SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.— U.S. industry veteran Paul Lew has been named CEO of the newly restructured Edco cycling company, now based in Arizona.

The historic brand — it was formed in 1867 in Couvet, Switzerland, and began making bike parts in 1902 — was purchased about ten years ago by Rob van Hoek and partners and has been operating as Edco Engineering BV in the Netherlands until recently.

In early summer, a major supplier filed a bankruptcy suit against Edco Engineering BV for failure to meet its financial obligations. This filing was approved by the Netherlands government in August and the company's assets were subsequently purchased by Best Top Industrial. Lew described Best Top as a well-established composite manufacturer in the sporting goods sector, whose corporate offices are in New Zealand. Janey Tiernan, a New Zealander currently based in Sydney, Australia, is the chair for the private equity team behind the new Edco, Lew said.

Lew, best known as owner of Lew Composites and then director of technology and innovation at Reynolds Cycling, became involved with Edco in early 2016. He left Reynolds to set up a U.S.-owned company that licensed the Edco brand from Edco Engineering BV.

Lew's U.S. company was completely separate from the now-bankrupt European company. Although it used many of the same suppliers, it bought and paid for its own inventory and was not in debt to any of them, Lew said. Lew was in charge of product development globally for Edco.

Lew shut down the U.S. operation in May 2017 but remained in touch with the New Zealand executives, who asked him to consult with them as they relaunched Edco after acquiring the brand through the bankruptcy. In August, soon after the bankruptcy became public, they invited Lew to join the company as CEO.

He told BRAIN that the new EDCO company will now be headquartered in Scottsdale. Lew and Tiernan plan to negotiate new contracts with former and potential customers at both the Eurobike and Interbike shows.

Lew also remains a vice chairman of the WFSGI wheel committee and planned to attend that committee's meeting at Eurobike.

| A BicycleRetailer release  ||  August 28,  2017   |||

The most radical of the new Ultime trimarans, the incredible Gitana 17 is designed to foil at over 50 knots and cross up to 900 miles a day, crewed by just one solo skipper. Elaine Bunting talked to designer Guillaume Verdier at the launch

A revolutionary 100ft fully foiling oceangoing trimaran capable of covering more than 900 miles in a day and sailing at speeds of 50 knots was launched in Lorient this week. Designed by Guillaume Verdier, the foil genius behind the America’s Cup winning Emirates Team New Zealand, Gitana 17 is designed to be sailed solo and to beat the round the world record.

Gitana 17 is the latest of the race boats backed by Baron Benjamin de Rothschild. The 100ft ‘Ultime’ trimaran is the culmination of three years of work by the team and brings together developments from areas as diverse as the Vendée Globe IMOCA 60s, the America’s Cup and the MOD70 trimarans.

This is a beast of a boat and significantly different from others in the growing ‘Ultime’ development class such as François Gabart’s Macif and Thomas Coville’s Sodebo. For the first time, this is a boat designed around foil performance.

According to the design team, Gitana 17 will be able to foil at speeds of 48-50 knots in 16-25 knots of true wind and seas of 6-8m – typical Atlantic conditions. It could also sail across the Southern Ocean in non-foiling mode at up to 40 knots.

“Foiling is not that [hard] but to do that and be stable in waves is a lot more difficult and this is a first stage to doing that,” explained Guillaume Verdier. “Previously the boats were designed to go offshore and slowly the foils got into that, but we have designed the appendages as a principal [part] and tried to have a platform that goes well with that.

“It makes a boat that is a little heavier because there are more systems to control the foil, more hydraulics and the platform is stiffer in torsion.”

The foils on Gitana 17 share some common thinking with those on the America’s Cup boats – the outer float foils are an L-shape. The main daggerboard on the central hull, however, is a shape never seen before on these boats and features a large horizontal component to help with roll control.

Continue here to read full article and view video and graphics

During a McLaren press conference at the 2017 Goodwood Festival of Speed in the U.K., Chief Financial Officer Paul Buddin said the company’s new plant in Sheffield, England, building McLaren’s next-generation carbon-fiber tubs will have an annual capacity of 10,000 monocoque chassis by the end of 2019.

That number caught the ear of a number of automotive news outlets, including CarBuzz and Car and Driver, especially since McLaren had also claimed its target goal was to build 5,000 cars annually by the end of the decade. The discrepancy between 5,000 cars and 10,000 monocoque chassis, both outlets reported, is a result of McLaren’s desire to make room for any future sales expansion.

“It would be very short-sighted to limit ourselves to 5,000 cars,” McLaren CEO Mike Flewitt explained.

Flewitt also hinted that McLaren is considering using the Sheffield plant to build carbon fiber monocoque chassis for other car manufacturers looking to build limited-run performance cars.

“We won’t do it until we’re fully up and running ourselves, but it is something that we are considering as an obvious expansion.”

