Photos: Craig Douglas & Orange Bikes
April 24 2024
The Phase AD3 is a labour of love nearly 6 years in the making.
It takes an Orange Phase chassis and a custom front end linkage designed by Alex Desmond, combining them to produce a ‘go anywhere’ adaptive mountain bike.
The Phase AD3 celebrates riders of different abilities and is a bike that we're incredibly proud to put the Orange name to.
It has been developed via Orange’s Strange Special Projects Division and with a huge network of passionate individuals and businesses. It has been made with the aim of helping more people discover, or rediscover, their love of mountain biking.
We've finally arrived at the point when the Phase AD3 is a reality. And are now in the process of taking orders and specification requirements from customers who want one.
The webpages with full specs and pricing is now live, you can find that here.
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The AD3’s story has Lorraine “The Pocket Rocket” Truong at its heart, a rider whose life-changing injuries have done little to hold back her love of adventure.
Lorraine was an XC, enduro and downhill pro with a day job as a mountain bike development engineer. She suffered several concussions through her racing career and, at an EWS in 2015, crashed hard suffering a brain injury. Lorraine now lives with severe headaches, debilitating fatigue, nausea and paresis - a form of “soft paralysis”.
Lorraine admits to there being some “really dark times” for her after her injury but she continues to maintain her independence and still has a fierce sense of adventure, helped by living in the Swiss mountains.
Enter Alex Desmond, now Orange Bikes' Senior Design Engineer and the inventor of the AD3 linkage.
A career engineer, Alex left university back in 2010 with a 1st in Mechanical Engineering and went on to work for Norton Motorcycles, JCB and Jaguar Landrover before founding his own company DezmotoRacing Ltd.
Motivated by seeing a friend’s riding impacted by a stroke, Alex used his extensive engineering knowledge to begin designing an adaptive bike that felt like a conventional mountain bike. Utilising CAD software and plunging his savings into a CNC machine to build parts, Alex self-funded several prototypes.
He was made redundant from his bread-and-butter job due to Covid in 2020 and rather than finding a new 9-5 he made the leap to focus on his passion. He worked with several injured riders to help them return to doing what they love by building adaptive bikes.
People started to take notice of Alex’s work and, a friend of a friend introduced him to Lorraine who was, at the time, hunting for an adaptive bike to help her access the mountain bike trails around her home in Switzerland.
In summer 2020 Alex visited Lorraine with a prototype and it was an instant fit. “Lorraine pretty much jumped on, balanced independently and rode straight off" Alex told us.
“Within minutes she was trying to slide the back end around but, with the brakes reversed for the UK setting, she ended up doing an endo with a massive grin on her face. I was chasing her down the road begging her to take it easy!”.
It’s at this point that the Orange connection sparked.
Alex stayed with Orange Bikes Switzerland whilst Lorraine was testing the prototype and they were so impressed they contacted Orange Headquarters in the UK. The team in Halifax had wanted to support Lorraine in getting back to riding for years and wanted to be involved. They agreed to help take the bike from prototype to production… with one condition.
“Orange said they’d only make it if I agreed to work for them” Alex says.
“I got halfway down the M6 before it clicked. I'd seen Orange bikes hung up in shops when I was 13 and lusted over them so to have the opportunity to work with them was a dream come true”.
Orange saw Alex’s potential, they knew he’d be a huge asset to the business and shared his passion for developing an adaptive bike. Lorraine could barely contain her excitement as she waited for her bike to be born.
The Phase AD3 is, in a nutshell, an adaptive bike that’s designed to feel like a conventional bike, built around the principles of giving riders independence and accessibility.
Alex’s design uses a pair of cantilever linkage arms to join two additional head tubes. It takes a second steering linkage element connecting the two suspension forks to the original steering head tube. The rider then sits in a bucket seat which gives core stability and the ability to throw the bike around - pumping, jumping and railing berms.
Where conventional bikes need your lower body for balance, the Phase AD3 transfers this job to the rider’s upper body, allowing riders to stationary balance and manoeuvre at low speed without using their legs or lower body. This design means that the rider can balance upright without toppling and is very stable, even in tight turns or at slow speeds. Many riders who have disabilities are able to get in and out of the Phase AD3 without assistance and many find it quick to learn, giving loads of confidence from the get-go.
As a hard-hitting eBike, the Phase was the perfect chassis for the Phase AD3 project, which Alex paired up with the Paradox Kinetics eMTB Motor motor. Depending on the rider’s requirements, it can be built as a pedal-assist eMTB or, like Lorraine’s version, a full twist-and-go setup where the motor provides all the propulsion.
