Are Gearbox Bikes The Future Of Mountain Biking? | Advantages, Drawbacks, and Future Possibilities

mountain bikes are absolutely crammed with technology but let's face it the achilles heel for many of us tends to be a rear derailleur that hangs off the bottom of the bike here in rock bashing territory some brands are starting to use gearboxes just like styling cycles and we're here today to find out a bit more about why they're speccing them and what the advantages are [Music] so this is styling cycles and they're based in bristol the hand make steel bikes right joe uh tell us a little bit about yourself a bit about styling uh what you do what's going on behind us and also a little bit about some of these cool frames she's got hanging up on the top there yeah okay uh name's joe mcewen i run styling cycles we're a company yeah based in bristol making steel for full suspension bikes um for me it started as a hobby making bike frames in my shed and then people liked what i did and we slowly started selling them and the company's just grown from that so i think we've been going five years now first couple of years was me on my own and then we've started employing staff and there's four of us now full time plus various admin staff and people doing marketing stuff like that um yeah that's that's starting cycles really why starling where does that man come from yeah so when when when was in the shed at the bottom white garden next door were some allotments and there were big tall trees in the allotments and the starlings used to roost in those trees and to me they're they're very simple birds but they're very kind of beautiful birds and they're a little bit sort of evil as well there's something sort of quite cool about them so i just thought they were great they were great sort of icon for the brand and they sort of match match the ideas of it and uh yeah okay so what's going on behind it's obviously the workshop there's stuff going on there's a frame being put together in a jig over there yeah so this this is the workshop this is we make all the frames so really our job is turning tubes we've got tubes in this thing here cuttering cutting and mitering them so that they form to the frames james here is assembling them into the jig and kind of test fitting them and then here where we're filming is the kind of welding area and there's just various other processes with frame alignment and yeah putting on all the brazons lots lots of things going on and that looks like a pretty good collection of old frames up at the top yeah yeah good stories huh so this this is this is almost the history of styling cycles we're missing the first bike i made so the first bike i made was on a frame building course with a chat called uh dave yates who's a favorite yeah 80s 80s 90s yeah late 80s yeah maybe made it but did he make the dog dogs bollocks no no yeah he made he made similar donkeys so i did a frame building course being married like a single speed hardtail yeah um took it home and he's quite conservative in his geometry so he made me make a 71 degree head angle and it it rode right yeah it was very conservative so it didn't ride very well so i thought right i want a 68 head angle 67 head angle so i actually in my shed made a jig out of woods hired some oxy acetylene chopped off the head tube fitted a new one to the right angle and and did it there in my shed and then i thought i could do this let's make another one so i just started making bikes and up here shows the progression so i actually made a bike for my daughter as the second bike like a little kids third one i made there is a cannondale profit swing arm and i made a new front triangle for it because the the swing arms are quite hard to require more more complex bits so is that where the love of single pivots came from yeah i had my cannondale profit is one of my favorite bikes ever loved it could do everything on that i had i had a build like one 150 160 build it was amazing um and then you saw c3 a little beat first beady little eye which is a single speed bike first enduro bike which was 26 inch but i've raced the ews on that still see the scrutinizer as a duffer though not as a not as a good rider as a bit of a duffer and then yeah you can see the progression as it became the swoop and we sort of refined details and then up here some later things as the first stern downhill bike prototype the fir that stainless one there is actually the cn test bike so that's cracked because they tested it to failure sure okay um a clunker a few other things nice okay so what i'm really here for is to talk about the progression of where we're going yeah and i know you've got a bike called spurs got gearbox so let's go and have a look at this bear and talk about gearboxes and modern tech [Music] okay joe so the obvious question first off is why have you gone for a gearbox on your bike so i know you make a bunch of different mountain bikes some are single speed some have got regular uh derailleur gears on there and you've got this the spur um i think i think a gearbox has always been an obvious solution and for a mountain bike a derailleur doesn't feel the best thing they get ripped off um they're sort of disposable they wear so a gearbox for a mountain bike being ridden rough terrain always seems like the obvious solution so i've always