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Locals make breakthroughs in bicycle technology
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Bicycles are a simple technology more than a century old, but the bike industry nonetheless regularly comes up with new versions.
Innovation is partly aimed at changing tastes and fashions, according to Mitch Rovins, who owns Beacon Cycling & Fitness in Northfield.
Models range from showy cruisers designed to get noticed while exercising to unique creations that blur the line between functional transportation and art such as the wooden-frame bicycles made by Cape May contractor Max Samuelson.
Occasionally, but not often, a technology or design breakthrough transforms the human-powered landscape, as when modern derailleurs — the mechanism used to shift gears — in the 1930s allowed riders to change gears without stopping and fiddling, or when gears were added to cruisers in the 1970s so they could be ridden back up hills and the mountain bike was born.
Bicycling may be on the threshold of such a change now, with the first mass-market bike doing away with the cyclist’s least favorite part of the vehicle: the chain.
Trek, the largest domestic bike manufacturer and a brand carried by Beacon, is offering two models this year that use a belt-drive mechanism to transmit pedal power to the rear wheel.
The advantages of belt drive on a bicycle are many:
_The belt, unlike a chain, is clean, requiring no grease or lubricant to prevent wear. No black smears on pantlegs anymore._The belt is maintenance free. No frequent lubrication or occasional cleaning as with a chain.
_Riding is quieter, with no metal-to-metal constant contact and movement.
_The belt lasts three times longer than a chain, which for many riders will mean nearly a lifetime of use.
The drive belt on the Trek District and Soho bikes is not like the fan belt or serpentine belt visible under the hood of a car. It’s more like the toothed timing belt within the engine that runs the valves and typically lasts more than 90,000 miles of driving.
Only higher tech. Trek’s belt is made of carbon-fiber composite that’s light, can’t be cut or stretched, and won’t corrode.
“The benefit is you can run it for a long time without any maintenance or problems,” Rovins said this week. “Especially in a salty environment, it will be quite an advantage to not have corrosion or sand get stuck in the chain and cogs.”
One early adopter of the belt-drive bikes is Jeff Sutherland, an attorney who commutes from Ocean City to Linwood on a Trek Soho. Sutherland said he likes how his bike is quiet and clean.
One thing drive belts can’t do that chains can is move from one gear, or cog, to another. So to get the speeds that Sutherland wants for riding fast and easy while pedaling over the bridges out of Ocean City, his bike’s rear wheel has an internal eight-speed hub.
Rovins said such internally geared hubs are very popular in Europe and are far more reliable that the three-speed hubs common decades ago.
And while a chain-drive system’s roughly 3,000 moving parts are exposed to dirt and the elements, multiple speed hubs keep their workings sealed and clean, keeping maintenance to a minimum.
With such advantages, it’s easy to imagine belt-drive bicycles becoming common, but Rovins said for that to happen production will have to reach a level at which their specialized parts become cheaper and their cost comes down from the near-$1,000 range.
“If we get to a multiple-speed bike with a belt drive for $500, I think we’ve got something happening there,” he said.
’s wooden bicycles start at the price of a belt-drive Trek and range up to nearly three times that — but then again, they’re also unique works of art that sometimes in bike shops, sometimes in galleries.
Samuelson, a contractor and owner of MC Squared in Cape May, said he has always tinkered with personal projects outside his work on residential and commercial buildings. A former bike racer, Samuelson said a friend one day quoted him a line from a movie where a brat kid says to a struggling balloon crafter, “Build me a bicycle, clown.”
So he did, making the frame entirely out of hardwood. He and others liked the result so much that he built nearly 20 more from a variety of woods, including mahogany, ash, purpleheart and oak.
The wooden bikes are equipped with conventional cycling components and work just like regular bicycles, which is part of the challenge, Samuelson said.
“Art is usually there to be looked at, and mine has to be functional, so I have to walk this line between making it beautiful and making it perfectly functional,” he said.
Components also drive up the price of materials alone to $700. With each bike requiring about 75 hours of work, the bikes have to be priced as art for Samuelson to make money on them.
The wooden bikes have been in the artists’ co-op, in West Cape May; the Rusty Nail, in Cape May; and Algie’s Place bike shop, in Wildwood Crest, he said. There are also four in the Breezin’ Up clothing store in the Hamptons, N.Y.
Samuelson said he’s working on a new version that could gain in popularity by reducing two things cyclists try to avoid: weight and cost.
“I’m shooting to have an under-20-pound wooden bicycle, and I think it will be one of my cheaper models,” he said.
Whatever the price, his self-propelled pieces of furniture would surely get noticed on any boardwalk or bike path.
Contact Kevin Post:
609-272-7250
Posted in BUSINESS on Saturday, November 21, 2009 11:00 pm Updated: 11:34 pm.
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