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Where is my "Lahar"?

Andeh

Customer Title
Mar 3, 2020
1,182
1,147
Man, that thing sure sounds like a DH bike of that era (a shopping cart with loose wheels). :sarcastic:
 

ianjenn

Turbo Monkey
Sep 12, 2006
3,003
708
SLO
Screen Shot 2024-04-08 at 7.43.52 AM.png


Hit him up and see if you guys could do an RN1 "resto-mod" series together. Maybe with an actual gearbox and another with derailure in can.....
 

vivisectxi

Monkey
Jan 14, 2021
516
617
yeast van
just reposting tidbits here, in case things get deleted on yt. i had a bunch of fascinating convos with aaron bitd, but were unfortunately lost with my old hotmail account.


@Maungateitei

23 hours ago
Bugger about the footage. And shame about the mountkng screws and gearbox plate issue. Did have a run of cnc'd spares that never made production. Got lost in some call of duty and urgent move years ago. However... Recently a backup on an old hardrive drive with all the CAD files for everything I ever did has surfaced. So I should actually upload them as a public domain resource, machining being pretty cheap nowadays. Who knows. I'm amused that you're describing it as short and low by modern standards. At the time it was designed 21years ago, that was pro-racer requested geometry, and lots called it high, though they were not taking into account the initial sag and negative travel that was more than others ran at the time. Because of the shocks and lack of independent, high pivot anti squat behaviour, supple initial travel and smooth even wheel contact force, hence traction, was being sacrificed for pedalling efficiency on conventional bikes. The bigger wheels today are still contraversial. I know some kiwi pros still prefer 26inch on smooth and fast courses. There is a hell of a lot of Aerodynamic drag and sacrifice of nimble fast response to rider inputs with direction changes and even pedalling efficiency loss with larger wheels. Still.. The big front, small rear is exactly what I did with early protos. Though 26F24R then. The mk8 production was initially designed for those, and it lost some antisquat/antidive when converted. Guess the higher BB and longer wheelbases today are the inevitable consequence of the bigger wheels. Good work again.


@-TheRealChris
20 hours ago (edited)
Making the CAD files public is the very least you can do, especially since you owe so meany people thousands and thousands of dollars for bikes you never delivered before you did your disappearing act. You do realize this video is by one of the people you ripped off right???? I don't even know how you live with yourself let alone show up here acting like nothing ever happened, you are clearly completely detached from reality.


@Maungateitei
53 minutes ago
@-TheRealChris Not very real Chris. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and Several 12 thousand dollar+ bikes and a factory full of over 100 thousand dollars of Brand New OEM parts, and Production Tooling that cost 250 thousand dollars and 2 years of my work for the Lahar DHV Mk8 were stolen off ME, and Four different limited liability companies during 20 years of ME personally building toys for rich boys. By Sponsored riders, Subcontractors, investment partners pretending to their wives to be working for the company when not.... I WAS NEVER PAID A CENT IN WAGES IN WAGES OR SALARY, OR SHARE DIVIDENDS DURING THAT ENTIRE TIME. Many sponsored riders did get bikes, international travel, cars, vans, even salaries during that time. And factory workers all paid in full too. There were a couple of subcontractors that took between them over 200 thousand dollars, to make Lahar Downhill bike moldings, and after demonstrating they could make them from the tooling, supplied no more and cooperated with hostile takeover attempts to steal said tooling. The situation that you appear to be referring to is one idiot from Hong Kong, that paid for a frame and drive train kit, that was complete, except for a 2000 dollar Rohloff, took a month of my unpaid labour to build, then with the help of ride monkey forums, who refused to put a stop to it, got a huge whinging bagging session to the number one search result on Google. Where it was for many years, destroying my reputation and ending the Lahar story. The limited liability company no longer existed so he was not owed a bike by me or anyone. In fact he refused to consider people's offer to pass the hat and buy him a rohloff for the frame. I would say the situation is that he owes me for defamation and the loss of a career and company considered conservatively valued at 100million dollars. At that point I had had to work unpaid for two years from 2006 world champs win to 2008, as a sole trader, due to a shady business consultant taking a govt grant of 30 thousand dollars, and instead of setting up the watertight trust, IP holding company, and trading company for investment as he was paid to do, with all appropriate constitutions etc, to prevent a repeat of several prior smash and grab attempts by investors.. Didn't honor his contract and tried one himself the day after the 2006 WChamps win. In that 2 years as a sole trader, I turned over 200 thousand dollars but had to sell my house to pay a shortfall of 30 thousand in trade accounts at the end of it. I had budgeted for the Rohloff, but that money was stolen by my stepfather to pay for my half sisters wedding. Stephen Hughes was caught in this a little too. As a young feller who really wasn't equipped to be a distributor, I sold him the bike you see him restoring at below parts cost as he is a nice guy and seemed to be worthy of a chance. I can't quite remember the details, but he may have had a deposit on a frame, he never received? But voluntared to let it slide under the circumstances. It is, I agree disappointing that the egos, unscrupulous behavior of rich people and a few egotistic sponsored riders caused the snatching of disaster from the Jaws of world leading success around 6 times from 1990, to 2010. However those are the ONLY cases where anyone was owed anything, least of all money during those decades. Certainly not by myself. I don't believe Stephen has lost on his investment. These bikes are highly sought after, and if offered, sell immediatly for far more than I sold them then. So reign in your bitching please. I have arranged to have uploaded all the Cad files for my bike designs, tooling and parts for all my designs to public access and free public domain usage. I have no interest in getting back into the bicycle building game, and would rather do this than sell this work to some rip off brand that sells 50 buck slave labour frames that last one race on the world circuit, fitted with parts that most cannot afford to maintain for thousands This amounts to many years of unpaid work and development. So I suggest you take a step back and stop acting like a prissy little f'wit spouting shite you know nothing of, and ruining everyone's buzz. I have no regrets and no reason for guilt over any of My actions. You perhaps might consider an apology appropriate.
 

konastab01

Turbo Monkey
Dec 7, 2004
1,262
316
So I seen he commented on part 1 but wasn't sure if it was him or now but its been confirmed now after going to bed and waking up to that and a name check.

