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See HERE for our schedule & below for details
All Meetings will be on the
Third Wednesday of the month
Doors open at 09:45 - Presentations start at 10:20 am
with Refreshments between 09:50 and 10:20
16th October 2024 - Chris Morris
Plastic Bicycles
The Itera Plastic Bicycle was conceived in the early 1980s by ex-Volvo employees,
with encouragement and loans from the state-owned bank PK-Banken. Volvo had been
experimenting with a plastic mini car at the time. The idea here was to design a
revolutionary new bike in Gőteborg (Gothenburg) and mass produce it inexpensively
in Vilhelmina, Lappland (Lapland), where employment was needed up in the far north.
This was the first time in the world a plastic injection moulded bicycle was mass-produced.
Launched in 1982, with a clever advertising program, the Eternal Machine (Evighetsmaskinen
in Swedish) alluded to the fact that the frame could never rust. It was marketed
as a mail order flat-pack which the owner assembled IKEA style.
So far so good so what could possibly go wrong?
Chris Morris became interested in the details of bicycle technology in the last decade
or so. He first volunteered in 2011 at the Pedal Depot (a not-for-profit bicycle
cooperative) in Vancouver, Canada, overhauling many older bikes for sale.
In 2015 he was appointed a director and over time he wrote, presented and had published
over a dozen international papers on various aspects of bicycle design. The presentation
locales included the United States, UK, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Germany and the
Czech Republic.
Since retiring to Swanage in late 2019, Chris has had several papers published in
English and Italian cycle magazines and participated in various local bicycle-themed
pop-up stands at cultural events in Corfe and Swanage. Last Spring he was in Cremona,
Italy to present a paper entitled A Shifty Business on the varied approaches to shifting
hub and bottom bracket gears.