Is 2013 the year of the Stringbike?

With each New Year comes a new set of predictions about what lies ahead.  Most of the people making predictions call themselves “futurists” and they even have their own magazine and blog appropriately named The Futurist.  What they predict for 2013 is probably what you would expect: things will get smarter.  Cars, kitchens, robots, “the cloud,” and even our brains will gain intelligence.  

As far as cycling predictions go, road.cc out of the UK predicts that aero dynamic helmets will gain popularity for the road riders and that electronic shifting and power meters will be improved.  Bikes will get stiffer and lighter.  The average, competitively-priced road bike weighs about 22 pounds. It is expected that a 10% weight reduction can be accomplished through new technologies in 2013.  It may be possible to spend under $1,000 for a bike that weighs under 20 pounds sometime soon.

The SBT crew has written about plastic bikes, cardboard bikes, old bikes, new bikes and more in the last few posts to this blog.  They are all new technologies and none appear in any futurist prediction for 2013.  Another new technology we mentioned briefly was the Stringbike.  This is another technology with an uncertain future.  For the Stringbike we have to return to Budapest, Hungary.  The idea for this innovation came out of a challenge put to postgraduate engineering students at the Budapest Technical University in the 1990s.  The challenge was to find a way to revolutionize cycling and bike technology.  The students did this by eliminating the cog and chain system.  It was replaced with strings.  The system is essentially a pulley on either side of the frame that drives a flywheel and it is pedaled like any other bike.  The difference is that as one pulley moves forward on one side the other side moves backwards.  And by eliminating the chain and cog the bike moves silently.  It does shift gears and there are 19 to choose from.  The makers say the bike’s use of strings eliminates dropped gears and chain breaks and slips.  

The Stringbike is produced by Schwinn-Csepel in a scaled-down laboratory/manufacturing facility in Budapest.  The company first unveiled the new machine at a bike show in Italy in 2010.  Reviews have been positive for the science and technology but mixed on the bike’s price—about $3,500 (2700 Euros).  Other reviewers have questioned how the bike would do in a crash claiming one good fall may destroy the pulley system but the Stringbike’s builders claim the pulleys are tough and that new strings are easier to replace than bike chains.  

Considering that there are over 500 different bicycle manufacturers world-wide it is smart for companies to challenge the market with new design and technologies else they stagnate.  Be it best to heed the advice of the late American newspaper reporter James Frank Dobie who said: “conform and be dull.”

Visit our website for a Stringbike video at www.stickybottleteam.net.