This is the crack-free model that most likely wouldn’t be outlawed by the USAT as it fits through the 8" x 10" rectangle required by their rules.
This model houses a 48oz Nalgene bladder and is easily refillable on-the-fly. I haven’t checked exactly, but I think it will actually hold about 40oz due to width restrictions imposed by the carbon housing. I also have a second “lid” with a shorter, low profile straw that doesn’t protrude past the top of the aerobars for shorter events when refilling is not required. That one holds ~30oz.
Front brake is a modified center pull made by Weinmann. I believe it was made for the back of the original Zipp 2001, as least that is the only place I have ever seen another one of them. It doesn’t work particularly well, but is low profile.
For those of you interested in hacking some carbon fiber parts - I did this all in my garage with wooden molds (when I used them at all), electrical tape, and a reasonable amount of patience and ingenuity.
Joe’s is a very fine design, and of course much less custom and much more marketable than my own. It may not fit on every bike, but it would fit on a lot of reasonable mid-sized setups and give people a very good hydration option.
It looks too big. I like the idea of an integrated drinking system that also increases the front area similar to the Felt, Argon and new Specialized and Treks. However, the side pic on it makes it look huge. I would wonder how it would do in the Kona winds?
That’s a pretty cool custom design, but I’m totally thrown off by the fact that he is wearing Tube socks for arm warmers in that pic, well and for leg warmers too, but that is somehow less suprising. I wonder sometimes what adding an aerodrink really does to the aerodynamics of my bike, but often when approaching this, or the obsession with aero breaks, I wonder if all of that really matters given the large variety of shapes and sizes that Triathletes come in. Triathlon is not time trial, we aren’t all in skinsuits holding perfect form in windtunnel refined positioning, not to pick on the picture but I have to wonder if the tube socks, the beard, the crap we keep in our pockets, position, etc, really negate a lot of the benefits we obsess about from wheels, brakes, etc.
That being said, I do appreciate the innovative spirit of fab’ing your own custom carbon, that’s awesome.
It is really quite large, you are correct. I live on the west coast in northern california and do not have any steering issues here despite very heavy wind conditions. 5-10mph is common, and 20mph gusts and sustained winds also occur frequently.
For those of you interested in hacking some carbon fiber parts - I did this all in my garage with wooden molds (when I used them at all), electrical tape, and a reasonable amount of patience and ingenuity.
So how does one define a ‘reasonable’ amount of patience/time?
From the front, it reminds me a lot of the Shiv (which is cool for a removable bottle, yet I find preposterous as an attached frame fairing… curious)
That is the brake model I used, although I only have one of them, and the one I have was missing the little levers near the housing entry and had some kind of special angular entry set up that was used (for instance) to mount the brake horizontally like under a Zipp BB.
I built the latest top part in 2 days (this last weekend). That included building the mold, doing the initial layup, removing from the mold, adding more layers of CF to certain areas, cooking in the oven, adding some bondo, painting a bit of black here and there, and clear coating. Lots of time in between all of those items to train and work on other projects.
The first pass on the primary bottle section took about a day. At that point I was using a different front brake (modified Zipp) and it was not molded to the shape of the brake, but was just cut out around it. The bottom was flat and epoxied on, and the top was taped. It worked fairly well, but lacked a certain sophistication. After I decided to put the Weinmann brake on there, I saw how great the shape could be and started figuring out how to lay up the bottom section. I used a couple of piecies of 3/8" wooden dowel and a piece of 1" metal pipe to do the primary molding (first 3-6 hours of set time), and then I removed the wax paper (keeps it from sticking to stuff) and did some “late process molding” on the bike to get the rest of the parts in the right spot with respect to the brake and bladder holder. Super glue dries fast for this sort of setup. After it dried in place for a day or two, I added some more layers of carbon to join the two piece together.
All in all, there are probably 50 man hours in the whole thing including both tops. It will only work with that brake, and only on this bike (the rest of the front end is highly custom in order to fit the Profile aerobars to the Syntace base), so it’s not exactly something I would recommend to most people who change bikes every couple of years.
It’s really all about the “late process molding” technique that I have been using. I am sure that composites people know about this, but I’ve not come across anything on the internet that says it can/should be done. It basically allows you to get a shape pretty close, and then once the epoxy is set enough to handle (still slightly sticky), you can get a nice fit without spending a zillion years on the molds.
LOL. You likely don’t know who that is . . . and how great of an athlete he is. Even with that beard and tube socks he takes it to 99% of the jokers on this forum.
I am both cursed and lucky with the softride head tube being as enormous as it is. I can fit 30-40 oz of drink between my bars with no spacers, where others can’t even fit an aerodrink without hitting the front tire. Unfortunately this isn’t a one size fits all solution.
