We really wanted to focus on creating the best possible system that
could match the rest of Eagle technology. Eagle technology right now
is seen as the benchmark for drivetrain performance, so we wanted to make
sure that we elevated our game on cranks like we have with everything else in our
drivetrains. As you can see behind me here, this is our San Luis Obispo facility.
We took that same systems engineering philosophy that we have in Schweinfurt
with the product management team working with the engineering team and
implemented that here with all this crew right here
to come up with the new DUB platform.
You know there was three key factors that we really wanted to focus on.
Simplicity, durability, and compatibility.
Today what we have is four different
frame standards that bottom brackets adapt to: BSA threaded English,
PressFit diameter 41, BB30 diameter 42 and PressFit 30 diameter 46 and with that
comes a whole landscape of different spindle sizes, different bearings, some
mounted external, some mounted internal and all those come with trade-offs.
So the idea that we had for DUB is if we have one solution that can solve all of
these frame standards, then we can put our time and engineering into optimizing
that one solution.
Now we have consistent bottom bracket placement, so we know
exactly where the loads are going, where they're coming in and where they're
exiting the crankarm. And that allows us to really optimize for a lightweight
solution that's consistent across every single crankset platform.
Simplicity and durability are kind of tied together
in that other competitors out there have gone this route as well.
They have an oversized 30 millimeter spindle that you
put into all those frame shell standards as well. The difference that we looked at
is that that's it's kind of a short cut to get there. We didn't want to take that
shortcut because our engineers back here felt that it's not going to provide a
durable system. It didn't provide the sealing, the wear characteristics that we
wanted from the bottom bracket and so we took and started at 30 millimeters
and slowly kind of whittled it down until the engineers found that that
optimal range of okay we still get the benefits of the oversize spindle to get
weight and stiffness, but then we now get the durability that you can't get with a
30 millimeter system in some of those bottom bracket configurations that those
manufacturers have.
The test lab is a pretty symbiotic relationship with actual riding.
We want to make sure that the tests that we're doing are
somewhat correlated to what we're doing outside on the field. We don't
want to test something that you know is never going to happen out there because that's
just not valuable to us. We're never gonna be able to replace actual good
quality feedback from somebody getting the part on a bike, going and testing and
saying yes it's good or no it's not good. Well what we can do here is control the
the environment, we can we can pinpoint, we can turn those knobs and dials to
really fine-tune what we want to do and actually get an answer of how the parts are doing.
This test here is our bearing wet test. It's basically
simulating a wet condition out on the trail, like Pacific Northwest riding.
Instead of having a sample out in the field where I would be riding it for
like a year, we can run this test in a week and get a similar result.
We can match it up to what we're seeing in the field and we can pull it apart
at certain intervals. Basically we can catch when we're getting water into the bottom bracket.
Another part that's really critical to designing and the
a development process is test riding. We really want to verify that
what we're seeing in the lab is actually providing value for the customer out on the trail.
We ride the heck out of these, and some people have hundreds of hours
or potentially even a thousand hours on their crankset.
We really love riding our parts.
That's kind of how it started, let's simplify our product line
and put all of the best features in to it that we can. We weren't able to
do that with with the old dual platform scenario, where you had some
features in one of the platforms, some other features in the other one, and
now you've got the the sealing, the bearing performance, the lightweight,
the stiff spindle. All that all together in DUB. No compromise
regardless of what bottom bracket platform your frame runs.
Compatible with all the stuff that's out there and has been out there for for years now.
So it solves a lot of problems.
From a compatibility standpoint, everything here that we have is
backwards compatible, forwards compatible. It will fit into all
those frame shell standards that you have. So, as long as you're buying a full
DUB system you'll be able to put it on your bike whether you have an existing
bike today or you're looking to get something here in the future.
There's a lot of proliferations of standards right now and we wanted to make sure that
whatever we come out with isn't a new standard, it can be put into everything
because ultimately at the end of the day we want anybody to be able to go out
there and put SRAM product on their bikes. In a nutshell the DUB platform
has the benefits of our 24 millimeter systems from the durability standpoint
but yet the light-weight and stiffness benefits of our 30 millimeter systems
all wrapped up into one single solution.