CHATS

Robot Mothership Ltd is a bicycle company developing high performance bicycles customisable in size and riding characteristics via a simple web-interface. To do this we are exploiting a combination of metal additive manufacturing (AM) and simple composite tubes to economicaly provide the fully customizable product not currently available but demanded by the market. A key to the business model is offsetting the high AM lug component costs with simple low-cost composite tubes. The AM lug components are being progressed to a high level of optimisation and maturity; but currently the composite tubes are sourced from New Zealand using materials with poorly defined properties and questionable aesthetics. As such, an outstanding challenge to prove the concept is the composite materials selection, supplier selection, process development to give a high quality surface finish and ultimately mechanical property data generation required to optimise the whole product.