- 2:00 marketing hype vs marketing honesty
- 5:30 legitimate Velocite / Venn innovations: filament winding for wheels and AI-assisted design
- 6:15 the Velocite design process: their aero road bike, the Syn
- Designed to be fast in real-world use at realistic rider speeds
- Specific design towards integrating bottles, resulting in a concave downtube
- 10:00 carbon fiber composite construction
- Carbon fibers are only strong in one direction, so fabric orientation in the assembly is supremely important
- There is quite a bit of variability between products that are are layed up (manufactured) by hand
- Innovation in carbon fiber construction favours automation where variability is eliminated
- 14:45 carbon fiber construction using filament winding
- Here’s a video of filament winding in action
- Issues with the original wet resin process and transition to a pre-preg manufacturing method
- 24:45 why doesn’t everyone build rims using the filament winding process?
- 27:00 on intellectual property and the struggles of enforcement
- 31:15 the end user benefit of using filament-wound rims
- Easier to build up into wheels and trusted by pro wheel builders
- Rims are completely uniform, so they stay true longer and experience fewer failures
- Very consistent end product with minimal variance in weight or mechanical properties
- 38:30 what else can you make using filament winding?
- Anything tubular: lugged frame members, seatposts, potentially handlebars
- Making monocoque frames is not possible - yet
- Possibly non traditional bike frames too like the Ventum or the Cervelo Px series
- 41:00 the possible future of carbon fiber construction
- 45:00 AI-assisted rim design: the Venn VAR77 rim
- First iteration was a rim that was 42mm wide!
- A 30mm max width version was eventually chosen to be fastest
- 50:30 a discussion on fork stance width
- 58:30 the future of AI-assisted design
- No software exists that can use AI to design a complete bike and rider
- 3D-printed bikes
- 63:00 Victor weighs in on rim vs disk
Learn more about Velocite Bikes and Venn Wheels at their websites.
To order a set of custom-built Venn wheels, reach out to Corey of Cognoscenti Cycles.