Our Story
I’m a composites engineer, and worked on projects for BAE systems, GE aviation, McLaren, Boeing to name but a few. Alongside this in my spare time, I have ridden road bikes as well as mountain bikes and so it felt natural to combine the two – my knowledge of composites with my love of all things bike related!
The initial idea behind ARNIER (is) to create bike bits – but bespoke. If you are a lightweight rider with very short limbs, then you will have a very different geometry to a heavyweight with long limbs.
That’s where composites can help.
So far….
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Tooling, tooling and more tooling!
Composites design is only half of the story - to build a soild composites component you have to delve into composites tooling. My workshop was filled with the stuff above, epoxy foam tooling-board ‘machine chip’
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First off
Not very impressed? Well I didn’t think so, but this was a monumental for me as it was the first go I had since coming to Australia and setting up ARNIER that I got to dealing with prepregs/vacuum bags/tacky tapes and all of that good stuff!
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It needs a rest
Into the oven it goes, not much I can do until it hardens and then we see what we have. Usually back to step 1 and repeat..
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Aluminium tooling…
Once we had the tooling design pretty much there, I decided to go for an aluminium tool - much harder wearing but a lot more expensive
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Looks good
Apart from getting the internal bits sorted, this component looks good from the outside!
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On my bike!!
Now on to testing……