(dramatic music)
- Contact points on your handlebar grips and your saddle
are every bit as important as getting your bike
set up correctly in the first place.
Now over the years I've been lucky enough
to kind of find my way without having to mess around
with too many different options,
but I'm well aware it's not always that simple.
So what is it that goes into making
a saddle comfortable for some riders
and not for others?
Ergon invited me here to their design headquarters
in Koblenz, Germany to find out exactly
what goes into designing and manufacturing the essential
contact points for your bike.
(bouncy music)
It's a company started by a cyclist,
Franc Arnold, who incidentally
is actually the brother of the founder of
Canyon Cycles, Roman Arnold.
Now it's very clear to me that this
is a company that lives and breathes bikes
and design as well as ergonomics.
You can see subjects, books, and studies
everywhere around the building
and it's very clear that there's a serious
amount of cyclists working
in this expert company.
Now I'm really excited to be here
and I'm really enthusiastic to find out
exactly what the process is.
Let's go and have a closer look
at all of those steps,
starting with the very early conceptual drawings
and the initial design.
(smooth music)
- Industrial design or product design
is basically joining the whole chain of production
so it's basically from the start,
from the idea, to the end product, right?
We start with collecting information,
basically a lot of research that
either comes from blogs, from online reviews,
from our own dealers
- Yeah, sure.
- And from ourselves as well, from testing the products.
- And I guess this is from existing products, or?
- Well it can be based on existing products
but sometimes in order to innovate
you also have to take some, not wild guesses,
but some steps forward, right,
which aren't based on much of anything,
or anything in particular,
so, yeah, we start collecting information
and a lot of research in order to
develop a briefing that satisfies
ergonomic functions, technical functions,
and also aesthetic functions.
So this is also the next step in the concept phase.
We also need to define the basic dimensions
of a saddle, and the shape.
We start out with very basic drawings of the shape
and we check them with our ergonomics team
so we are sure we are on the right path
- [Doddy] You might not find it that surprising
that Ergon take ergonomics very seriously.
With their crack team of experts,
they make sure that every saddle design
is up to high ergonomic standards
for maximum comfort for a plethora of body shapes.
They do this via several tests.
- So, when we develop a saddle,
we try to see what is happening
when the rider is sitting on the saddle.
You want to see where the pressure occurs
and how high the pressure is.
So this is a necessary part to see
what is really happening,
but also we want to know how the rider
feels on the saddle,
because sometimes you can see pressure
that is not really disturbing the rider,
or the other way around,
there is pressure that is not really high
but it's disturbing the rider
so it's a back and forth process.
- Okay, cool, so explain to me what this is doing, then.
- Okay, (laughs) so that's our pressure mapping foil,
and due to the fact that you have two layers
the resistance changes and this is translated to pressure.
So I can see exactly where the bones are touching
the saddle and how hard the bones
are touching the saddle.
- Yeah, okay. - That's what can be done,
so I can switch it on now,
and then we can see how
the saddle performs for you
- Yeah, let's do it!
- Okay so just keep on pedaling,
and try to act as if you were outside
(laughs)
- I'm outside in the hills,
- Okay, shall we take a look here?
What we have now here,
we can watch the video in real time
and you can see that the pressure's moving
from one side to the other
and a bit forward and backward,
so you're always moving a bit on the bike,
and the pressure's moving from one side
to the other as you're pedaling.
But we can see here in a really good way
when we take a look at the medium pressure
and also at the next pressure
that you're loading your sit bones very well,
so the middle part of the saddle, there is no load
- That's good.
- Yeah, you can see the good part of the channel
that is unloading the sensitive areas
where blood vessels and nerves are
getting out of the pelvis,
So the bony structures are loaded
and that's exactly how we would like to have it.
- [Doddy] And so, how many people do you think
you go through this process?
- I would say not enough.
It always helps us in the development process
to get as many pressure distributions of people
to design our saddles the way that they suit
the most riders outside,
as many riders as possible,
and that's why it's so necessary
to get as much data as possible,
So we're moving from events to events
or getting people in here
to get their butts measured
(laughs) - Yeah.