thought about gearbox since i've been building bikes and then sort of the opportunity came i found out about effort gear and i thought okay that looks like a good system it looks like it suits what i can do let's have a go at building a bike so i think i contacted ethergear [Music] they liked the sound of what i was doing and they gave me a unit early on and then i started setting about developing a bike around that around that effigare solution okay so so this one's an effort gear bomb where there's also opinion yeah so i've written an opinion but what's uh for the viewers what's the kind of the basic outlay and what's the difference on those um to me the biggest difference they're both internal gearboxes they've both got similar gear range the biggest difference is to do with the output drive so a opinion is designed so that the output is a standard chainring around around the axles yeah around the crank axle and i think they've done that because it suits making commuter bikes it suits making you know most of the hardtails most of the bikes they make this one has got the output shaft higher up so for a standard bike that would be you know you'd be limited to chainring size there'd be reasons they wouldn't they wouldn't like it but for a mountain bike where i want a slightly higher pivot and i want to be able to mount the the swing arm around the output shaft it makes perfect sense so yeah it was the obvious solution really i was going to say that the most interesting thing about this is the fact that pivot point is directly around there and it looks it resembles basically all the rest of your suspension frames yeah yeah so you use a single pivot on all of the bikes yeah yeah i've always used single pivot i've always ridden single pivot whenever i've had multi-linkage bikes they've annoyed me because they end up getting rattly and they cost huge amounts of money to replace linkages and i've never felt the performance is any different really if a well set up single pivot is is a good solution and especially with yeah modern shocks we have now you know yeah i mean the ext to be fair is an exceptional shock yeah compared to a lot of things out there um and all your frames are steel as well yep so i've always made steel um bizarrely my background is in carbon fiber so i was i was a carbon fiber aerospace engineer for a long time um but when i started making bikes i started in steel because i've seen carbon fiber at the highest level mountain bikes are lower level they're you know they're they're a consumer item they're not a flying aeroplane so i could never bring myself to make something lower level than what i've seen in aeroplanes and it's carbon mountain bikes are fit for purpose they're good but when you've seen the very very best yeah and i was never going to be able to achieve that at home on my own so and i think steel i've always had steel bikes i've always had steel i've always had a steel hard tail i had a few a couple of steel downhill bikes actually a doberman stella which was beautiful and a an swd which i remembered yeah yeah okay uh swd which was a tiny american company and they both just rode beautifully they've got a sort of damped feeling yeah still has got very unique yeah yeah the metals here yeah so steel to me seemed the obvious choice it's it's for a small builder steel it's easier to work with of course at some point the derailleur might disappear totally so let's talk about some of the advantages of the gearbox and some of the disadvantages yeah and the first thing i want to jump in with which i've i've discussed with the viewers before who always asks why are we still using the derailleur gear and the ultimate thing is yes all right so they're hanging off the back of the bike so they're not ideal but they're cheap to replace yeah and there's not that much friction in the system yeah so i guess it feels like the industry sort of biding time until until someone yeah i mean i know there's two brands making very good gearboxes but it feels like it needs to be a couple of other yeah significant brands this gearbox is amazing the whole bike it builds into an amazing bike it builds into an amazing descending bike but there is a little bit of drag in the system so you've essentially got two sets of cogs that always mesh together um and depending which set of cogs you you select is which how the gearing changes but because those cogs always mesh together and there's lots of oil between them you've kind of got to move all that oil you've got to move all the cogs it adds a little bit of a little bit of drag so the way i kind of describe it it's equivalent to running a heavier pair of wheels compared to a lighter pair wheels or it's equivalent to riding up a slightly muddy hill compared to a dry hill so there's not too much in it but there is yeah so you can get up hills really easy but over the course of a long day you do feel more tired but the descending ability is amazing so you've done a few things you've you've meant because the swing arm pivots around this output shaft there is no chain growth there's no chain forces yep it's like everyone talks about like gwyn's uh chainless right yeah everyone talks about that and your suspension works amazing and he talks about that you've also yeah he's good as well which helps but uh you've also got there's no