#union foundry

about a year ago i approached the guys over at open bicycle about developing a simple and exclusive shop-branded tool. i thought that it would be a really good idea for the shop to have something with their name on it and figured that i could come up with a tool for them in a few minutes and have a handful of them manufactured and it would help to separate open from some of the other boston area bike shops. i went over to the shop with a few pages of sketches and notes about tool possibilities and left an hour or so later with a really great, and fairly complete design. what happened in that hour in the shop was a high-energy brainstorming session between joshua kampa and myself. we took all of the tools out of the shop drawers, examined lockrings, chain links, bottom brackets, hubs, and anything else that we could get our hands on.

i went back to my office and drew up a version of the rotafixer tool that had two tabs on it and sixteen teeth. three days later we had a prototype machined and realized that we needed to move to a single tooth, because lockring spline patterns vary, and an eccentric cutout, because lockring sizes vary as well (this is the part that occurred at the bar). we also added an additional tooth on the outer cog, making the overall tool diameter larger (for a few different reasons, involving possible scenarios with two chains and forces). we had a couple of the new generation of the t0001 tools made, on one of which we removed a path large enough for axles and spacers and locknuts to pass through, so that the user would not have to remove their wheel from the bicycle to use the tool with a chainwhip to tighten or loosen their lockring. eventually we settled on the fully toothed version, tested it in the field, and decided to move ahead with production. that was at least eight months ago. we spent a lot of time trying to tie down manufacturing and figure out what kind of material to make it from. we wanted to make a high-quality product and locally source all of the manufacturing and design. i just came to an interesting realization last night about how craftsmanship and novelty don't really go together that well. we kind of designed this tool around a market that doesn't exist (in a quality equals price-point kind of way).

i could write a lot more about this project, but i'm kind of burnt out on it. "done is the engine of more." next project please! thanks to everyone who helped on this project and thanks for everyone for all of the decent press. the video that stebs made has 15,000 views in the last three days, and i think that is just super. we were shooting for the most elaborate product release for a bike tool ever, and i think that we did it. more information is available online at http://union-foundry.com and the product is in stock at Open Bicycle. some of my other photos of this project are here. thanks again to everyone.

a few blog posts by the other contributors on this product:

repeatpress.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/union-foundry/

Union Foundry Rotafixer In Stock. (Open Bicycle)

AYHSMB (Open Bicycle)

some of the initial responses to the product:

Union Foundry: Rotafixer T0001-0A (Prolly Is Not Probably)

Independent Fabrication Blog: Union Foundry :: T-0001-0A Rotofixer

Union Foundry | Selectismcom

Flights of Fancy: The Art of Unsimplification (bikesnobnyc)

responses to T0001 (google)

Union Foundry T0001-0A “Rotafixer” | Freeman Transport Blog

Reviews: