Filming the trophie build

The last months have been complete madness.... I have pushed it harder the last months then I have ever pushed it in my life and for all good reasons...

One of the top of the list of crazy projects was to design and build trophies for RedBull's Rampage mountain bike event held every year in Utah.

If you know about the rampage, then you know its the event to win.

I was asked to tackle the design of the trophies with one goal in mind - make them super rad !

At first I came up with about 15 concept sketches and narrowed it down to some of the best ones, while I worked one night on the machines, my best friend Margaret Holland ( she has painted stuff in my shop before ) decieded to put some of my chicken stratch concepts in to a more presentable sketch ready to win over the kids at RedBull.

The final design just getting started....

Within an hour we were mostly complete on the design with some good concepts.

One of the first ideas was to make the spur into a belt buckle but that idea was thrown out for safety and other BS that it might bring on having a super sharp gear belt buckel.

With the help of my buddy Matt Carney on the Solidworks CAD program - we were able to design a cowboy boot made from layers of 1/4 inch plywood to make it look like the mountains in Utah.

My next plan, once I figured out the size and all the details of the boot was to come up with a rider jumping off the " Rock like wooden boot".

 

While I was designing and building the boot trophies, my buddy Jefferson Hower at RadioRobot in Oakland, was hammering out this crazy 3x5 foot sign for the finish line.

 

With the trophies and sign loaded up I headed out to Utah to drop off everything.

 

Theres no way I could drive thru California with out stopping by the air/spaceport in Mojave, CA to check on some of the rad stuff hidding in the field.'

 

Quick stop at AREA 51 to get yelled at ....

 

The finish line sign went up..... Everyone was stoked !!

Ready for Fridays events

 

 

 

We will just have to wait until this weekend ( Oct 7th ) to watch the Madness live on Redbull's site but until then watch the building of the trophies. Matt Ducot once again hammering out a rad video in record time for everyone to enjoy. 

 

Redbull Rampage Trophies from Matt Ducot on Vimeo.

SPD of fun

Matt Ducot the master behind the camera came to me and asked me...

" think you can help me make a camera mount that mounts to a pedal for a shoe company I am working with"

The shoe company DZR shoes based out San Francisco was working with Matt on a project and so he needed a cool way to make some custom shots for their shoe lines.

The idea was simple and the mount I designed had to work for all kinds of angles to get the shoe shot from the front, side, rear and angle its designed to do it all, all you need is to move the SPD mount.

45 minutes later we had a custom 4130 chromoly camera mount ready for testing. With some prototype DZR shoes in hand we did a quick test shot....

here is the overall layout

What do you think?

I am stoked and a bit dizzy

Heres the video kids...

Enjoy and thanks to Matt for filming it

Make it happen !!

If you read my blog you know that I get frustrated somedays about public schools across the USA dropping shop programs to save money and time.

I try my part to keep the kids a-buildin' and the dream alive....

This is a new edit from Matt Ducot for his work Connect-Ed which is a non-profit with the vision of getting videos out there for the kids in high schools to see what " A day in the Life " looks like for different careers.

Matt followed me around for a day and I built some stuff... He did a quick edit a while back for my blog, but this one has audio and a bit more footage from that first shoot that turned out so rad.

Enjoy

Prototype Fabricator from ConnectEd Studios on Vimeo.

Here we go..... You ready?

100 MPH + on a track bike with no fork?

This project between my brother Jason Tiedeken and I has been on the burner for a while and its time to just hammer it out. I did the mock up of the bike and some of you got a sneak peek of it in the 360 deg view of my shop weeks back but its time to put it on the blog, plus a quick teaser video from Matt Ducot

The vision started about a year or so back when I asked my brother to team up with me to design and build something fun and fast, something that would get people thinking different about the bicycle industry and all the possibilities still out there when it comes to design.

He sent over some sketches for me to think about...



This one of the many 30 second sketch that caught my eye!





In my years of working in the prototype industry, I have got the opportunity to work with some of the most famous designers and engineers but my brother scores in the very top few because of his mad skills of thinking outside of the box as well as being one of the fastest design engineers on a computer, and then being able to walk in to the shop and build it, to put the cherry on top.
He is very highly in demand across many industries for that very reason.

