Takhion Headset Caps: The Second Prototypes

If you missed the beginning of this, here you go.

After I was nearly eaten by an angry man due to the bike car being absolute chaos because of some gnarly Caltrain delays, this happened.  

Take two was much more successful.

After my last attempt, I went on a search to find a more suitable printer that could give me something with a better material that was closer to the original.  The awesome people of Incept 3D were able to help me out by giving me something called Shore A 95, which is basically a very strong rubber.  At the time, I didn't know the original material of these caps, so this was my next best choice, but I'll get to that later.  The upsides was that this provided me with a strong, flexible, and watertight cap.  Plus, the guy I spoke with at Incept was amazingly nice and very understanding of my complete lack of 3D printing knowledge, and worked with me through the whole process to help me out.

Perfect fit?  Perfect fit.

The pros: this prints are very, very well made.  They're high quality, high definition, and they fit perfectly in the handlebars and in the frame.  They were also made very quickly - if you need something printed, seriously go to Incept 3D.  To be honest, I would love to make a batch of these because of the quality and customer service level that I received working with Incept, but unfortunately that brings me to the next part.  

The logo is the right way this time!

Here is where I have a dilemma.  These prints are far, far too expensive for me to make a batch of, let alone provide to people that need it.  The technology required to print this material is still very high cost, and even though Incept was nice enough to work with me to get my order down to something manageable, it won't be viable to mass produce this particular print.  Also, as much as I like it, I didn't quite get the detail I wanted in the logo due to the complexity and the properties of this material.  Not anyone's fault, just the laws of physics.  

So, I will be working with another company to create injection molds so that these can be produced for a much more reasonable cost.  Not to mention - I didn't know it at the time, but using injection molding will also allow me to use the correct material: polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.  How do I know?

The real deal.

Mr. Vorontsov of Takhion framebuilding frame was kind enough to send me the original schematics and information for the caps and plugs, all with the help of an excellent guy in Boston who has a killer bike collection and has been nothing but awesome to me.  I'm extremely grateful for their help and wish I could do more to show my appreciation!  Спасибо!!

Here you can really see the difference in materials.  

With the schematics, I will have to rework a few things on the bar plugs that I did wrong (now that I have actual drawings I realized that I borked them pretty badly), and I will also be cross checking the headset caps before sending them off to make a batch. Though I feel that they are ready as they are now, I want them to be as close to accurate as they can be in both measurement and materials.  Nonetheless, I should be ready to send them off for a mold very soon, though since I have to make two versions of the plugs - brake and brakeless - those may take a bit longer.  I'm working on it, I promise!!

Old and new.

A few people have contacted me saying that they're interested in these, so at current I have a small batch size that I am planning to make.  If you need one of these caps, please comment here or e-mail (aeyoqen <at> gmail <dot> com) to let me know so I can get a decent count!  I will be sure to make extra so that there will be plenty available in the future.

Time for some model updates!