Wheels To Watch: Make Way For Magnetic Bike Hubs?

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This appears to be a run of the mill lightweight mountain bike wheel. It’s glossy and show-friendly, but it follows protocol with its fancy direct pull spokes and a standard splined freehub body to take your standard fancy gears of choice. Don’t be fooled. Inside that hub lies madness. No, wait, magnets. At a recent Taipei tradeshow Pinkbike got an enviable first look at Spank’s unreleased Mag-Drive hub.

For the uninitiated but interested, a bike’s drivetrain is almost always controlled by 3+ spring loaded pawls that rotate within a toothed collar in the rear hub, providing the forward engaging/backward freewheeling action that powers the bike and lets you coast. Notable exceptions like DT Swiss included, it’s still pretty rare for a rear wheel to not use pawls. Anyone who’s ever had to work on a freehub knows that pawls are both simple and a little irritating. I get grumpy fingers just thinking about the widgety bits. More importantly, for performance riders (and those of us who commute competitively) unnecessary friction and gaps in engagement are distracting and offensive, and a failed freehub can be devastating. All of these issues can come up in even newer wheels, and increase in likelihood with age and dirt and abuse. Spank, and a few other companies (like DT), are proposing that the opposing resistance of magnets can solve some of these problems.

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A Self-Contained Making Space

mebotics2.pngThe Microfactory is designed for small spaces and can even work on a desk. All images courtesy Mebotic.

Enter a making/hacking space in most parts of the world, and you’re likely to find a wide variety of tools and machines to help you realize your creative vision. Given the cost and size of equipment, it often makes sense to visit a maker’s space to run your prototype idea through their 3D printer, hammer something together or basically tinker and make.

The Microfactory is a new project out by Mebotics LLC in Somerville, MA. Concocted at the Artisan’s Asylum maker space, the Microfactory is what it sounds like: a smaller, more portable 3D printer and milling machine in one self-contained unit. It’s networked, quiet and—with a simple model starting at $3,195 through their Kickstarter campaign—vastly more affordable than more standard models. The machine even contains a computer within, complete with USB and Ethernet ports, and it cleans up after itself with a built-in vacuum.

“We believe the Microfactory would be equally useful for maker communities and individuals,” noted co-founder Jeremy Fryer-Biggs in an interview with Core77. “But one thing about the Microfactory that’s particularly great for individual makers is its networkability, which allows people working in garages or collaborating remotely to share equipment and ideas—bringing some of the benefits of a maker community home.”

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Visualizing a Sustainable Future

This content series is brought to you by
Autodesk – Accelerating Better Design.

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So far this summer in NYC has been an endorsement of global warming… again. While one year certainly does not constitute a representative statistical sample, having recently moved to a top floor walk-up in SoHo, my sweat-stained shirts tell a different story. Given ConEd’s virtual monopoly on New York’s power grid and the correspondingly high prices, I took a number of energy-saving measures, including changing all of my bulbs to compact fluorescents and installing a fan to blow fresh night air through my apartment in order to supplement my air conditioner and reduce my footprint.

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Visualization: The revolution will not be televised… it will be on your monitor

This content series is brought to you by
Autodesk – Accelerating Better Design.

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Last Thursday, some friends of mine and I launched a virtual company, GothamSmith. All we had was a website, a handful of 3D printed prototypes and no inventory whatsoever. Within 48 hours everything had changed: we’d received pre-orders from around the globe based on photos of our prototypes, yet we also learned that our stainless steel bicycle cog cufflinks might have a high failure rate because the shaft that went through the cuffs might not support the weight of the pedal. Suddenly, we needed to reevaluate the viability of fulfilling bulk orders on our biggest seller. All businesses have hiccups during the expansion stage, but new modes of visualization, design and production mean different growing pains.

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