Development of wheel holder for bike carrier

This report is a bachelor thesis work within the field of Product Development and is also an assignment for Thule Sweden. The work has been performed by Niclas Tjäderborn and Christian Holm, students at the Mechanical Engineering Program with major in Product Development and Industrial Design at Jönköping School of Engineering during spring the semester of 2009. The thesis work concerned the development of a new wheel holder for bike carrier for Thule Sweden. The background to the project was that the initiator wanted a more user friendly wheel holder with better design than those available on the market. The wheel holder is able to be implemented on one or several of Thule’s current wheel holders. The report continues the entire process from pre-study to the finished prototype. One of the challenges concerning the project was that the wheel holder should be able to attach bicycle wheels that have large variations in dimensions; due to this a specific investigation concerning dimensions was performed. A patent investigation was also made in order to find out what patents that currently exist. Seven different concepts with several versions have been developed during the project work, all of them created in CAD, specifically using Solidworks. After a four phase’s evaluation, one of these concepts was chosen. This final concept was further developed and a prototype was made in 3D-printer. The authors of this thesis would like to thank everyone that has been a great help during the thesis work. A special thanks goes to Joakim Andersson and Anders Lundgren at Thule Sweden