The folks at BRIDGE Bike Works have been fast at work conjuring up new products that include the new All-Road carbon fork, plus a new patent-pending T47-86 bottom bracket design that allows for the molding of threads to be directly fabricated into the shell, resulting in less weight, perfect alignment, corrosion resistance and ease of application.
In the case of the fork, the All-Road offers full internal routing, while sticking with a traditional round steerer column, one of first of such designs.
“Our fork is designed to give the rider the perfect amount of control on and off paved roads. Matched with our two rake options, your ride will feel nimble and quick, but also confident and stable. Industry standard for an All-Road fork has been 38 mm clearance, but we have increased that to 42 mm under ETRTO standards while keeping axle-to-crown height at the accepted 382.5 mm standard. All of our carbon layups are highly engineered with top-end materials. Each piece of premium pre-preg carbon fiber is precisely placed to handle the necessary impact and load forces and provide the desired ride quality and performance characteristics. Our trade secret production methodology uses biodegradable mandrels that also allow for ease of laminating and part removal from the tool. Great care has been spent on our engineering and laminate scheduling, in-house and external testing, extensive rider feedback, and incredible attention to detail in production to create the world’s finest riding carbon bicycle fork. With a fork, the emphasis on laminate for safety and performance is the highest priority. Our experienced in-house engineers have developed a proprietary ISO fork testing rig which has allowed us to go from design to fully functional and safe fork very quickly, with the data to support each improvement towards the final iteration. Our standards are to aim to create the very best possible: ideal ride quality mixed with race-quality stiffness where required. Only in-house testing and constant iterations to our carbon laminate process could come together to create the fork that we wanted to ride, and offer to the world,” explains BRIDGE Bike Works.
Moving on to the bottom bracket, Bridge Bike Works’ new technology involves a complex laminating and molding procedure that eliminates the need for a threaded bottom bracket sleeve, which as mentioned, results in less weight, as well as better alignment, ruling out the dreaded bottom bracket creak.
“When the bike industry started shifting towards press-fit bottom brackets, we all noticed a new sound coming from our crank area. An annoying ‘CREAK, CRACK, CREAK’. That was the bearing moving around in the frame. Yeah, you could grease it up, but that was often only a band-aid. So yeah, threading in your bottom bracket is better. But… all too often, the bearing cups would be misaligned, either due to process in a post molding procedure, or the quality control of the bottom bracket area leading to non-concentricity. Again, a good greasing would potentially ease or rid the sound, but inevitably make it easier for the bearings to move around and increase the issue, while temporarily solving for the noise. So we took the best of the options out there and created something new, an integrally molded carbon bottom bracket shell that is perfectly aligned in the molding process, won’t seize, won’t creak and is light! You might think carbon is brittle, too thin, too light or too soft. And you would normally be right. That’s why we developed the entire process of manufacturing the threads from raw strands of carbon, to the laminating process, to the curing cycles all the way to how they integrate with the rest of the frame. It’s many steps that ensure the final part will hold up to whatever you take it through. Oh yeah, and just to make it even stronger, we are coating them with Cerakote. Cerakote is abrasion resistant (lasting 5023 cycles on the standard Taber Abrasion test), hard (with a 9h rating in the ASTM D3363 Hardness test, the highest possible) and durable (reaching 160 inch-lbs. in the ASTM D2794 test, the maximum the tester can measure),” boasts BRIDGE Bike Works.
Speaking of Cerakote, BRIDGE Bike Works is now fully certified to perform the coating process in-house, while Ready-to-Paint options are also available in partnership with some of the finest bicycle paint shops in the industry.
You can learn more about the All-Road fork and BRIDGE Bike Works’ new bottom bracket design by visiting the Canadian brand’s website here.
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