While working with our idealized proto-bike-frame we soon realized that the reality differs quite a bit and most bike-frames out there do not have parallel head and seat tubes. Even though their angles do not match by only a couple of degrees, it renders a large percentage of the cells we intuitively found so far obsolete. When we picture a classical Gaussian bell curve, our (educated) guess* is, that the number of bike frames whose head and seat tubes are colinear falls at least in the area of two standard deviations, if not three…

We looked at several of the triangular cells consisting of three unedited proto-bike-frames and analyzed their geometrical construction.

One conclusion we take away from this is, that this is not a very promising way to continue. The problem-solving involved when only trying to connect bikes along their already existing joining axes is singular to the bike frame and not very likely transferable to other types of “frame artifacts” (and similar to what was previously investigated during our Branch Formations research). And this version of an idealized prototypical bike frame is not a good one either.

Given the fact that one of our main directives of this research project is to find solutions applicable to a larger variety of “objects”, we decided to try another approach, rather than looking at different levels of editing to create modular cells, which could then be (re-)assembled into different generations of aggregations.

Continue here soon.

*other exemplary bike frame geometries:
https://www.singletracks.com/mtb-gear/mtb-frame-geometry-part-1-how-it-fits/
https://bike.bikegremlin.com/832/bicycle-frame-geometry/
https://road.cc/content/feature/how-read-bike-geometry-table-268675
…