Sunday's Booth and the 3rd Wave

Sunday have up a flip of their InterBike booth:



Notables include some rad looking completes and a look at their 3rd wave tubing:



Some pics of the 3rd wave were up on TCU a while back and got loads of people commenting, including Jim C. As well as letting everyone know that Adam is a naughty boy, he had some words to say about the the 3rd wave tubing:

"As always Adam is good at leaking info that he shouldn’t. As most of you know, Sunday is always trying new and inventive ways to improve a BMX bike’s performance. Which is why other companies are heat treating frames, copying our hollow dropouts, doing angled brake mounts and using Black Magic rustproof coating on their parts. There’s stuff we do that we can’t even say because it will get copied. We made a few samples of Funday’s and Wave’s with the waved top tube because the wave downtube has been proven so strong. Why not improve the strength of the whole front end by using a stronger top tube? The current Second Wave and Funday frames are easily the toughest frame we’ve done so far. Jake has only been on this frame for a few days now, so there’s many more months of testing to be done with it. The earliest you might see this would be late spring of 2010. As always Sunday will continue to design and make products that will fit the rider’s needs."

There you go straight from the J.C's mouth.

Eastern's cockroach tubing

Now this is tech.

This is like engineer pornography - a new type of tubing that'll be going on Eastern's 2010 aftermarket frames and a few of their completes. It's called, wait for it... XHeliX. I don't want to bring you down, but this amazing new word is pronounced, quite simply - Cross Helix.



I could just leave you with this quote I lifted from the comments on Eastern's post for the tubing: Phantom: "I don`t know much of this, but it seems so good", but I'll try and shed a little more light on it.

Of course, it's all about the weight. As you can see there are little ridges that run in opposing spirals down the inside of the tube. So the idea, i guess, is that you can have a thinner walled tube of an equal strength due to the reinforcement provided by ridges. The fact that they spiral along the length of the tube would also give a good torsional strength.

It'll be interesting to find out whether you can also get butted tubes of this design. That is: have a greater wall thickness at the end of the tubes where the welds are. Without butting you'd have less material at the weld point. But Eastern are going to put up some more info later in the week, so...

Just in case you didn't already feel like you're back at school, don't fall asleep yet. Cast your mind back to science class and take a look at the comparison below with the inside surface of an insect's exoskeleton. Pretty much the same principal. If it's good enough for cockroaches, it's good enough for me.