Author: paschmann

Lithium Labs: 2011 – 2014

paschmann

I founded Lithium Labs in 2011. It was bootstrapped by the proceeds I received after selling Aschmann Media Group (Social Media Startup). The idea was born by recognizing the impact, and potential, mobile apps could have in the enterprise space. The original mission statement was:

“Lithium Labs provides a full suite of services for designing, developing, implementing and maintaining an enterprise mobility solution. We support all major mobile operating systems and hardware including iPad, iPhone Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbol and Intermec.”

The product/application portfolio of the company was seeded by a few mobile apps I had already released, and were being used widely in the SAP space. All of them were free from the various App Stores, the primary objective of these apps were for me to personally learn about the technologies and platforms, and the secondary objective, was to draw awareness to Lithium Labs as a company, and provide an example of what was possible. One of the most popular free apps which I developed under the Lithium Labs portfolio was “SAP Note Viewer”, with 12K downloads. read more

Aero Bottle Holder

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Another 3D printed bottle holder for my Canyon Speedmax. This is a raised bottle holder for between your arms and mounts a traditional water bottle cage.

The typical distance between for the mount holes on cages are 64mm. 2 100mm M5 bolts keep the mount attached to a custom made carbon fiber base plate.

Reynolds Disc Wheel Cover

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I could not justify spending $1500+ on a aero disc wheel, so I went with a more budget friendly alternative from the company EZGains. It is essentially a disc cover which can be attached to your existing wheel set with nearly identical benefits as a traditional disc wheel.

Below are some interesting statistics regarding disc wheels and these types of aero gains: (From EZGains website)

Tests 31st January 2023 using rim tape and a rider holding the exact position within the green lines set out from base ride.

The idea was to validate that putting one of these covers on your wheel actually makes you faster. Spoiler – it does! We had an array of quality carbon wheels of different depths with EZDisc covers for each, one aluminium box rimmed training wheel, one relatively cheap disc wheel and one relatively expensive disc wheel to play with. The test itself was with the wheels on my TT bike, with the wheels spinning, without a rider. Why? The rider adds far more drag than a wheel so unintentional movements can mask the differences the wheels make. We tested with wind speeds of 30, 40 and 50kmph, with wind angles of -15 degrees through to 15 degrees. The results were unequivocal! This graph shows lines, one per wheel, for the aerodynamic drag (the “CDA“), including the bike, against the wind angle (the “yaw”). It’s averaged across the wind speeds. The lower the CDA, the better. As you’d expect the training wheel performed worst (the top line in dark grey).Then there is a group of all the carbon wheels. Surprisingly the depths from 38 to 88 all performed similarly, with the deeper rims just outperforming the shallower ones at higher yaws. Then there is a grouping containing the real disc wheels and the disc wheels with covers. There’s very little difference between these. These distinct groupings show the disc covers improving the aerodynamics of the wheels up to the same performance as normal disc wheels! Bearing in mind these are a fraction of the cost, this is a pretty big finding! What do those figures mean in terms of racing? Plugging the differences between the wheels with and without the disc into a calculator or directly using the formula you can work it out the saving. read more

SRAM Rival Crank Aero Cover

paschmann

After reading about some aero gains from Crank covers, I decided to try and 3D print one to fit on my SRAM Rival crankset on my TT bike. The curves and irregular shape/profile of the crank made it difficult to model, so I printed a flat surface, and used heat to mold it to match the profile. It is held on via zip ties.

The design was done using Fusion 360 and a front and and side profile reference image. I printed this on a Prusa MKII.

This was one of my first prototypes. Due to the low melting point of PLA, a heat gun pretty quickly warms it sufficiently to get it to mold into the correct shape.

This was the final version.


EZGains testing results regarding covers and their benefit: read more