Carbon fiber composite construction has been described as the “black gold” of the bicycle industry. In addition to the promise of weight savings, its woven nature makes it possible to simultaneously deliver stiffness where needed and compliance where comfort is desired. Also, carbon fiber disperses high-frequency, low-amplitude vibrations (that's road buzz to you and me) better than most metal materials.
Given the potential advantages in weight and ride quality, why don’t more women’s bikes use carbon seat stays? Because smaller frame designs often don’t leave enough room for traditional carbon monostay designs to be properly attached to the seat tube.
Here at K2, we realized this when we were developing the Spire Road bicycle for our 2005 T:Nine collection. We could have used our existing carbon seat stay technology for the T:Nine Medium size, but there was no way at the time to share this benefit with the riders who fit our Small and Extra Small sized bicycles. The Spire Road's tapered, aluminum seat stays provide excellent ride quality and offer consistent, appropriate performance to women riders in all three T:Nine size ranges.
We immediately began new development to offer the increased comfort and performance of carbon seat stays for our 2006 T:Nine collection. Our design engineer developed a hybrid seat stay construction that blends a sculpted, aluminum brake bridge with slender, dual carbon seat stays. The resulting system's performance was so remarkable that we created three new T:Nine bicycles around it: the Twister and Tempest road bikes and the Jetstream triathlon model.
This new T:Nine carbon technology was eventually applied to our men's Red Zone triathlon bike, whose elongated, aero-shaped seat tube also made it difficult to use our other carbon stay designs. So, after years of "pinking and shrinking" existing men’s cycling technology to better suit women’s bikes, the opposite has finally begun to happen!
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