials used, 5 years ago a carbon fibre full-suspension design would've been unheard of, now Scott and Giant are two companies that have production CF bikes available. This together with more advanced machining and hydroforming techniques for manipulating Al means that exotic frame designs can be produced which actually work! (Sometimes!). Then you've got new braking systems, v-brakes have replaced canti's and they are now being replaced by disk brakes.

Roadbikes don't seem to have developed as much (I blame the UCI!), but even so Cannondale have done truly remarkable things with Al to make such light, yet stiff frames. Omega and Time are churning out some very nice CF creations. Bottom Brackets have had an overhaul and been moved outside their shells, and headsets have migrated into the head tube. Not sure when STI or Ergolevers etc... were introduced but they've been a big influence on the shape of bikes too.

So there is still innovation in cycle design, it's just not quite as "eccentric" as it was!

£4k worth of bike.

Internal gearbox.(based on Shimamo 8spd Nexus).....bike first prototyped 8 years ago, now in production.

http://www.hot-wheels.co.uk/GT_IT/GT_IT.html


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