Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
Who's going to run Frog Wake brakes on their Guard Dog 2? C'mon, you know you want to!
https://www.vitalmtb.com/features/shanghai-bike-show-2026.
Because the word cancer comes from the Greek word for crab.
Done 🫡
2 questions:
-when you say “conventional” bike. Do you mean normal carbon, or aluminum, or steel, or ti, or anything that isn’t thermoplastic?
-is thermoplastic the same stuff GG was hyping up?
Thanks! Yes conventional should be conventional carbon, a little error there. And yes thermoplastic is the same type of carbon GG was using, and other manufacturers are starting to use recently as well.
I just need 13 more people! Please help me out!
I thought those brakes were cable actuated when I first looked at the picture.. I used to own a 2010ish Giant STP with cable disk brakes, and that bike did stoppies easier than my enduro bike with Codes and about equal to my other bike with Saints. I don't even know why bike OEM's bother with lower spec hydro brakes from legacy companies after riding that bike, to be honest.
That Chinesium Sender is tempting with a capital T!
I only ride metal bikes...
Are thermoplastics commercially viable though? GG and Forge + Bond are both in the toilet. Did anyone make it work?
Thanks for the feature once again! Glad you were able to find the video explaining the process.
GG had a terrible implementation of cable guides, the frame was too heavy for the short travel stuff, and a lot of us just wanted a metal bike from them. When value added brands try to go bougie upscale it often ends in tears.
Yes, somebody will figure it out. The MTB business is notoriously tough. B/c thermoplastic CF can be done with robotics it’s one of the few technologies that can work in developed countries with high labor costs. The recyclability is huge bonus, they are the best tire levers I have ever used. Benefits in vibration damping and impact resistance.
https://flowmountainbike.com/features/thermoplastic-focus-jam%C2%B2-next/
Focus does! Made in Belgium
I believe that plan was scrapped early this year.
It had to have been, apparently they were working with REIN4CED which folded.
"To what extent to you agree with the following statements?
thermoplastic carbon mountain bikes fit well with the way i go out and come home in my daily life"
company who was supposed to make them went bankrupt before production started
If you want to do it with robotics you have to scale to numbers which are hard to achieve in the MTB realm.
I believe the thermoplastic variant tends to be heavier than thermoset resin?
Recyclability of thermoplastic is rather theoretical atm, are there examples where there's a working process?
As I understand it, there are limitations with the current thermaplastic technology where a traditional carbon frame allows for more ability to tune the frame for stiffness and compliance where wanted.. Yes, that can change with time, but as of now...
But the recyclability factor is only a huge bonus if it's easily done. I was under the impression it's anything but. Sure it would help reduce manufacturing wastage at source but in terms of a closed loop consumer recycle system I think the claims are a bit far reaching, no?
What thermoplastics allow us to melt away the matrix to be left with just the fibres. I guess you could either chop those to be a filler or recycle them (make new fibres), but you are for sure not picking up a cloth from the bunch of fibres and reusing it. As I see it (without being in the know) it's mostly component separation that's the benefit here vs. resin matrix materials than the "reuse" type recycling.
Reusing old polymers is frowned upon anyway outside non ctiritcal applications as you don't know the state the polymer is in. These are not metals that have a crystal structure once the melt solidifies, we are talking about long hydrocarbon chains that get damaged by atmospheric oxygen, UV radiation, etc.
GT did back in the day with the RTS and LTS.
Seems like Focus is hardly an mtb company now anyway
pit bits from mountain creek - https://www.vitalmtb.com/features/pit-bits-pro-downhill-series-mountain-creek
The vast majority of the advancement of continuous carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic materials is centered around aerospace. Carbon fiber reinforced bikes (mainly epoxy based) have "veered away" from aero materials - their processes and needs have evolved and are now somewhat different. So, thermoplastic composites (TPC's) have not been as targeted towards bikes. If you look at material test data, there are TPC's with similar or even better performance (strength/stiffness vs weight) than epoxy/CF being used now in bike parts (especially a property called "facture toughness"). But, these highest performing TPC's are higher priced in general, higher processing temp, and more difficult to lay-up/preform. But, the properties are there, just need someone to continue the efforts in part design and processing that companies like GG, R4 and CSS did. Bikes are already using the strongest fibers in the world (arguably the strongest material in the world - at least in the fiber direction); it's more of just changing the resin - if there is market demand and engineering/performance reasons.
Would love to see this convo moved over to a thread called “thermoplastic debate/discussion” or similar. This is a dead end technology for now but I understand that a lot of you like talking about it.
Gas Gas had the right idea with the moto-inspired replaceable plastics kits for their ECC ebikes. How many carbon frames become landfill waste from rock strikes or crashes where a sacrificial "fairing" could have taken the blow? If the industry wants to improve durability, this is the right place.
Can we get a separate thread for requesting separate threads so it doesn’t clog up this thread?
My bad, I thought I remembered seeing welds on the red one being pushed up a hill in Santa Cruz
No way we love that shit here. It's a Tech Rumours mainstay.
You still get an upvote for requesting a new thread, however.
Robotics cost should continue to come down over the next 10 yrs. To include improvements in 3D printing, you should see more on-shoring of low volume manufacturing. CSS made tire levers with the recycled material, I have a pair, they are best levers I have used.
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