Civia Bryant Dropout Development
I’m the industrial designer here at Civia. I collaborate with a team of people, such as, engineers and a brand manager on Civia’s products. I am responsible for what industrial designers call form or the way our products look in terms of shape.
In the next few blog posts I’ll be delving in to the design process for the Civia Bryant. By explaining design features in detail, hopefully you’ll get the idea that that the Civia Bryant is more than just sum of it’s parts. The Bryant's modular dropout allows for a range of different drivetrain solutions.
When the design process for the Civia Bryant first started belt drive compatibility was not a requirement or even on the table. The bike we were thinking of was a straight forward steel drop-bar transportation bike. That was almost two years ago. Then a number of factors changed and Civia design team realized belt-drive was a viable technology perfectly suited to transportation bikes.
Sketching at its most basic is to allow for quick problem solving. These concepts are in no particular order, so they're not great for showing a linear process but they show how ideas are developed.
The key design constraint of the Gates carbon belt that the Bryant uses is that the belt can not be “broken” like a regular chain can. (On a traditional bike you break the chain to get the chain on the rear cog and then put the chain back together again.) There are a number of ways to achieve belt compatibility. Each solution has positives and negative. To maximize the positives for the Bryant user experience, the design team at Civia used a rigorous design process to create a belt-drive solution from the ground up.
From there we develop the solutions in Solidworks, a 3-d CAD software program. I'll go into more detail in another post but notice the split on the drive side dropout. This is for the belt.
Here is a prototype of the dropouts.
In my next post I'll go into more detail on the modularity of the dropout.
Thanks for reading.
This post filed under topics: Bryant
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Comments
David | July 28th, 2010
How thick is the Gates belt? The split looks tiny in the picture, maybe 1.5mm. So how does the belt fit through?
Burton Avery | July 29th, 2010
Thanks for your question David. In my next post I’ll go into more detail, but because the frame is steel and the split in the frame is at a diagonal you only need to create a small 2 to 3 mm gap to push the belt through. Check back on Monday and I’ll have images.