Here are a couple of spy shots of a stem that Tempered Bikes will have out soon. The design is all by Tempered, but I’ve helped them with the solid models and the manufacturing drawings for these two samples. By the look of it they’ve turned out really good. Now they just have to make it from the factory to Brisbane and then testing will be under way.
And here’s a quick edit from a couple of Tempereds team riders, Jerry Vandervalk and Nick Kajewski.
A while ago Jeff over at the BMXtec blog contacted me and wanted to do an interview. A few days (or was it weeks?) later I got a bunch of good questions in the e-mail. The whole thing turned out to be rather long so it has been split up into two parts. The first part is online now with the second part scheduled for later in the week.
I won’t keep you any longer, here is the link to all those words. And yeah, I wrote all those answers myself.
“Birth of a Hero” is the name of a font, by Last Soundtrack, that I’ve seen a lot in graphic design over the past year or so. It’s a nice kinda modern looking distressed style font, which is so very popular in graphic design nowadays (I’m guilty too).
See the four examples below, where two are from Proper Bike Co’s packaging. I know that three examples hardly justifies the term over-used, but I’m sure I’ve seen it in a bunch of other BMX related media and design. It’s just that I’m really shit at remembering little things like that.
PS. Birth of a Hero a free font and can be downloaded from dafont.com, where you can also check out the other fonts by the guy responsible for giving birth to the hero.
Past few days I’ve been playing around with doing some photorealistic renderings of stuff I’ve got CAD drawings for. This one turned out really nice although I got the focus a bit off. Was really cranking it with the bokeh (the blurry out-of-focus areas) with short depth of field.
Only six more hours to render a new one… haha!
Adding another one… This time I’ve been trying to play around with transparent materials. Not really as realistic, but it’s still close and way better than any other renderings I’ve done before.
Posted: May 17th, 2009 | Author:Jmy | Filed under:Design | Tags:Antrep04 | Comments Off
Browsing the internet for new interesting things to spice up my computer I stumbled upon this website. It’s a graphic & industrial design collective who’s done some amazing stuff. The first thing I saw was these container icons which are freeware. They also have the same container style design as limited edition prints that you can buy online. A highlight is the radio and the clock product concept they have up there. I’d love to see those two become reality!
Posted: March 27th, 2009 | Author:Jmy | Filed under:Design | Tags:Links | Comments Off
Been doing some changes to the site the past couple of days. Changed up the background a bit as you can probably see. Be on the lookout for more graphics to change within a few days. I just suck so bad at the website design and coding stuff it’s not even funny. I’ve got a few ideas, but don’t know how to get it to work just yet.
My friend Fredrik over at The Shape just launched his webshop where you can buy some cool tees. He’s got some sweet designs up there and the tees are of really good quality, and they’re cheap! 120SEK (That’s Swedish money for you who don’t know) or around A$22. Free shipping within Sweden!
So if you want to own some really limited edition tees, go have a look, then make Fredrik happy and place an order!
I just finished a new desktop background for myself. Grew tired of the one I’ve had for way too long now. I played around a bit and came up with this one, figured I’d put it up here in case someone else might be in need of a new desktop too.
I’ve updated the gallery and changed the style of it. It’s now got a separate WordPress theme more suited for displaying photos.
Check it out here, or by clicking the “gallery” link at the top.
Yesterday I got a question to my e-mail why I don’t draw the Simple frames with slightly bigger spacing between the dropouts to accommodate for hubguards. The standard is 110mm and making it bigger might make sense at first glance. Below, I’ll go into the details of why it’s a bad idea.
Personally, I had never even considered adding bigger spacing as a “feature” of a frame before, and after I spent a very short time thinking about it I came up with the following reasons why to stick to 110mm.
First off, a standard is a standard and it’s always better to stick to that (unless you plan to make everyone else change at the same time). Just look at all the problems, misunderstandings and confusion that has been caused by the BB sizes in BMX. US, Mid, Spanish (and maybe soon Spanish V2), Mexican, Euro and the latest on the board — German (KHE showed something ridiculously small at Interbike). Where will it end?
Do we need the same confusion when it comes to dropout spacing? I would think not.
Secondly, more spacing between the dropouts also means there is a risk that you will need to add spacers on your crank spindle as to not let the crank arms hit the chainstays. Maybe not the biggest problem, but there are already clearance issues on some frames out there, so it would not make sense to make matters worse. Also, adding spacers on the spindle weakens the crank arm/spindle interface by reducing the amount of material in contact. This might be a very miniscule loss of strength, but a loss nonetheless and that is undesireable.
Third… a guard that adds to the overall width of the hub will also offset your wheel in the rear triangle. This has to be compensated for by either making the frames wide enough (or stretch them open even more) to allow extra spacers on the drive side to center the wheel, or you have to “dish” the wheel by tightening/loosening spokes on either side of the wheel as required.
The fourth argument is that the people who do not want/don’t have to run a hubguard would have to make up for the extra spacing by adding spacers on the inside which does not make sense at all. You’d have an inferior contact surface, maybe throw the chain alignment out of whack and it would just look plain stupid, like the frame or hub didn’t fit properly — which would actually be true. Also, many people wouldn’t put any spacers in there and just tighten the axle nuts and that way put unnessecary stress on the frame. Then some would argue that spreading the rear end to fit a hubguard will also put stress into the frame — this is true, but there are good ways to avoid it. And this brings me to the fifth argument:
Get a properly designed hubguard instead! There are already a number of hubguards on the market that are actually designed in a way so that you do not have to spread your frame to fit them. BSD, Mutiny and Profile all have guards that are designed that way. BSD’s “Jersey Barrier” has a high grade aluminium core that is threaded and completely replaces the locknut hardware on the non drive side of the hub. The first version only fits Odyssey and similar hubs, but I assume more versions that will fit other hubs are coming. Version 2 of Mutiny’s “Hub Buddy” works in much the same way and you get a good instruction manual and all the bits you need to fit it onto several different hubs. Profile have got their own guard made specifically to fit their hub. It slides over the locknut and wedges up against the cone spacer on the hub. Very efficient.
So I guess my conclusion is that instead of frame manufacturers adapting their frames to fit inferior hubguards, the hubguard manufacturers should adapt their products to the already existing standards.
And here’s a quick edit from a couple of Tempereds team riders, Jerry Vandervalk and Nick Kajewski.
