Mountain bike design has come a long way in recent years. From modified BMX rides first taken on off-road and crazy creations like slingshot was ridden at the end’80’s, come monstrous electric monsters you see on the trails today. Along the way, bikers have experimented with all sorts of technologies to try and make their rides faster, lighter, and more reliable. And never afraid to try out in different fields, automaker Honda even tries its hand at mountain bike design.
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Back in the early 2000s, Honda begins experimenting with gearbox design on downhill mountain bikes, up to that time still used the same gear and rear gear you still see on most bikes to this day. But in its first foray into mountain biking, the automaker decided to build on what it already knew, so took something from the car world and downsized it. it’s for bicycles.
As a result, Honda’s first downhill mountain bike is equipped with a type of continuously variable transmission or CVT. Now, the design of these gearboxes has been broken down by Cycling Introductionand they are very attractive.
As with every CVT you find in the car world, the transmission allows the driver to efficiently select from a multitude of gears between two setpoints. To do this, the test transmission used a camshaft and a series of levers to change the gear ratio.
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The advantage of this was that shifting was almost instantaneous and you had much less risk of skipping a gear or struggling with a grating chain like you might with a badly-tuned derailleur. The boxes were thought to be more efficient as well and, by Honda’s second-generation model, they were also fairly compact – meaning that riders would benefit from better ground clearance when navigating particularly gnarly routes.
But sadly, those CVTs were just prototypes and Honda rarely get a chance to race with them in a storm angry and really show what technology can do. However, Honda had another trick up its sleeve, revealed in 2004 when they joined a team that competed in the World Mountain Bike Championship.
For its first race car, named the RN-01 G-Cross, Honda had another secret transmission. According to patent was announced years later, the third experimental gearshift was more like the “Derailleur in a Box” design, as Cycling About explains:
“The solution is a derailleur-in-a-box: a seven-speed gear system that uses the same components as a conventional powertrain, but all sealed away from the components.
“The transmission works by transferring the force of the pedal to a sprocket located on the rotating shaft. As this sprocket rotates, it drives the inner chain onto a small belt where the gear ratio is selected. The cassette then drives the outer sprocket directly, which drives the rear wheel.”
While the gearboxes aren’t as groundbreaking as Honda’s first two attempts, they still allow the driver to shift gears without pedaling, which means riders can be better prepared for tight corners or rough turns. difficult track in the race. They are also more reliable and less prone to damage on the trail.
But perhaps they are better known purely for the secrecy that surrounded them during their competitive years. According to Cycling About, Honda has unimaginable steps to keep its design secret. All the work done on the gearbox is done in secret and the parts are never stored with the rest of the bike. Instead, engineers often hide transmissions in their hotel rooms when they’re not needed during races.
Then, when Honda disbanded its G-Cross team, the company even went so far as to destroy all of its prototype gearboxes, Follow Bicycle Radar. Maybe it’s because of these steps that the improved transmission has never been mass-produced for casual racers like you and me.
