Product Description

Mike Burrows is a legend and this is the long awaited masterwork - revised and updated in this new edition - from the world's most famous and irreverent bicycle designer and inventor. "Bicycle Design" is the essential handbook if you want to know how to go faster, or if you simply love cycle technology. Inside you'll find no-nonsense explanations of everything from aerodynamics to suspension forks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63274 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
Mike Burrows is one of the world's leading bike designers

About the Author
Mike Burrows is an engineer who has designed bicycles for Giant, the world's biggest bicycle manufacturer. He pioneered the carbon fibre monocoque racing bike, as ridden by Chris Boardman to Olympic Gold in 1992, and the compact road bike, used by the ONCE professional cycle racing team. For many years he has also designed, built and raced recumbents.

Customer Reviews

Some tit-bits of interest, but not very thorough or comprehensive
More a coffee-table book than a serious reference manual, this small volume will suffice as a reasonable introduction to the fundamentals of bicycle design, but only for those too daunted by basic maths and physics to read the much better Bicycling Science by DG Wilson (also available on Amazon). The author's highly informal and at times slapdash style will annoy some readers, and despite the most recent edition being published in 2008 most of the content reads as though it were written in about 1995, albeit with some hastily tacked-on updates at the end of some of the chapters. The sections on aerodynamics and composite frame materials are interesting but slightly spoilt by the dogmatic and opinionated views of the author which make it difficult to know what to believe and what to treat with scepticism. An interesting if frustrating read with the odd tit-bit of useful information, but not a thorough or comprehensive work by any means.

Some thought-provoking discussion
Overall, a useful book that provides some thought-provoking discussion regarding issues such as cadence, crank length, suspension benefits, frame material selection etc. However, it is rather dissappointing in that its primary focus is on the design of machines for speed and downhill racing. It lacks consideration of design evolution for bicycles used as day to day transport means, with all the design compromises that this involves. I still await publication of anything useful on this topic, although I note that W H Smith list "Cycle History" by Nicholas Oddy et al as appearing soon. I look forward to seeing how that shapes up.

An excellent introduction for the layman
Mike Burrows has set out in this book much of the thinking behind designing such innovative bikes as the Lotus superbike, 8Freight load bike and the RatCatcher recumbent. He explains the physics in a clear and comprehensible way that helps you understand the compromises inherent in designing a bicycle for performance. An excellent read.