One of the innovations that will make this possible is the increase of automation. Back in March, new broke that McLaren aims to completely automate the carbon fiber production process its uses to create the lightweight “tubs” around which it builds its supercars. To do so, McLaren ended its contract with Austria’s Carbo Tech and moved the work to Sheffield. The production process at Carbo Tech, which also made the body for VW’s XL1 eco-car, is only 20 percent automated. McLaren wants to push that to 100 percent, allowing the British automaker to increase production to 20 to 25 cars a day, up from 15 now. The plant produces McLaren’s 720S supercars, the first of which has already rolled off the production line.

| A Composites Manufacturing release  ||  July 17,  2017  |||

British bike manufacturer Orro have released the all new Terra C model road bike this month. Featuring sigmaIF – a combination of Innegra™ and Sigmatex carbon fibres, to produce a completely redesigned frame.

Orro’s mission is to create the best and most stylish bikes for serious riders. Their headquarters in Ditchling at the foot of the Sussex Downs, provides an area of outstanding natural beauty; an inspiration and a perfect testing ground for their bikes.

The Terra C is one of several bikes in the Orro range that feature Sigmatex carbon technology. The Terra C has a lightweight frame, tyre clearance and geometry aimed at the emerging adventure riding scene, while retaining the speed and handling of a road bike. Offering the same light weight performance as more traditional carbon fibre reinforcements, sigmaIF offers improved impact resistance and damping properties – absorbing energy and reducing vibrations, which makes for a smoother ride.

“sigmaIF is so versatile and we have been able to completely customise the fibres to improve the strength in critical areas to ward off rock strikes and other such impacts.” – Orro.

In addition to cycling, sigmaIF has been the chosen solution for a diverse range of sporting applications including paddle boards, ice hockey sticks and surfboards. sigmaIF has a greater damage tolerance which reduces failure in such applications where impact resistance is essential.

| A Sigmatex release  ||  July 5,  2017   |||

With Challenger and Defender intently going over their America's Cup campaigns and trying to evaluate the other's performances, there is a fair chance that they'll be looking at the latest content from a new 3D Video application which takes them aboard their rival's AC50 - sitting in the 'shotgun seat' wrote richard Gladwell earlier this week in sailingworld.com.

Earlier in the 35th America's Cup Regatta, Race Director Iain Murray confirmed that the teams would have full access to a suite of performance data from their competitors.

That is expected to include content that Oracle Team USA and Emirates Team New Zealand have recorded from an onboard camera stack to gather content for a new 3D Video viewing experience.

The application is the latest development from New Zealand-based Animation Research Limited or ARL who first made their mark 25 years ago with real-time graphic animation in the 1992 America's Cup in San Diego.

That product, now Virtual Eye, while originally designed for the TV broadcast has been extended into a multitude of platforms and devices from mobile phones to PC's smart TV's. ARL have used their market leader position to dominate the sports animation space - covering everything from gliding to cricket, motor racing and golf, as well as sailing.

Continue to the full article on sailingworld.com  ||  June 22,  2017   |||

C-Tech began life in 1997 as a small back yard operation in co-founder Alex Valling’s shed writes Chris Kitchen for Sailworld.com

Fast forward 20 years and C-Tech has a lot to celebrate. Their composite technicians have produced over 50,000 custom designed carbon spars, and they’ve had a successful partnership with Emirates Team New Zealand for five consecutive America’s Cup campaigns.

C-Tech and Emirates Team New Zealand first worked together during their 2003 campaign to supply sail battens. Despite radical changes in America’s Cup classes, 15 years later C-Tech continues to supply wing components, rudders, dagger board cases, dagger board tips, fairings, lifting posts, accumulator tubes, struts, prods and ‘bike components’ for their 2017 challenge. C-Tech has also supplied most of the other America’s Cup teams with their prods and a number of compression struts.

Emirates Team New Zealand’s 2017 challenge has been one of the most dramatic in their history with C-Tech.

Days before America’s cup qualifying was due to start Emirates Team New Zealand damaged a rudder. C-Tech got the call to build an emergency replacement. The C-Tech crew pulled together and rostered a 24 hour shift to get two weeks work completed in five days.

Two weeks later just hours after Emirates Team New Zealand’s capsize on the Great Sound during qualifying meant another phone call to the C-Tech team. Within hours the emergency order order of fairings and struts were being built. They were completed and shipped to Bermuda in record time.

Continue to the full article here on sailingworld.com  ||  June 24,  2017   |||

Hexcel Corp. (Stamford, Conn.) has entered into exclusive negotiations to acquire all of the shares of Structil SA (Structil), a French producer and supplier of high-performance composites to the aerospace, defense and industrial markets.

The proposed transaction is subject to review by relevant employee representative bodies and approval from the applicable French authorities. Assuming those reviews and approvals are successfully completed, the acquisition is expected to close in 2017.

