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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

HN is becoming more conservative by the day. Shouldn’t companies/people be applauded for thinking outside of the box and trying to innovate?

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Innovation can be good, scamming other people into spending money on things that don't work, not so much. There's a whole lot of the latter masquerading as the former. There's also a whole lot of user/customer/community hostile innovation, like the entire advertising industry.

That’s not the case here though. The design I linked is a legitimate attempt at solving a real problem. Whether it works as well as intended or not is a separate issue.

The design as plain obviously wrong. The only "legitimate" part there is trying to part people with their money for zero benefits.

I'm not a mechanical engineer or anything remotely like it. Can you explain why the design is wrong and especially explain why you think it's a dead end that can't solve it's problems via iterating?

This drive train simply can not handle high torque as the chainrings will bend under load. They admit it themselves. Increasing their thickness will cause a whole lot of compatibility problems and also turn the whole thing into a monster.

This expensive ceramic bearings are exposed and will experience significant wear. Properly insulating them would wipe out whatever miniscule gain in efficiency they claim as the insulation increases losses.

Finally reducing chain friction (which is already very low on a tuned drivetrain) to some fraction (that has yet to be proven for real conditions) is tantamount to snake oil in my opinion.

These are just few. I could go on but it is not worthy the typing and mental efforts.

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