Bike frame cad software

Zero Compromises. Mountain I built are made from the highest grade steel, giving the full strength of steel with the lightweight nature of properly gained tubing. Discover More Discover More. Discover More. Road Built for speed, built for comfort, made to fit your body like a glove. Never compromising. Vlad Badge Brass badge mounted to the headset. Details To Your Spec.

Does anyone know Alibre? I would do some research and see what software other bike manufactures are using. I really don't think anyone makes software just for bikes.

PRO-E or Solid-works would be a start. Costum Bikes design is fusion of art and engineering. I would suggest SolidWorks for its ease of use. Wheel size 3. Dropout spacing e.

For my frame, I decided to use T6 aluminum tubing. It is lightweight, corrosion resistant, readily available and inexpensive, and well-proven in the cycling industry. My choice of tubing diameters and wall thicknesses was based largely on precedent from other bicycles, and the commodity tubing that was available I bought mine from Aircraft Spruce.

My main tubes are 1. Make sure that you do your research! My bicycle is going to be used for city riding by a lb rider. These wall thicknesses are not appropriate for mountain biking or heavier riders. Obviously, using different materials requires totally different tubesets as well.

Tubeset manufacturers like Colombus, Dedacciai, Henry James and Nova Cycle Frames are good resources to find out what wall thicknesses are appropriate for different materials, applications, and locations on your bike. The carbon fiber I used was primarily 0. I also used a small amount of 12K carbon fiber tow. The fiberglass I used is extremely light. I also purchased this through Aircraft Spruce, but these materials are available through many online suppliers.

That said, you should always take precautions to minimize your exposure to the uncured epoxy. For ease of assembly, I used a stock head tube, bottom bracket shell, dropouts, and V-brake bosses rather than fabricating them myself.

You can buy these parts individually, but I liberated mine read: chopped them off with an angle grinder from suitable broken donor bicycles at my local DIY bike repair space in Toronto, BikeSauce. It has all the basic functionality you need for this process sketching, extruding, sweeping, filleting, splitting, and shelling. Draw 2D sketches that lay out all the tubes and other key dimensions such as dropout spacing 2.

Create transition sketches as necessary for curve sections e. Large, gentle radii are your friend. The tolerances on these plugs need to be tight so that it will fit snugly into your tubes for accurate self-jigging of the frame. This saves weight and money!

STL In my case, because I was using dropouts from a donor bicycle I cut apart, I also needed to reverse engineer these in my CAD model. I separated my bottom bracket region into two separate parts - the junction of the seat tube, down tube, and bottom bracket shell became one, and a wishbone part that created the angles for the chainstays. This facilitated two-part moulding of the carbon fiber, since I only needed one parting line. The thickness of this body defines the wall thickness of your carbon fiber.

I used a uniform 2. This will create a flat gusset in between the tube joints, providing a huge amount of bonding area for your carbon fiber parts, and adding stiffness and strength. This gusset is a total of 2. This is the base part of the mould.

This will ensure the two pieces clamp together straight. If you designed your bike with moulding in mind, almost all of the lugs can be created with a simple 2-part female mould. However, due to the bottom bracket shell, your BB lug usually requires 3 moulds 2 to form around the frame tubes and the top of the BB shell, and 1 to form around the bottom of the BB shell. A large part of the design intent with this frame was to use the 3D-printed lugs to remove the need for a jig.

The prints for my parts and moulds came from an Up! The resolution, part quality, accuracy and ability to print support material very easily made it perfectly suitable for the needs of this project. For those of you who already know about working with fiber-reinforced plastics composites , feel free to skip this section. But even those who are familiar with fiberglass and polyester resins should note that carbon fiber is a slightly different animal.

It is 10x stronger when oriented with the fibers than across them. Being anisotropic allows the designers to put the strength in a carbon fiber part only where they need it. This saves weight, but requires that you know exactly what stresses the part will be subjected to! See the attached picture to see how sharply the modulus stiffness of carbon fiber drops off when the load is not oriented with the fiber.

The number of plies used and the direction determines the strength of the part. Bike tubes have most of their fibers running in this direction. This is the least important direction on a bicycle. This is important, especially at junctions like the bottom bracket. For very complicated junctions like the bottom bracket lug where there are a lot of forces at work that are difficult to predict, this kind of layup will be heavier, but safer. Be careful when sanding your part — if you sand down a lumpy layup for the sake of aesthetics, you may be severing the long-strand carbon fibers and compromising its integrity.

This is where the epoxy resin comes in. The epoxy is the matrix that holds all the carbon fibers in place and turns the individual layers into a strong, unified whole. If your layup has too much epoxy, the only disadvantage is that it will be heavier and a bit more brittle. While more expensive than polyester, it is significantly stronger, less brittle, and creates much stronger bonds with the carbon fibers. The key to preventing this is to compress the fibers together.

This can be accomplished with a two-part mould, by vacuum-bagging, or simply by wrapping the part in vinyl electrical tape sticky-side out to compress it all together. Unlike steel - and to a much lesser extent, aluminum - which will bend when they fail, carbon fiber parts will snap.

A little bit of extra weight will go a long way for reliability and peace of mind. Once you have your 3D printed joints and tube-stock, carefully check the dimensions that you need to cut your tubing down to.

Being really accurate at this stage will pay off later. The easiest way to cut metal tubing is with a pipecutter, as it will produce a clean, 90 degree cut. Measure twice, use plenty of cutting fluid and be patient. Also take note that the pipecutter can swage the cut end of your tube a tiny bit, so you may need to file out the inner diameter a bit to maintain a perfect friction fit with your 3D printed parts.

Do a test fit with all your pieces first. Everything should fit together tightly — play between the tubes and the sockets can lead to inaccuracy. Observe the surface prep rules — solvent wipe, rough sand, then solvent wipe again. Let your solvent flash off for a minute, and then mix up a batch of 5 minute epoxy. Featured News Training Workshop. Tell us about your business background and how you got into software creation: I studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

What inspired you to develop BikeCAD and what are the limits of the software? Have you time for bike design yourself? Typically who downloads your software? Any big bike brand designers? How complex is the software for a beginner wanting to try their hand? Any tips for the beginner? Beyond design, what other capabilities has the software? Share this: Tweet. Share This Post:. Cinelli and Columbus brands take new majority investor 7 July, Mark Sutton Comments Off on Cinelli and Columbus brands take new majority investor.

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