Starting with their world class mountain bike frame, Santa Cruz uses over fifty vendors to manufacture a near to perfect bike – headsets from Sram and Fox, bottom brackets by Shimano, Maverick hubs, Avid brakes, Boxxer mounts, and the list goes on. Last July, we brought you Santa Cruz Bicycles and their journey toward suspension nirvana. Using Creo Parametric, Santa Cruz made multiple iterations of theirActual Pivot Point technology to create a suspension system coveted by mountain bikers worldwide.
On projects like this, good vendor collaboration and communication is essential to building a bike that most cyclists will want buried with them when they die.
There are a lot of hands in the mix when it comes to creating a top notch human-powered machine. Each of these companies is passionate about their specific component, constantly updating and recreating their piece of the puzzle in the quest for the lighter, stronger, and faster ride. Consequently, parts change, like the size of the headset or the size of the bearings for the crank set that affect the bike specifications.
As Joe Graney, engineer for Santa Cruz says, “If you don’t have the right specifications on your frames, then you can’t make the parts fit. So, yeah, there’s a lot of interaction with our vendors and what would work and make it better and easier to implement.”
Santa Cruz and their vendors are often friends. They ride together, compare, change, and recreate. In this episode of the Product Design Show, Vince and Allison show how Santa Cruz Bicycles used Creo once again to work with a vendor and improve the design on their carbon frame bikes.
