SAMPSON TECHNICAL INFORMATION
For the past 20 years, Sampson has quietly innovated many new designs. Additionally, Sampson has worked with many top manufacturers in order to bring you the best technology available to your riding. Be it titanium, magnesium, carbon, steel or leading edge composites or ceramics, Sampson has years of experience with it. Some products you see, and some do not make it into our production for either durability issues, or what we believe is a prohibitive cost/benefit ratio. Shown below are some of the innovations and terms used in this web catalog. Of course you can always call for more information!
SAS: Short for Sampson Attenuation System. SAS is a Sampson innovation that reduces the noise and vibration from your bike, for a smoother and quieter ride. The benefit is you feel fresher for longer. The SAS process is also worth it's weight in gold when you do long stage races or multi-day events. When others feel worked, SAS keeps you going! And, before you dismiss this as fluff, please keep in mind that VeloNews, Cyclingnews.com, Biketest.com, and Asphalt magazines all tested an SAS equipped bike before singing it's praises! Here is how it works: A series of polymers of differing durometers (hardness) are injected under pressure into your bike frame.
SAS polymers are comprised of millions of cells. When you hit a bump or hole, the vibration travels from the wheels and into the frame. When the shock hits the frame tubes, the SAS grabs it and sends it into these millions of cell walls, so that by the time it gets to someplace you can feel it, the energy has been attenuated, or absorbed. While there are Zertz and other technologies to absorb or attenuate vibration, SAS is far more effective as it doesn't just work on the smallest part of the frame-it works inside the bikes biggest tubes that transmit the most shock. In addition, we do not need to add extra frame material and weight to support SAS. And, SAS is also very effective at eliminating noise from your bike, so you ride in silence, even on a big tube Diablo or Exalt. After all, who wants big tubes for performance when you hear every shift and bump inside the bike? With the Diablo, Exalt and Express with big tubes we wouldn't settle for noise in our bikes, and once you ride it, you won't either!
SAS is now featured on every Sampson bike, even the new 12.8 pound Diablo Mt. Evans. With an average weight of about 80 grams in a typical frame, SAS is hardly a place to cut a few grams. The Sampson Attenuation System was originally developed to provide a top level ride with big-tube aluminum frames, but it turns out that it makes every frame we make smoother and quieter than anything you have ridden!
We have been putting SAS into our ACO handlebars for 2 years, and the SAS turns this big, stiff bar into a very smooth riding partner with a price that is now about 65% of the full carbon bars.
Magnesium Alloy: Sampson has built frames with magnesium alloy for almost 10 years now, however we have only offered them for sale for 4! Our first magnesium alloy bikes rode well, it was just all the other details that kept us from offering them in production. But we found new tubes, new technology and also tried combining them with carbon which resulted in exceptional performance and smoothness!
The magnesium alloy versus aluminum is much quieter riding, and with SAS and the carbon rear stays, our magnesium bikes are silky smooth. Versus a high level 7000 series aluminum alloy, our magnesium alloy offers about 200% the fatigue life, and 150 % the notch sensitivity. The magnesium alloy is a great selection for those who want light weight, high performance, and the ability to take a ding or two along the way and keep on going!
Hydroforming: a second operation seen in conjunction with our magnesium frames in which the tubes are molded into special specific shapes.
The primary advantage of hydroforming for you as a rider is that the tube diameters can change over the length of the tube, so we can "tune" the frame set. With the Psychic frame, you will see the ends are big and ovalized at the ends for exceptional torsional support. What you do not see unless you look at the bikes next to each other, is that the tubes are bigger in diameter by almost 50% on our largest bikes versus our smallest. This advance in tube design means you not only get a custom fit, but a frame that is tailored to your size too!
If you look at the pictures of the Psychic, you will see pointed ridges on the ends of the tubes. With hydroforming we can also place more material where needed, which on a bike is at the ends for extra strength. This is the same as the big welded on gussets you see on mountain bike frames in function, clearly our MagTech technology turns these once unsightly areas into tube art!
Carbon: Sampson has made the Diablo carbon for about a year, and previous to that we worked Kestrel for our carbon frames. We are working with exceptionally experience carbon suppliers and molders for our products. As a result our learning curve has been assisted greatly by our manufacturing partners, and we have already learned much more about carbon than most. A word of caution about carbon is the mis-use or misleading nature associated with carbon fabric. The 12k fibers used on many bikes now are about the lowest cost carbons. On some bikes it is used as a top weave only, but often it is signal of a low cost/low quality product. We are conditioned to think that if 1k is great, 12k must be awesome!
Just as you can look at the weave on a top suit and see the tighter uniformity and smaller weave, typically you can see this as well in carbon. We obtain our carbon typically from Toray, and we use 1k and 3k material. With 1k and less going almost exclusively to aerospace and military use, there remains little true high modulus carbon available, and what there is costs an arm and a leg! Thus, the price increases in our products with all carbon, and big increases with the high modulus product. If you are seeing a full frame that is being touted as high modulus carbon for less than a couple of large, please give us a call so we can look into building our frames there too!
Titanium: just as there are many alloy types of any other metal, and many grades of carbon, there are many levels of titanium. Over the years we have used many alloy types, with great success in all varieties. At present, we use 3AL/2.5V and 6AL/4V These numbers indicate the amount of aluminum and vanadium in the alloy with titanium. With all titanium, there are present many trace elements, so that the 3/2 or 6/4 designator is an approximation, with copper, zinc, etc. all present. One of the most important areas we have found is the oxygen content, and we do not use titanium with high oxygen content. Typically 3/2 has far more strength than ever needed in a bike frame, but 6/4 tubing is available if desired. We use 3/2 now for the Silverton frame tubes and lugs on the Exalt, with all the fittings, drop-outs and bottom-bracket shells made with 6/4 for exceptional strength. Sampson is one of the older titanium bike manufacturers, as we started making titanium bikes with the UK branch of Raleigh, in their legendary race bike production center in 1994. The all commercially pure titanium Kalispell brought a host of new fans to titanium by virtue of it's affordable price. In 1998 Sampson fully redesigned the frame to offer snappier performance, and this brought an award for one of the most innovative products, and even more titanium success.
Over the past 20 years, Sampson as a company has elected to pour our resources into our r and d in order to produce exceptional quality products that help elevate the performance of world class and recreational athletes alike! As we start our next phase, we are now able to offer our next generation bike platforms to you that combine our advanced frames and components with our new component lines to provide you a bike that will simultaneously help you to ride faster, and with lots more comfort.
How to measure and fit your new Sampson (.pdf)
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