big lump of cassette on the back so you've lost a good pound of weight on the rear so you know especially chris porter's someone who's always banging on about swing arm weight yeah if you make that rear swing arm light that can move it's got a lot of small bump sensitivity it can move over small bumps yes it says funny so we've we've discussed on a channel a lot you know the unsprung mass to the spinal mass sort of ratio of removing all the weight possible on the back end of the bike the cassette is something that so few people actually refer to yeah so we're adding more and more weight yeah so you've got more and more weight on the back and that is what your rear wheel has to move up and down for yourself and clutches clutches effects of course yeah and on certain suspension bikes you can feel it yeah as well yeah so great so you're taking a massive lump of weight off the back of the bike no derailleur to smash off in a crash uh did you say this was more of a gravity focused yeah so this this is this is built as a 170 170 it's full coil this this goes downhill better than any downhill bike i've ever had immediately i haven't had down about for five or six years but it's it is unbelievable it just carries speed it's got the weight on this part as opposed to the back yeah i'm not i'm not i think the positioning of the weight away from the wheel is a positive thing but having the weight up or down in the frame i don't think matters because you're i know i'm 75 kilos stood on the cranks here of course it's going to overrun whatever the bike is yeah so in terms of moving the bike between your legs it's a bit more easy to move but that's not a key riding ability but a riding sort of thing that's interesting i'm quite glad you said that i think a lot of people would would say the opposite of that yeah and you're right your body weight is always going to overcome yeah yeah it's still like this i think with an e-bike it's a bit more noticeable it's got a whack and great battery so it really is a lump of weight yeah yeah down there and that's uh of course that's why e-bikes feel so good yeah if you ride the bike and you turn you lean with the bike it makes no difference it's only it's only if you're one of those people that moves the bike between your legs center of gravity matters but okay so so the positive so far you're removing all that weight from the back of the bikes your suspension is super supple um the bike's going to be silent no doubt yeah because of this yeah no chain rattle this chain doesn't move that far so it doesn't clutter so there's there's a few things i had here so the friction we've talked about because you've got the gears that are moving through oil so i guess the flip side of that is because the gears are moving through oil probably you don't have to maintain it that often compared to lubing your chain and degreasing and everything yeah all the time so this this bike has been running for probably 18 months now we've got another prototype that's been running for a couple of years that occasionally you drain the oil out the bottom and top the oil back up and that's literally nothing else yeah okay so what about the shifting of gears because it's going to be completely different now i've ridden the pinion system yeah um which has a i think it's called a twist twist the older style system i had we had the yeah yeah i noticed you've got a regular shifter on here yeah so this has got a sram a swamp shifter it's actually a modified scram shifter but just to change the pool weights you're a little bit to suit the gearbox okay and then you can't quite see it but down down this side here is a long tube with a big spring in it and that spring tensions the cable so there are two cables pulling from both sides but one's tensioned with a big spring here and then this just works like a normal dura a normal shifter that it just you know releases and then that that's like the spring in the derailleur so normal shifter yeah change is fine there's a bit of difference in that as you're going down gears you just press the button and it and it changes is it dropping down into yeah i was going to say dropping down into a higher gear drop it down here yeah it uh it changes instantly so you can go from you know as you're going down the hill you just change gears yeah as you're going up the gears you do need to you do need to stop pedaling a little bit it's not not going backwards but you actually learn to subconsciously just do a quarter of a turn backwards but you can change as many gears as you want and it sounds weird but once you've ridden it two or three times it becomes totally natural and it actually becomes a real positive that you're you're coming down a hill you're coming up to a small climb all you have to do is knock off all the gears and then just stop pedaling for a second and then it's changed and it's changed instantly it's gone across instantly so i guess you approach the riding differently you kind of learn yeah yeah it's just you know i need to click up a couple here you're already in the right gear it's a learned skill it takes a little bit of time to learn once you've got it it's totally intuitive it's good okay so the gearbox sounds really positive all through now is this technology you'd want to put on to like the trail bikes and stuff or is it not quite