Jason T, my brother and owner dude of Metal Morphosis Engineering threw a quick 3D drawing together of the creature to see what it would look like 

in Solidworks so we could decided the layout. This was a quick drawing to take some of the guess work out of it, there was nothing specific about his drawing to build off of, most of the time this style of 3D modeling is done as a point of concept to clear up any questions before the specific drawings are made and building starts. This is the reason there is no seat, the chainring goes thru the tube and so on, its nothing more then a good way to view your project in a different way then a hand drawing.

My brother's concept was locked down and it was now my job to make it a reality, my brother stepped back and let me do the magic in my Skunkworks shop in Oakland,CA. 

Peter from Cane Creek has always been a believer of anything rolling out of the MLS doors and was quick to join the effort with some sick carbon wheels and AER headset.

Since Cane Creek always helps me out I decided why not do an internal headset using their AER headset,

I decided to make it using a bottom bracket from a BMX frame I was suppose to build for a customer, the BB is the same size bearing bores as an internal headset, the only differences being in the small angle the bearings rest on ( you can see inside the tube), I machined an angle inside for the bearing rests. Kinda cool and it took about 5 minutes to make it work, if your ever looking for great info on machining headtubes for custom projects check out Cane Creek for PDFs they show every dimension need to make all sizes of HTs. 

I did some quick layouts dimensions to set up my frame table

The frame geo is based off of Lance's TT bike.

My frame table I built about 2 years ago was built for this very reason.

TO THINK OUTSIDE OF THE FIXTURE

not to be constrained by the requirements of where to put the tubes, it takes a bit longer to build a frame because you need to be measuring extra, but in the end, your brain has no limits to where you need to be.

I machine out all the parts to save every possible gram...

There did I sound like a roadie?

I machine out the parts just to make sure that later down the road if I need to back purge the frame with argon for better weld quality or if I need to run cables inside the frame I don't have to get ghetto crazy with the frame and do it the wrong way with a long drill bit and some beers.

I know your asking " How do this thing steer"??

good question

These good old "Morse Push Pull Cables" as seen on your dads dragster and boat

This one is for a TOP FUEL dragster hammer shifter from B&M

I havn't lock down all the details with it and the mounting but I had to start somewhere with the concept.

If you going to go over 100 MPH your going to need a big ring, maybe like 90+ tooth

Thats a 52 tooth laying on the table and check out those chainstays.. talk about a pain to make

As of right now this is how far I am.

I built the mock-up bike already to make sure it looked right.

I like it.

Now I am running a orbital sander over all the tubes to clean them and doing the final tacks and cuts on the tubes.

Matt Ducot working on the video teaser

I don't think he wanted me to take the picture?

He made this video so quick and with such little amount of footage, kinda makes me wonder what he would do if he had a lot of footage and way more time. 

                               Monkey Likes Shiny - 100mph + concept track bike
                                                    from Matt Ducot on Vimeo.

Remember tell you mom you seen it first here on MLS, she will be stoked.

Monty Python classic

Jay Bird the star !

Here is my buddy Jay in the new Harbortown chopper video.

Yetiman - The good old days

I found this old video from a few years ago when i first got my Yeti 4x mountain bike.

I was so pumped Art filmed me riding

The days of USA made bikes

Check out this rad video I found, it shows most of the steps in building mass produced bicycles.

I like the movie because it shows them making the tubing in house - this was very common, up until the late 1970s for Schwinn and Columbia. The very large roll of thin flat strips of steel shows up at the factory on train cars and the tubing mill rolls the steel strip in to a tubing shapes. The last step of the mill is to weld the seam of the steel strips closed, making a sealed tube. Some machines even finish the tube by grinding it.

The other machines shown in the first part of the movie are Swiss screw machines. The machine is the fastest machine in the machining world for mass produced machined parts. It runs on cams and gears and uses raw force to drill, cut and profile the parts. The operators had to understand how to adjust the machines by using a large series of gears, cams and belts. The cutting tools used have to be made to the outside shape and contours of the parts as the machine only travels on one axis when cutting, so it could only make one cut to make the outside shape of the part.

Check out the video for all the cool machines