Battery life and range will vary depending on an individual rider’s setup but in Lorraine’s case, the bike was built with a 504wh battery and a 1.5kw continuous motor with a 2kw peak and around 150NM of torque.
Lorraine can do about 700m of technical climbing on one battery and about 25km of trail. She can also carry a spare battery when she wants to go further, which easily fits in a backpack and takes seconds to change. A day’s testing in Verbier saw Alex and Lorraine use the chairlifts (yep, the Phase AD3 does fit) and cram in over 2500m of descending.
From day-one of his research, Alex quickly understood that riders with disabilities don’t just want to ride ‘tame’ terrain. Many want to ride singletrack, slash berms, send jumps and overcome technical, rocky, rooty and rutty trails. The Phase AD3 opens this up to them, either returning to what they loved before an injury or helping them to find a new love of off-road riding.
The Phase AD3 is a monster over rough terrain. It’s built around 175mm of suspension travel and because of the actuation, the front-end system reduces suspension input to the rider by 50%. This actuation means one of the front wheels on Lorraine’s bike can clear obstacles up to 345mm, enough to stop most conventional bikes in their tracks.
In Alex’s words “It’s like a magic carpet ride over roots and ruts. With that second front wheel you’ve got an amazingly capable bike that’s great through rough ground”.
A challenge that Alex worked hard to overcome was the risk of losing traction, losing balance or crashing. This is where the leaning three-wheeled design comes in and having two front wheels was found to increase grip by 50%.“When we tested it, no-one could keep up with Lorraine through flat corners, she’s pretty damn fast anyway and the Phase AD3 just gave her loads of grip”.
In addition, if the bike does lose grip the bike will understeer rather than toppling. If the rider does fall the linkage will help to protect their legs.
The design means the bike can lean as the rider covers ground, the front end moving by up to 40° to offer plenty of margin for different terrains. That’s great for allowing access where other adaptive bikes can’t go and allows the rider to carve turns, climb steep inclines and even traverse severe off-cambers that would be tricky to even walk across.
The secondary seat suspension also opens up a new world of possibilities to riders like Lorraine. Riders can change their centre of mass on the bike, allowing them to jump and pump the bike.
Last but not least, the bike’s design addresses a classic challenge of adaptive bikes, their width. Where many other designs require specially built trails or wider tracks the Phase AD3 is significantly narrower, with a 350mm track width. It can be ridden on narrower singletracks than 350mm too, including on steep inclines and even through nasty, gnarly, rutty trails with wheels bouncing in and out of ruts.
“The whole purpose of the Phase AD3 is to provide a bike that allows adaptive athletes to push the boundaries of their riding abilities without being restricted by the bike” Alex told us.
Where many adaptive bikes focus on safety and stability, the Phase AD3 aims to give riders the freedom to ride challenging trails and a bike that feels more like a two-wheeled bike “you pick a route, ride down it like a conventional bike and the Phase AD3 does the rest of the work”.
Needless to say Lorraine is smitten with the Phase AD3 “having disabilities like I do means you’re often really dependent on other people and that’s something that I find really difficult, so having a tool that allows me to go on adventures just by myself is something absolutely incredible, it gives me so much freedom”.
Lorraine particularly liked that the Phase AD3 was built around her rather than her having to compromise for the bike “what’s amazing with this design is that it's not only adaptable for different disabilities but it also opens up having an adaptive bike for different disciplines. The Phase AD3 means you’ll be able to get the actual bike you want as a biker, not only as an adaptive biker”.
The Strange specific technology devision is where we work on prototypes and testing division. Often flying under the radar, but you will see a few Strange things if you look around.
Strange has also become our components development division, and as such, is a brand in it's own right. There are lots of exiting and innovative ideas in the pipe-line. Some will see the light of day as original equipment on Orange Bikes and will also be available as aftermarket components.
You may have already noticed that some Orange bikes are already equipped with Strange stems, bars and seatposts.
Orange Bikes and Alex Desmond would like to acknowledge the following for their help with the development of the Phase AD3:
Dezmotoracing Ltd | Lorraine Truong AKA My Brain My Rules | Lucy and Phil at Orange Bikes Switzerland | Bairstows | Rideworks | Hope | Fox | Paradox Kinetics eMTB Motor | Boxford | Invisiframe | Filmmaker Craig Douglas AKA The ridgeline | Adrian Bedford
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