The Stringbike is a bicycle that uses a rope and pulley drive system instead of a traditional bicycle chain and sprockets.[1][2][3][4] It uses two Dyneema ropes attached to pulleys attached to swinging lever and cam mechanisms, one on each side of the bike. These mechanisms replace the round sprockets found on chain-driven bikes. Unlike some traditional 10-speed gears using a derailleur, there is no slippage when changing gear ratios.[5] The Stringbike uses a 19 gear ratio system with no duplicates and a total gear range of 3.5 to 1. The transmission ratio can be changed with a shifting knob located on the right-side handle grip. Gear ratios can be changed even when the bicycle is almost stationary.[6]
Hungarian designers from the manufacturing company Schwinn Csepel Zrt, unveiled the bicycle in 2010 in Padova, Italy.[7]
It never caught on so possibly isn’t better than a chain design, but maybe it simply lacks popularity or the idea might be made use of for some other application
Do these bikes actually exist? All the links at the bottom of the wiki go to some shitty blog (and he’s doing reviews of bikes with regular chains).
I’m also getting a strong “AI generated” vibe from this blog. A few years back I worked at a company that had this idea about auto-generating web sites. Basically they were already in the “domain squatting” business, but wanted to make more use of those domains than just showing the usual ad-filled parking page, so they wanted to have an algorithm that would see the word “bike” in the URL, then take a bunch of pre-written blog posts about bikes from their database and drop those onto the page to make it look like somebody was curating a blog about bikes.
The project got scrapped largely because it relied on poorly paid writers to produce all those blog posts, and to make them generic enough that they’d look native to that site while still not looking overtly generic. The company couldn’t find a good balance between how much they had to pay for decent quality vs. how many articles they needed to scale to. I bet ChatGPT gave that idea new life though.
Interesting concept, although it seems like one of the biggest “why though?” projects ever. Very interesting idea, but probably overengineered and expensive.
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Chain drivetrains are really simple, easy to maintain, mature and efficient. The efficiency is biggest point for racing, for commuting maintain and simplicity are probably the biggest points and there’s a lot of interest in belt drives that are almost as efficient (or about on par in single speed setups) and almost maintenance free.
As it turns out, it’s very difficult to come up with new better system than simple chain drivetrain.
I’d also be wondering about how easy it is to break whatever rope or what not they are using. Cause if it’s some really expensive rope or what not that’d probably be more expensive than the gear and chain anyway and if it’s not than how easy is it to replace and how expensive would it be.