I really didnt want to comment on it but since he's spinning some sort of narrative that I gave him a deposit and just let it slide when the shit hit the fan is nonsense.

The guys not right in the head!
 

canadmos

Cake Tease
May 29, 2011
21,903
21,428
Canaderp
Bikes are an investment?

Damnnnnnnnnnnn

So wait, he basically said (whether ANY of it is true or not), is that people stole from him, so that makes it okay for him to steal from people?

:popcorn:
 

vivisectxi

Monkey
Jan 14, 2021
516
617
yeast van
gonna just keep archiving these (there's a few neat historical tidbits amongst the ranting):

21 hours ago
i've got a trimble hanging alongside my lahar in the shop. the trimbles were certainly flexy things, but the compliance was pretty nice (back in pre-full suspension days). fun bike at the time, though they all broke eventually (had a couple).


@aaronfranklin324
20 hours ago
@xy9ine yeah they didn't look like they were very durable from the construction. And the capacity for the bottom bracket and wheel contact patches to flex out of line was obvious. I'm sure they had a bit of pedal lashback from the rear wheel path being good by inertia thrust under drive thrust forces without any attempt to stop the chainlength extending. The softail remedied a lot of this by distributing the vertical compliance between the chainstays, without seatstay support, and around the curve of the Y mainframe. It also allowed higher lateral stiffness at the BB than diamond frames. Many found that hard to grasp. And it got a bit of bullying from some who noticed that they could grab the top of the rear wheel and the seat and quite easily demonstrate that a lot of flex could be created by applying force at those points.
But you don't often ride with the top of the wheel on the ground. And I designed the axis of rotational flexure of the rear end was leading the tyre patch by a few inches. There were plenty of knuckleheads that would claim that it couldn't handle the sort of hard riding they did. And sure, poor bike skills, like a motor cross rider that bought an early mk2, broke one despite me suggesting it might not be ideal for the sort of riding he did, and ignoring my stressing to him that landing big drops with his butt on the seat, raised right up for pedalling was not what it was designed for. That's what he did. I gave him his money back and rebuilt it as a floating drive train in 1994. Trek copied that in 2006. It's still going good now in Pat Littles hands. The first prototype was built in 1992, and I made a transparent cast epoxy mold with steel bar frame and hot water heating pipes embedded to develop the reusable shaped internal bladder, dry wrap, resin infusion along seamline process, that still hasn't been used by any other bike company as far as I'm aware. So that the whole frame could be molded quickly and easily in one piece. That was the mark 2 that about 20 were built of up to 1997. The bladders were the biggest challenge. I tried all sorts of synthetic rtv silicones, two pot industrial urethane, nylon reinforced or not, and none of them could handle more than one or two moldings. Popping, breaking coming out... One of the urethanes was almost capable, a compound used for rebuilding stuff like teeth on gravel slurry pumps in the mining industry. Similar to race car urethane suspension bushings rather stiff though. It took a mitsubishi pajero with the frame tied through the BB to a Friggen pine tree, repeatedly yanking a 30ft strop backing full throttle down hill with all the tires hurling dirt and gravel to pull it out the head tube. (I molded the head tube and a few inches of mainframe on after the bladder was extracted on the mk2) Didn't damage the frame pretty good for 3lb of 1.5mm thick frame. The synthetics weren't capable of handling the 60C temps and 80psi pressures required to get decent 5 minute resin infusion and 80% by weight fibre content. Would always stick on the second molding. Not chemical resistant and shite tear strengths. Natural rubber latex was though, with a bit of extra sulphur and a vulcanisation bake. That's why modern tyres are so shit. The plastic doesn't stick to the reinforcing too, causing all that drag at low pressures we all know about. It's why we need 100hp to make a car go as fast as 10hp used to do with rubber/silk or cotton. Four mk2s went to France and in 1996 one got tested by Gitane, 3rd biggest bike company there. They Wrote to me "please pass on our congratulations to the designer we have tested and computer simulated it's dynamics, and it is a perfect design. We would like to purchase a first year trial order of 3000 frames. I was offered a $60000 investment by a friend which allowed me to model and build a CNC alloy block frame mold for the mk3. When he came to handle sales, purchasing and accounts, at the factory we'd opened in Kumeu all the trouble started. Never give a prime of life day of birth earth pig any ability to influence your company . About 120 were built they were very fast and great traction. But the "carbons not strong enough for MTB!" chants had begun, because of the shite from gt, specialised and Cannondale with aluminium glued into everything f'n it up, so the nexus dh mkdframe protos 1, 2 and 3 from 1995 got ramped into a World Cup and NORBA campaign with protos 4, 5, 6 and 7. And the trouble really began with the brown pig spending all the investment funds on partying trashing the factory, and organising and buying tickets and hotel bookings fees etc for his own Los Vegas interbike trip without telling me while we were away. Poor business skills indeed. Caused us to be stranded without cash in Frankfurt and miss the last WCup in Mont Saint Anne, and the twat came back from interbike with a 2500 frame order for the dh bikes, despite being told he couldn't sell any till we had production molds. And didn't try getting orders for softails which were 2hr one low skilled operator builds and selling for 5000 dollars at that point. You might say it was all downhill from there.