there yet [Music] one thing i've never done is tested this with a lighter build but you know i think a lighter set of wheels would help but the drag is there to the point where it's never going to be a zippy bike it's never going to be a zippy bike for flowing single track it's sort of and part of it as well is the suspension's so so supple it does rob a little bit of energy because of that you'd have to have quite a firm compression tune to overcome that um so it's possible one thing i've always saw is maybe just a few gears i i think there's an option of having like i ride a lot of single speed so my ideal bike would actually be a three speed gearbox i didn't ask how many gears this has this it's um nine gears with 440 range okay this one has actually got six gears in it because i've been testing out running less gears just as something to try out and i've actually found that sixth gear system is enough yeah so mega interesting stuff yeah now i can't help but feel that where we are with gearboxes there's obviously this this brand affy gear and there's pinion which is great yeah but there's brands like yourself which uh you're quite a small like almost a niche brand making really cool products quite specific uh i know that uh the geometron bikes have used these in prototype stage sorry they've used opinion one yeah yeah there's a few others what's it gonna take for the mass market to to commit to using gearboxes um i i think i think it needs the big players doesn't it to to get involved tomorrow i i think i think this is a good solution i think it does that drag we keep talking about it it is enough to put people off if you're riding this type of bike it doesn't matter at all if you if this is a winch and plummet back right that's fine but that's a small part of the market isn't it most people want a bike that's a trail bike really isn't it that's what most people ride a bit more efficiency so there are options of chain drive solutions so remember the honda gearbox bike yeah that's that's pretty much had a rear mech in a box so i actually was doing a bit of development work with somebody who was a an engineer at uh who makes the cars tesla he was a tesla engineer and as a side project we were looking at a chain drive gearbox because the chain is more efficient than meshing gears yeah so chain is like 99 percent and you i guess you could protect the chain within the gearbox oil just like you would with yeah there's various ways to do it but as we as we went through this then shimano brought out a patent for a change-driven gearbox so shimano and sram have they're delving around they they know if they haven't got a fully working system i'd be massively surprised i keep saying this i reckon they've got a big big red button on their desk or the boss has got a big red button and when when it looks like oh we're going to make money out of uh drive or out of gear boxes he presses the big red button but for them it requires big investment in their manufacturing capacity it requires commitment for frame manufacturers yeah so the step is massive so it will only happen when if i start selling 10 000 of these they'll probably it's funny to say that the this step is massive it's only the same as what's happened with e-bikes yeah yeah maybe yeah yeah maybe yeah smarter and bosch and all the other brands uh to commit to their frame manufacturers and that's that's happened really fast think about it so yeah i think the market is ready for it well this one looks pretty finished to me am i assuming this one's not a prototype is this like a available to buy this this particular bike is a prototype but we are now doing a production batch so we're doing a run frames of this model of the spur there's a few little details we're changing we're putting in a bit more of a refined shock mount we're moving the cable routing to the top of the down tube uh safeguarding it i guess yeah it's just it's not straightforward strikes there otherwise it's pretty much good to go you know we've we've we've had the two prototypes running for a long time so we're happy with the design yeah that's the exciting time i think to have a bike like that that's available to ride now with uh some pretty cool new technology i think even though the gearbox thing has been kind of simmering for a while yeah it's good to see brands like yourself committing to it yeah yeah and that's all the questions i have for joe i'm sure you're going to have some questions in relation to steel bikes single pivots uh gearboxes anything like that hit us up in those comments underneath and if you've got enough comments maybe we'll get you along for a special ask yeah i should be getting studio that'd be good that's about it from us see you later

Channel: GMBN Tech

Views: 399,806

Keywords: gearbox, mountain bike gearbox, gearbox bike, bike gears, internal bike gears, starling, starling cycles, starling interview, single pivot bike, steel mtb, steel enduro bike, gmbn tech, mtb tech, bike tech, mountain bike, Bicycle (Product Category), MTB, bicycle, gmbntech, GMBN, Global Mountain Bike Network, mountain biking, Downhill, XC, Cross Country, Enduro, MTB skills, bike skills, mountain bike skills, bike, bike riding, cycling, gmvn, doddy, Қ, 4430, ዩ, ᐶ, ፕ15, Ҫ, ҧ, ҭ

Id: dW4aIatRP34

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021