new bike part 7: color

I knew early on as a nod to my Irish heritage I wanted the bike to be green. Here again was my early "sketch":

design

There I used Kelly Green, which makes sense given the inspiration:

Irish

But these are just cartoons, and it's a mistake to judge colors in a cartoon.

So when it came time to discuss real color, I told Eric to base it based on this: a Lotus racing car:


Lotus

Charles @ PezCyclingNews has based bike designs on racing cars and motorcycles, for example:


PezCyclingNews
PezCyclingNews

I didn't want anything so complex. The Lotus I showed is elegant in its simplicity. The green fades to black. The racing inspiration is there, but it doesn't dominate.

Painting took awhile. But it was very, very worth it:

Alaban

Credit goes to Keith Anderson, who did the painting.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i...
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over...
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc...
Read more