- And so this helps us to create a saddle
that can cope with the problems that people are having,
and create the pressure distribution
that we would like to have,
to load the bony structures and unload.
(smooth music)
- After we sketch and we have
a clear idea that everyone's behind,
we start really with the concept development.
That means turning it into functional prototypes.
Which involves, of course, not only on 2-D
but also in 3-D, so we move on to CAD design,
which is Computer Assisted Design or Development,
so what we've got here is a CAD program,
it's a 3-D program in which you construct
and build every part.
And what we're looking at right now
is the assembly part,
so it's all of the parts together in one.
So engineers let us know the rail
drives into this garage
and this garage has to have
these specific dimensions.
If you don't have--
- It's not going to fit? - It's not going to fit.
it's going to crack, it's going to sound,
So it's going to have three millimeters,
3.5, four millimeters wall thickness
so you've got to take a lot of factors into consideration.
So if you go inside this part, you'll see
that it's like this huge, huge construction which is
feature over feature over feature so it's huge.
We can also check extra parts
that we adapted to the shell.
And you've got a rear mod cart
which you can adapt to the clip
on the base of the shell,
one of the cool features of the SM Men saddle.
- You have no idea when you look
at the saddle base,
how much work that you've just shown me
goes into it, that's insane.
- This way we can create
functional prototypes which we produce
also in-house through a milling machine,
3-D printer, and some magic hands
from our colleagues.
So we can try different
construction concepts maybe or see
how far we can push the limits of each product.
- [Doddy] Once a design concept
has been approved digitally,
a prototype is made in-house.
Using the CAD designs, the prototype is milled
from a choice of varying densities of foam.
The rubber exterior material is draped over,
and the padding is attached
to a 3-D printed shell.
(smooth music)
- As soon as we finish the first prototype,
we would go and put it on a bike,
go ride it here locally in Koblenz,
and then we can already see if we're happy with it,
if there's anything that we want to change
- And at the moment we're doing a study
here in house so it's people of the region
that are coming to visit us here
and do a study and test several saddles
and also test them outside,
give us the feedback through a questionnaire.
- Sometimes we send it to other riders,
professional riders that are sponsored
by us as well.
They send us their feedback
- We have the FMD Racing Team,
Canyon Factory Racing Team,
we have a few young gun racing teams,
all the different athletes in different sports
from XC to downhill,
We send the prototypes out to them
so they can actually test,
and then we Skype with them,
we talk to them
we ask them about their opinion
and then try to put all that feedback
into the product again.
- Wow, so they're actually testing some of those
prototypes similar to what we saw earlier.
- Exactly.
If we find out about things we want to change,
we just change it in the CAD.
- So we always have to keep in mind
Okay, I changed the shell,
how is this going to effect padding, rail, and other components
- Yeah, yeah, sure.
- How is this going to look on a bike right now
If you're saying this is not comfortable enough,
we need to add 3 millimeters padding to the--
- [Doddy] Change the appearance again.
- And then three months later,
you have to check
this looks too fat for a downhill bike ride,
so in order to avoid these,
we need to always go back to the briefing,
to the original requirements which we
from the start stated are the most important thing.
- Then talk about it again and again,
get everything finished,
redo the thing and do everything again.
- And again.
- And again!
- Until we get it right.
- And on top of that,
Ergon conducts constant in-house lab testing
to make sure all their designs and material
stand up to the rigors of continual use.
And if you'll follow me in here,
we're going to find that, hopefully,
Freddie is up and running in here.
How you doing?
- Hello, hi!
- Yeah, cool, so I've just been talking
upstairs with the crew about how
the 3-D design turns into the rapid prototyping,
which we've seen now.
Now here, you're going to be doing
some lab testing in here.
- Yes.
- So can you just tell me the sort of tests
you've got in here,
and how you get a product finalized
before it goes to production, I guess.
- Yes, so this is our static testing machine
that we use to try to understand
how our saddles behave,
the different materials, how they deflect
For example, we want to see
how the plastic part, the shell of the saddle,
how it will deflect having different thicknesses
so we can make sure that the saddle
deflects in the right way for the type of saddle
you're trying to make.
