Behind the Design: How Urwahn 3D Printed a Bike for Urban Riding Conditions

Since the 19th century, the bicycle has undergone thousands of different design iterations for different riding styles and rider sizes.

While you could say frame designs have varied based on road or offroad usage, the core design of the bicycle itself hasn’t gone through many revolutionary design changes.

This is where German manufacturer Urwahn Bikes comes in. In their effort to make a more urbanized bike, they came up with their newest (and hardest to pronounce) creation: the Stadtfuchs.

The curves on the frame allow the Stadtfuchs to be more ergonomic and balanced, making the ride through city streets a lot smoother (it also helps that the bike has an elastic rear-suspension), while the frame’s tubing has an absurdly thin wall thickness of 0.9mm or lower and is made from high tensile CrMo-steel, making it easier to interlock with the other parts of the bicycle.

The individual parts of the frame are made through Selective Laser Melting; the additive manufacturing process that fuses parts in a bed of atomized, layered steel with a high-power laser.

Once the frame parts are fabricated, they are connected using a silver solder at <700°C by hand before being smoothed out. If you’re in doubt of the hand-soldered nature of the bike, take note the soldering process allows only for a small deviation of 0.2mm – which is relatively unheard of for a hand manufacturing process.

With the assembly nearly complete, the final step is powdercoating. Electrically charged powder is sprayed onto the steel frame before being heated in an oven. Once the color dries, a second layer is applied to make the Stadtfuchs resistant to weather and flaking.

The final compontents are then assembled by hand before going out into the concrete jungle.

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