This may seem like a blasphemous post. Oh well; the point of this blog is to cause
trouble.
At Seven Cycles we sometimes hear the question, “Do you use Finite
Element Analysis—or what type of FEA do you use—in your design process.” It’s a very reasonable question. It’s an engineer type question. FEA is an engineering tool. It is a computer program that simulates the way a product might be used; in the case of bicycles: loads, stresses, impacts, etc.
‘Finite’ is the key word.
It also stands for finite value, in my view.
I preface this conversation by explaining that Seven Cycles
is lucky enough to have six engineers on staff.
For a business our size, that’s way overstaffed—it’s about 15% of our team. Granted, they are not working on engineering
and design projects fulltime. However,
they do all participate in design projects every day. In addition, their primary roles at Seven
include engineering on a daily basis. And,
lastly, while I don’t have an engineering degree, I am part of the engineering
& design team.
We have a hierarchy of design tools for making products for
which we offer lifetime warranties. In
this case I am only talking about tools that impact safety and durability; I’m
not talking about tools that serve all the other elements of product
development and design.
I will post about details of each of these tools at a later
date. For the moment, I’ll provide only a
brief explanation of how and why we use and think about each tool. Of course,
nothing at Seven is a true hierarchy, but for the purposes of writing a
reasonably short post, here is how our tools fall in order or value.