First impressions are important. I was suspicious of this bike by virtue of the hype and focus on money above all other considerations when Lester was trying to peak my interest. Sure, I like healthy profit margins, but I also like my expensive items to be PERFECT! And, I want the item to be perfect BEFORE I am given the chance to help them perfect it for free, which is what I do, and did. Next time, bring money or a free frame, Lester. He said he is taking orders and from the look of the bike, this seems a tad premature. "We want rich people who want the best to buy a few to provide more money to work on the design." That is what I heard.

Profit is good, but it shouldn't be the prime focus when building something as beautiful and sacred as the most efficient machine ever invented by a human. This Arantix bike is a marketing ploy to get the company's methods into magazines so that they can start building space crap for NASA. A bicycle is the opposite of a car or a spaceship. It is about NO GAS. The interest in building other things is OK, but the bike looks like it was made by people who make widgets in hopes of making doohickies for outer space. I got a solid impression that Lester hardly ever rode a bike. He was not interested in riding one with me, I can tell you. He and his girlfriend were chosen for their warm, friendly nature. When he told me that the bike was a "project" and that what they really want to do is take this technology in any direction that is profitable, Lester lost me. I took him into the shop to show him the Pegorettis, the Dreamride Fully and the Moots bikes. He poo-pooed the aluminum and the steel. Ignorant and prejudiced is what he thinks I am. He turned nose up at the fancy Moots Psychlo-X on the stand being built.

Would I want to carry their frame?

Moots might be a "sold-out" company, but the passion for cycling is there. They stay away from widgets and doohickies for spaceships and missles and plumbing systems. It's gotta be about bikes. Pegoretti is 100% road bike passion. This Delta 7 Arantix is all about marketing hype, at least as is presented. If it weren't for the passion I personally feel at seeing advanced technology put into human-powered vehicles, I would have been lost at $7,000 for the frame!

The frame has obvious design flaws and I was happy to point them out. The bottom bracket, where most lateral loads from rider input are concentrated, is bonded to the chainstays, creating a point where the frame is going to separate. These bonded joints are fairly strong, but when you bond carbon fiber you are bonding two very strong stiff pieces and any flex is going to end up in the joint, wiggling away at that epoxy resin. Then I took a good look at the rear dropouts. This is another spot where lateral flex is concentrated. On this frame a CNC piece juts out from the carbon, bonded into the chainstay in what looks like a small can with a bonded cap on it. Acutally every joint on this frame looks like they used cans or medicine containers as molds. The appearance of bare epoxy is everywhere in every joint (didn't even mix in some carbon dust to fake it). Carbon fiber is a great material, but who is going to market a bike made out of epoxy resin? There is not much art to this frame aside from the natural appearance of the woven carbon and kevlar, which is spectacular. It is so organic, like vines crawling up the branches of a tree. The parts on the bike certainly did not reflect the retail price of the frame which is $7000!! They wanted $12K for the complete bike. What would I put on a $7000 frame? The absolute cream of components and none of them were on this bike. Would I put that cream on a Delta 7 Arantix at this point in time? Absolutely not!

I took the bike onto the singletrack next to our shop and was frankly impressed by the compliance, and a bit worried by the compliance as well. The carbon lattice acts like a form of suspension, but in every direction. The wheels were horribly flexy, as well, but the feel of the frame gave me hope that this could actually be a fine way to build a ROAD BIKE!!! or a 29er. A 26 inch wheeled race bike? Probably. But whose gonna pay for it? A sponsor?

Conclusions:
The Delta 7 Arantix is far from a well-thought-out piece of engineering. It is an experiment that will probably die on the vine like so many project bikes because those who are behind it are not in tune with its true chances at perfection as a BICYCLE. And if it is truly revolutionary, could be had by many more people and could change the way we ride bikes, the UCI would kill it. If Delta 7 doesn't make a heap of money, they go away from it because it is not "profitable." If they make a heap of money, the frames will be made in Taiwan or mainland China in short order. How about a really well crafted, artistic, detailed statement that is a bike?

If this was a perfect effort, an apparently flawless design with a flair for beauty as striking as the woven tubes, $7K might not be out of the question. After looking at the details of this raw prototype, a bit more cobbed-together than I would want to ride around on after paying $7K, I say the idea needs a lot more attention to creative molds, to eliminating joints and covering the fine details, such as cable routing. I like to sell extreme high end bicycles, and truly appreciate the strength and tuneable compliance of carbon and woven kevlar spider webs, but the details of this frame are just too crude. But, this is a very good design "idea" that desperately needs and truly deserves a creative engineer to take the next step. And forget 26 inch wheels for this sort of thing. 26 inch wheels are for short people and full suspension bikes.

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