Hello everyone,
It’s me Jam again. As you may have known, we just released our latest take on the lightweight aerocockpit: F1x handlebar!
F1x handlebar made its debut at the Rouleur Live Show at the beginning of this month and it’s now officially available for you to order. You can now make your purchase here.
Since the inception of the F1 series handlebar, there has been a lot of resources dedicated to make this product the best handlebar options in the market. There has been a lot of collaboration between engineering design and manufacturing input. Instead of telling you “it is better because just trust us”, I think it’s only fair if I share with you the product development journey of the F1x handlebar.
Let’s take a close look at the F1x handlebar:
The textured look mimics the dark lava. It’s stealthy and yet has that fiery passionate for cycling hidden underneath the surface.
Through rigorous testing and design iteration, we were able to maintain high stiffness (in both torsion and bending) while further reducing the weight from F1s design.
Well yes. But let’s take a look at where are the weight saving opportunities when we set out to design F1x. Besides the obvious answer that we have further optimized the carbon layups to further reduces the weight, we take a holistic view on this design challenge. Some low hanging fruits had surfaced during our customer feedback as well as early brainstorming sessions: 1) computer mount and 2) mounting hardware.
We have seen many one-piece aerocockpits claims to be super lightweight on its own, but once you add in the computer mount and mounting hardware, the overall weight of the system completely negated any lightweight marketing claim.
The final design for the computer mount only weighs a merely 12 grams! To achieve this incredible feat, we have done multiple design iterations.
Trying to create a computer mount that is both light and stiff had become a topology problem. I called up my best friends in college, who is now a professor/researcher in bionics and topology in a renowned university in China. He is a cyclist himself so it didn’t take much to convince him to help. Some photos from our scrapped designs:
Once he generated the topology designs, the models need to go through post-processing for 3D printing or design for manufacturing analysis.
We’ve even 3D printed the prototypes to test the stiffness:
Finally, this is the design we landed:
The design is inspired by bionics. The shape of the mount mimics stretched muscle fiber that provides a lot of stability with minimal materials.
We were initially trying to 3D print all the computer mount. However, 3D printing had too big of a tolerance and a very rough surface finish that is not suitable for anodizing. We just didn’t feel right to sell a ‘science project’ to our customers. It was a hard choice between manufacturing cost and the overall product feel. Eventually we decided to CNC the mount.
Another area that was previously neglected was the top cap and screw. We have decided to combine the 2 parts and forge them into one.
Forging creates parts that are lightweight while maintaining incredible strength due to the metallic grain structure on a microscopic level. This further reduces the weight of the overall system.
The end result? We achieved a total weight saving of over 70 grams from F1s handlebar design!
Due to all the design choices, the F1x handlebar is offered at a higher price point. But as a company, we want to make sure that we are still providing the lower cost option. So we are proudly announcing that we will continue to produce F1s handlebars for the customers that are on a tighter budget.
Last but not least, if you have made it to this far, I want to share some Black Friday announcement: from now to November 28th, 2023, if you are purchasing a set of FARSPORTS handlebar and you would also like a set of FARSPORTS wheels, you can use ‘FARBLACKFRIDAY23’ at checkout. You will receive 20% off from any wheelset that you order along with the handlebar purchase.
I hope you enjoy this nerdy blog post. Let me know what you think in the comment section below. Do you like this type of content? Do you want to see more in the future?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Jam
