Multiple Combinations, Combined

What do you get when you cross an Austrian Industrial Design grad student, their passion for bikes, and a german-like attention to detail?...

What do you get when you cross strange (poor?) taste in materials, a passion to take bicycle design somewhere new(ish), and 138 pages of explanation in german?...

"Eine Wunderkind! YAH! YAH!!!!"

Roland Kaufmann put a lot of work (and documentation) into the 'Jano'; should have known it was a fixie as well (at least at the proto stage). havent gotten all the way through his photo journey, but the site (luckily) is in english, so its worth a peruse.

designer on bike.



some other dude on bike.



perhaps i shouldnt be so mean; i suppose its not a bad choice in material, just a poor choice of shape for that material... looking at biomega's mn frame - another user of the two peice shell-for-a-body technique (but of aluminum) - it would seem that Mark Newson (the MN in MN) went through a few models before he came to this minimalist conclusion.

i would chance to say, maybe, that Roly might be able to keep some of the cool bits (integrated LED lights, low resistance hub dynamo, semi-hidden disk brake action, rear-internal hub gear shiftage) while drafting a smoother more direct body / product; ie, cable routing - if he figured out how to make them disappear for 90% of the journey, why not completely internalize?, or the fork, if its made of metal, why so wide and with a window? (existing fork technology is pretty good, so, unless your using the formed plywood, i would venture to say a simpler fork would do the same job.)

now, obviously, there is an element of jealousy here (somewhere in the MA / dream bike / industrial design fields), but to much of this design seems like he got 80% of the way, then had to finish, and kept it at whatever state it got to.

hopefully we will see later iterations...