We can actually run a test if you want
so you can see what happens. - Yeah, definitely!
Let's see actually what happens to this--
- We are about to load
the saddle with 70 kilograms,
which are going to be loaded onto these two points,
which are our sit bones.
They simulate the bones of the body.
- [Doddy] I can already see it flexing, yeah.
- Exactly. And interesting to notice also
that the nose moves up a little bit
as the saddle is pressed down.
These are the sit bones that we have
right now, right here,
but we have other types of sit bone shapes,
depending on the kind of riding you're doing
you're going to be leaning more forward,
so your sit bone position
on the saddle is going to change,
so you need to have different sizes
of those sit bones and also different widths,
depending on the anatomy of each person,
obviously that's going to differ.
- And so, wow, that's a serious amount
of testing that has to go on.
- Yes.
- So what is the goal of this part of the testing?
Is this for like stress of the saddle?
Is this for comfort?
- It's to really understand how much the saddle
moves when you pedal,
when your leg is on there,
when you're pedaling cause you don't want
too much movement or too little movement,
or you want more of one kind
of riding than another,
and to see how different materials will behave,
will allow deflection or not.
So it's to make sure we're doing the saddle
right for the type of riding that we want.
Yeah, for the type of riding.
- Cool and also, what other tests have you got in the lab?
- We have temperature testing here,
for example we simply heat up the saddle
to a certain temperature for a long time
and see how the materials are affected,
Then after that we can maybe run this test again
and see if there is difference.
- If it's different after, wow.
- Exactly, 'cause obviously you can leave a bike
outside in the high temperature for a long time,
the whole summer 40 degrees,
so we have to make sure it can
withstand the heat well.
Also humidity testing, cause you have that
problem in many areas
and humidity can be a huge problem.
All these, humidity, heat, and very cold
could make the saddle too hard,
Make it more uncomfortable, so it's important
to make sure that it stays as comfortable
even in these extreme conditions.
- What would the effect of humidity be on a saddle?
- It could be harder.
- All right, okay.
- There are problems,
you hear about problems of people living
in high humidity areas,
they say some saddles can change over time
so we have to make sure that we choose
materials that don't change their properties,
their behavior with high humidity.
- Wow, so this is totally not what I thought
this was going to be like,
it's not just simply making,
getting the correct foam and the correct base
and the correct top,
- No.
- And checking the saddle is strong and stiff,
there's so much more to saddle development.
Wow, this is quite impressive.
- And then after that,
it's all about bringing it to production
so not only ergonomics and engineering feedback,
always at one table,
but also regarding production.
So we travel to our manufacturers as well,
to take care of, to go through all the projects.
Because you can design something really cool here,
but if you just leave it to your manufacturer
without working and learning from each other
- [Doddy] Constant communication.
- It can be a huge gap between the expected result
and the end result,
so you have to be also there and learn from them,
get their feedback regarding production,
and then you can kind of hand-in-hand,
develop the best product possible
inside a time frame because
the determining factor is always time.
- Well, there we go, that is a finished Ergon saddle.
I certainly didn't think there was going to be
that many parts to the process,
but I'm seriously impressed by the sheer amount of design,
industrial design, testing, prototype testing,
laboratory testing, and then real world testing
that goes into making something like this.
It's certainly made me pay a bit
more attention to it and certainly
the fact that they make these for different
sit bone widths and it's definitely
designed around different style riders
makes it a super interesting process,
and well worth checking out.
Definitely get yourself measured up for
the right sized saddle.
The saddle is the key to being
super comfortable on a bike.
Hopefully you found this as interesting as I did,
touring around the facility here in Koblenz,
For another Canyon related video,
click over here if you want to see
a Canyon E-Bike versus a Canyon Mountain Bike,
that one's over on EMBN,
and as always, don't forget to give us
a huge thumbs up here at GMBN Tech,
and of course, don't forget to
click, share, and subscribe for all the content.
Cheers, guys!