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D’Aluisio Smartweld

Making Aluminum Awesome

Aluminum is a great material for making bike frames; it’s light, it’s stiff, and it doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars. But there are some material properties that need to be taken into account when welding it together into a bicycle. This is where D’Aluisio Smartweld technology comes into play, and brings out the very best that aluminum has to offer.

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What is Smartweld?

Smartweld is an engineering process that precisely matches the welded area of tube-to-tube joints, in turn allowing a better welded joint, much stronger weld areas, and ultimately a stronger, lighter frame. In the case of the new Chisel, we’re talking specifically about how the head tube, top tube and down tube are joined together. This is the highest stress area in a bicycle frame, and Smartweld is how we can achieve dramatically increased frame strength at close to carbon fiber weights.

Yeah, But What IS Smartweld?

Okay, Smartweld is where we engineer the shape of the head tube to precisely match the shape of the top and down tubes where they intersect. We also engineer the shape of the top and down tubes where they meet the head tube. We design these tubes to intersect exactly how we need them without any old-fashioned mitering or fudging, and we add material right at the ends of the tubes where they are welded together. The benefits of this are huge.

The Hydroforming Advantage

Hydroforming – the process of using hydraulic pressure to shape aluminum tubing in a mold – goes hand in hand with Smartweld when it comes to unlocking aluminum’s full potential. Hydroforming allows for radical material shaping that can deliver exceptional directional stiffness where needed, provide plenty of metal in the high stress areas and also minimize the excess material where it isn’t needed. Hydroforming also allows us to precisely craft the jigsaw interface tube junctions in a way that is just not possible with any other metal forming process.

Focused Materials

By focusing on the material needs in the highly stressed weld zones, and putting the necessary material exactly where it needs to be, we also have the freedom to use tubing that delivers the ride characteristics we want, instead of having to make do with overbuilt tubing that sacrifices ride quality in order to be strong enough to survive the trauma of old-school welding.