Way back in 2008, Delta 7 brought their Ascend and Arantix road and mountain bikes to Interbike and dropped jaws with their carbon-and-kevlar woven isotruss design. Then they demo’d them at Sea Otter in ’09, and that was really the last we heard of them.
Fast forward to Interbike 2013 and Kovit has purchased the design and reworked it to bring prices down from almost $6k to $3,500. They also managed to drop another 150-ish grams from the road frame while updating the standards. What remains is the helically wound composite strands that are woven around straight strands to create isosceles triangles to form three dimensional “pyramids”. The result are tubes they say are incredibly resistant to bending, twisting and compression forces in all directions. The other benefit, besides being very lightweight, is that damage to one strand won’t compromise the integrity of the entire tube, as can happen with traditional carbon tubes.
More pics and details below…
Kovit gave it a tapered headtube and PFBB30 to add strength and compliment the tubes’ stiffness.
The white Ultralight is just 700g. Compare that to the Ascend’s claimed 817g frame weight…which was very, very light for 2008.
Internal cable routing should be a bit easier, and they’re running full length brake housing. Shift cables run externally alongside the downtube.
In addition to carbon headtube, seat collar section and BB shell, it runs standard carbon frame sections for the stays. The original Arantix had trussed seat- and chainstays and looked really wild.
We’ve reached out to them about availability since there’s no pricing or ordering info on their website. We’ll update if/when we hear back from them.
