3D printed nylon bicycle that's "as strong as steel"

This 3D printed bicycle, exhibited at this week's London Design Festival, is claimed to be as strong as steel. It was printed from layers of fused nylon, using a technique more commonly deployed in satellite manufacture.

Launched this year by a team of development engineers, the bike is made up of successive layers of fused nylon powder that are each just one-tenth of a millimeter thick. Designed by Andy Hawkins and Chris Turner at the Aerospace Innovation Centre in Bristol, UK, the bike is constructed from a manufacturing process known as additive layer manufacturing (ALM), which is also used in the manufacturing of satellites.

Nylon Bike Made Using Satellite Technology is as Strong as Steel! (Thanks,Terry!)

• [Sooper8]

  As strong as steel with the same thickness…? As strong as steel of the same weight…?
  As strong as steel that had been turned into nylon fibres and folded over many times and mixed with camel piss?The speech marks around the “strong as steel” making it vague enough to be none and all of these.

  • [David Yoon]

    My hair is as strong as steel!
    (Very, very thin steel)

• [Palomino]

  Yeah! You left out the best part…..How much does it weigh? And this link, with your quote above, is from March of this year.

  http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/09/eadss-airbike-is-a-3d-printed-nylon-bicycle-actually-looks-rat/

  And a YT video of it being made and someone riding it: http://youtu.be/hmxjLpu2BvY

• [martij13]

  The EADS press release announcing the bike only says the bike is “made of nylon but strong enough to replace steel or aluminium.”   Sadly, printed nylon is not as strong as steel.  It is just strong enough to replace steel in some situations where weight is more important than cost, strength, or dimensional stability and the part will not be subjected to elevated temperatures.

• [liquidstar]

  This bike is great in every way except one:  it would suck to ride.  Only an engineer would want to ride this bike or like how it looks.  This was made by people who only love cars.

  • [Evan G.]

    Well, it passes bicycle muster in one respect–disembodied hand holding it up in the photo! Just like on Craigslist. 

    But yeah, it’s ugly as sin.

  • [morehumanthanhuman]

    As an engineer I think this bike is damn beautiful. They’re doing stuff with 3d printing most people don’t do yet.

    The bike was not designed to be ridden, it’s designed to show off what can be done with 3d printing. See that triangly looking thing in the bike frame? That’s a 3d truss structure, it’s impossible to make…. with traditional manufacturing. The cool thing about it though is that a 3d truss structure can be as strong as solid material, but weigh half as much. This might be where some the strong as steel stuff comes in. Though according to some calculations the best they can do is about half the specific strength of aluminum.

    That detailing in the seat is another show-offy thing they did too. The detailing makes something called an auxetic, which means that when the material is stretched it gets fatter(unlike a rubber band which gets thinner) and when the material is compressed it gets thinner.(for the confused: http://www.product-technik.co.uk/Auxetics/about_auxetics.htm http://www.yarnsandfibers.com/revamp_ir/ir_print.php3?id=349 ) These weird properties make auxetics really good cushioning and impact absorbing materials, which is exactly what you need in a bike seat.

    They could have made the bike more rideable though, if a larger 3d printer existed. The largest SLS 3d printer on the market is not big enough to print a bike, so they had to design all their parts to snap together and be easily tetris-able in the build chamber. But when SLS 3d printers are getting bigger, someday soon they’ll be able to print a full size bike in one piece.

    As far as ugly 3d printed bikes go, expect them to get uglier. One trending new technology in 3d printing is something called topology optimization, where you ‘evolve’ the lightest possible structure. In the end you end up with something that looks like bones or something H.R. Giger would produce. Very bad pic here: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/amrg/images/photos/projectpics/atkins1.jpg

    • [pKp]

      Wow, that’s cool. Thanks for the informative comment, mate.

• [joeposts]

  reminds me of the Itera Plastic Bicycle

• [Paul Downs]

  How did they put the tires on?

• [Kevin Ruszel]

  too bad the people behind these designs don’t know the first thing about bicycle design or making things that don’t look like total ass.

• [Billy Hale]

  TEH UGLY. IT BURNS

• [Evan G.]

  I’d rather be seen riding a y-foil:
  http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2009/02/laissez-fairing-rules-vs-aerodynamics.html

• [John Romeo Alpha]

  It is indeed fugly but the purpose was to demonstrate the concept and not make a final product. However, even as a concept, couldn’t they present the advantages they see in using the technique with this material as compared to existing techniques and materials? I can help the makers out with that: either it would shave a few pennies of cost off the bottom end, permitting big boxes to sell bikes for like, 19.95, or, it would shave off a few grams as compared to a carbon fiber frame at an acceptable cost premium, thereby giving weekend peloton warriors that ultimate edge they’ve been seeking in the town line sprint.

• [disillusion]

  This looks a lot like the Cat Cheetah bike frame before the Tour de France banned certain frame types.

  And people said reading manga wouldn’t teach me anything >_>

  • [Evan G.]

    The UCI is the body responsible for banning/allowing frame types, not individual races themselves. 

• [Max]

  I spoke to someone who works in the same place. He said you can request nylon parts and get them delivered to your desk in a couple of days. They also have a similar process that they use for printing titanium. Unfortunately, you need all sorts of budget approvals before you get a titanium thing printed…
  I’m guessing “strong as steel” is shortened version of “strong as a steel bike”.

• [benher]

  Just wait until we can all print our own bikes… 

  It will be COMMUNISM EVERYWHERE!!!

• [avraamov]

  1 claim attribute (strength)
  2 fail to adequately define attribute
  3 ???
  4 profit!

• [EvilPRGuy]

  Printing bikes frames out of nylon is a brilliant idea. It’s quite impressive that the components (bars, chainring etc.) are also nylon.

  I’m curious about the purpose of  that sunken/lattice area on what what would be the downtube on a traditional bike frame. Is it decorative, for weight savings or does it serve some other purpose?

  I’ve been building bike frames as a hobby for the last 5 years, and one thing people often miss when designing and building frames, especially innovative ones, with innovative materials, is ride quality. It’s a tough thing to define, because unlike the other factors that make up a bike frame (weight, aerodynamics, geometry) there is no mathematical way to measure this. For instance, you can take a frame design, and construct the identical frame out of aluminum, steel and carbon fiber and each frame will have an entirely different ride quality to it. Feedback, essentially what the bike frame is “telling you” as you ride, is very important. A steel frame gies you much better feedback then a carbon frame, so even though a carbon frame may be lighter and stiffer, a steel frame may be preferable depending on the kind of riding you’re doing. Does anyone know what kind of feedback nylon offers to a rider?

• [Wizard Gynoid]

  i want to meet the robot who is holding this up and shake his hand!

• [Guest]

  … and ugly as shit! lol

• [awillett]

  I liked this better when I thought it was a CYLON bicycle.

• [Chris Driskell]

  I really can’t see Chevette Washington riding one of these…then again, hers was made essentially of glue, paper & laminate.