A new bicycle will be manufactured that will be the first to be coated with retro-reflectivity powder coatings.
The bike won a major award at the Oregon Manifest, a show for new bicycle engineering and innovative ideas. Rob Tsunehiro of Tsunehiro Cyles and Silas Beebe of ID+, a collaborative design/build team that took second place in the competition. Tsunehiro, a former Boeing engineer and custom bike builder, and Beebe, an industrial designer with 10 years of global experience, won for their "Louis Vuitton of city bikes", an elegantly realized, highly visible and practical urban utility approach to the competition.
Their luxurious leather, brass and steel entry featured a convenient top tube cargo pocket with integrated USB mobile device charging for easy access to your phone or iPod while riding an easily removable memory foam passenger seat with footpegs and passenger grips, and leather cargo straps that function as skirt guards but also provide simple on-the-fly load carrying.
The bike featured the world’s first patented retro-reflective powder coated bike frame coating made by Halo Coatings. The Halo reflective powder makes the entire frame and wheels glow like reflective tape at night, while still maintaining a day-time appearance that's normally associated with a robust powder coated finish. As another safety caveat, Blaq Design created a matching waterproof leather and canvas pannier system that has 10 inch tall electro-luminescent strips sewn in for superior rear visibility at night, and a clear acrylic LED handlebar stem spacer ring light that provides 360 degrees of visibility.