Structil is a joint venture between Safran Ceramics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Safran, and Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. (formerly Mitsubishi Rayon Corp.). The company employs approximately 70 people at a 68,000-square-foot production plant on a seven-acre site in Vert-le-Petit, France, about 25 miles south of Paris. Structil's 2016 sales were approximately $21 million. The company’s product lines include prepregs, structural adhesives and pultruded profiles used in engine nacelles, aerospace interiors, military jets and more.

Hexcel’s chairman, CEO and president Nick Stanage, stated, “By combining Structil’s advanced composites product portfolio of prepregs, adhesives and pultrusions with ours, this acquisition would further enhance our product offerings to our customers in aerospace and industrial, providing an expanded choice of advanced composite solutions. The integration of the Structil team would also further strengthen our development capability and technologies for next generation aerospace and industrial applications. Hexcel is a Safran First Circle supplier, and this project will further reinforce our strong 30-year-long partnership.”

| Hexcel release  || june 1, 2017   |||

Just outside of Hamburg, a monumental experiment is finally coming to life.

Named the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), the 1.5-mile-long experiment has produced its first laser pulses, signaling that the project is nearly ready for its experimental debut.

According to reports by the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), which operates the laser, the XFEL has produced its first pulses of 0.8nm laser light at a single pulse per second. With this demonstration, the researchers believe that in the coming months they’ll be able to ramp up the lasers pulse frequency to its final state of 27,000 pulses per second.

"The European X-ray laser has been brought to life! The first laser light produced today with the most advanced and most powerful linear accelerator in the world marks the beginning a new era of research in Europe,” said Helmut Dosch, chairman of the DESY Directorate. “The European XFEL will provide us with the most detailed images of the molecular structure of new materials and drugs and novel live recordings of biochemical reactions."At the core of the XFEL is an electron beam generated by a superconducting linear accelerator. A 2.1 kilometer (1.3 mile) accelerator tunnel, accelerates electrons to relativistic speeds along the length of the passage.

The electrons then enter a 210 meter (689 foot) stretch of the experiment where X-ray generating devices built around 17,290 permanent magnets twist the beam. By taking the straight-line electron beam and giving it a rotation through forced magnetic pulses, the researchers are able to create short wavelength X-Ray particles.

These incredibly energetic X-ray pulses carry with them a high degree of luminosity and thus can be used for the various laser experiments that litter the XFEL experimental hallway.

According to DESY, once the laser is fully operation, in September, researchers will begin using it to make pictures and films of “the nanocosmos at atomic resolution.” Beyond biological and medical research, these films might also be capable of showing researchers what conditions within the interiors of planets might be like, lending better understanding of now frequently discovered exoplanets.

For more record-breaking engineering, learn about the World’s Largest Pool for Space Research.

| An Engineering.com release  ||  May 16, 2017   |||

Tomorrow Liam Malone will graduate with a Bachelor of Commerce from Victoria University adding another another hard earned award to his growing list of acheivments. 

There were a few distractions on the way, not least competing in the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Liam’s next step is to become the fastest person on the planet. “I’m going to be the fastest person on the planet, legs real or not. It’s important to do things that shape the future and this would be one of those things,” Liam said in a recent Victoria University press release.  

So technology around the running blades will no doubt play a role in helping Liam acheive his goals so it was interesting to have a look back at just how these blades came about and where from.

The Flex-Foot, as the blades are called, are made in the USA  by Össur an organisation whose aim is to improve peoples mobility and provide prosthetic solutions.

Here is the Flex-Foot story

Over the past few years, Dubai has produced some incredible composites innovation, including the world’s first 3-D printed office building, materials for Apple’s new campus roof, passenger-carrying drones and components for the Boeing 777X, among others. By 2020, the region hopes to add another industry-changing innovation: the world’s first rotating skyscraper.

Leading the project is Italian firm Dynamic Architecture, led by architect David Fisher. The skyscraper, aptly named the “Dynamic Tower,” was inspired by Fisher taking in the view from the Olympic Tower in New York City in December 2004. He noticed from a certain spot, he could see the East River and the Hudson River, covering both sides of Manhattan.

“That is when I thought to myself: “Why don’t we rotate the entire floor? That way, everybody can see both the East River and the Hudson River, as well as Saint Patrick’s Cathedral!” Fisher said. He added that his architecture philosophy includes making buildings that “adjust to life.”

The skyscraper will have prefabricated floor units made with a combination of carbon fiber, steel and aluminum. As of now, the idea is for the entire tower to be powered from wind turbines and solar panels. Enough surplus electricity should be produced to power five other similar sized buildings in the vicinity. The turbines would be located between each of the rotating floors. Fisher said that they could generate up to 1,200,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. The solar panels are expected to cover the roof and the top of each floor.

|  A CompositesManufacturing release  |  February 27, 2017  ||