DVO Suspension is 100% designed, engineered, tested, and proven in the USA for riders by riders. We base all our designs from an Intelligent Engineering perspective, that means we build it with the consumer in mind regarding tuning, ease of servicing, cost of spare parts, manufacturing, reliability, and ultimate performance.
To help us get our ideas into reality, all the DVO products will be engineered using the most advanced design software and hardware available. Hardware requirements were so stringent that the company’s head engineer, Josh, had to personally spec and build out each workstation.
No expense was spared, with engineering at the heart of development and the ability to design, test, simulate, run FEA (finite element analysis) is paramount to designing and optimizing all our critical parts.
As shown on this example of the Strain Analysis of the new DH leg & Drop Out, the computer simulates a very high bending load and the blue color represents a cooler area (less stress) and red-orange color spectrum represents (increase in stress) warmer or hotter areas of strain. This is just one of many types of computer analysis/simulations we perform on all the structural components.
The next step is to perform the mechanical aspect of the testing process, bench testing. We will utilize different “bench test” protocols to test to the highest standards for strength and durability to ensure our computer simulations are in line with our physical test results.
And the most important and enjoyable part, we will have riders putting hours upon hours of ride time on our new products to verify the ultimate performance result because as we have learned from our decades worth of experience, the ultimate proof of design and engineering is how the product performs on the trail.
Another cool tool we use here at DVO Suspension is a 3D Rapid Prototype Printer which is great for verifying parts as you design them. We can even print various piston designs in the morning and be testing them on the trail in the afternoon. Having the ability to immediately verify a part right after designing it saves a lot of time and money. For example, after prototyping the axle and drop outs, we fitted them to a wheel and mounted a brake just to make sure we had the proper clearance and everything matched up. It’s a great tool to avoid making any small mistakes that can snowball into BIG problems.
FDM’s, better know as 3D printers are quite possibly the future of manufacturing across the globe. We have been on the waiting list for months now for this small “desk top” size machine and finally see the amazing results of this incredible technology. Our next investment will be a FDM that prints in different metal compositions so we can reduce the development and prototype time from months to just days. This allows for more testing time giving the engineering team a larger window to verify designs which greatly improves reliability and overall product performance. We won’t let a product come to market that’s not 100% Developed.