rswiftcycles
Urmston, GTM United Kingdom
Hi Brent... I was nattering with another amateur builder this week, also a BikeCAD user (Charlie from Christchurch, nice bit of alliteration there) and we agreed that a "lugs mode" would be really useful. Basically, the ability to specify lug parameters (angle really, but the lug design could be important for short head tubes) and fix the design to those. Hopefully that makes sense?
I appreciate this only applies to a subset of BikeCAD users :)
Cheers - Robert...
Lug mode
Thanks for the suggestion. Others have asked for this type of thing as well. I usually encourage people to check out the notes at: bikecad.ca/building_to_suit_lug_angles. However, as more and more people ask for a more automated approach, I suppose I should give more serious consideration to this idea. Because it's difficult to know where to start, it would be helpful to hear which dimensions besides the lug angles people would like to be able to specify and which dimensions they would allow BikeCAD to determine for them. Also, I believe most lugs allow for angles that are plus or minus a degree from their nominal value. Can I assume most would opt to stretch or contract lug angles to achieve the desired geometry?
Lugs...
Thanks for the link Brent - I'll have a good read of that. I suppose it isn't necessarily about automation, rather, the ability to specify the angles (maybe with a configurable tolerance, such as 0/0.5/1º) to constrain the behaviour of BikeCAD itself.
With that in mind, maybe an option that doesn't constrain the design in BikeCAD, rather, it glows red or something similar for the joints that exceed a given tolerance - so the designer would be able to specify that the lugs were Xº with a ±Yº tolerance, so then any tubes that pushed the angle over the tolerance would be identified? That would also then work for non-lugged frame designs if angles were a design constraint?
I'm very much a newbie/amateur builder so am not best placed to give a commercial builders perspective on what would be needed - which is possibly why I'm asking for it, maybe commercial builders just 'know'? For me though, I would imagine that being able to specify the length of the lug sleeves themselves would be useful for very short head tubes? If others read this and have a view maybe they'll give better insight, equally, if others read this and no further comments are forthcoming, maybe I'm a lone voice so engineering effort would be best spent elsewhere :)
Cheers - Robert...