Thanks Medico and numberzero for your insights!
Here's what I just heard from Adam at Carbonda:
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Thanks for your email.
Re. the NS bike rear triangle,we can not offer it for you as it's NS bike's mold.
If you wanna create a similar rear triangle mold,the cost details as bellow:
4000USD for rear triangle
3000USD for the link
And batch order price details as bellow:
Super light version:720USD
normal weight version:580USD
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I'm definitely not opening a rear triangle at these prices, I know of several places that will do it for under USD2500 total. Neither am I going to buy a super light version, that's just too little weight savings for too much money. T800 carbon isn't that much more expensive than T700 carbon, and the layup complexity is the same (albeit different). For example, other vendors charge +$75 for their T800 vs. T700 models.
I would like to believe NS bikes story, and it defintely sounds the best in terms of their brands' status and capabilities, but I have several doubts:
- Carbonda has full-time engineers that oversee all mold tooling design
- Carbonda subcontracts engineers to corporations to design new frames
- Smaller brands commonly open new rear triangles and linkages to throw on open mold frames, as a elatively cheap way of getting proprietary models
If I could speculate, I would consider it much more likely that NS Bikes pledged X number of sales to Carbonda on terms they opened a mold with Y geometry numbers according to a general aesthetic layout. In the eyes of NS marketing folks, that contribution may consitute "design". Then, because Carbonda was the company actually paying for the mold, they agreed to keep the front triangle proprietary and Carbonda went off on their own to publish it as an in-house option. I'm not just pulling this hypothesis out of the blue, this is the way a lot of agents try to cajole you into opening a new mold with them--you promise X sales, I'll promise mold tooling, and you get some proprietary parts and I get license to some parts.
