Jobst Brandt "The Bicycle Wheel"
 

Is the content the same in the different editions of "The Bicycle Wheel"?

thanks, Brian

...I have two different editions. IIRC, the pagination is different, but the content is pretty much the same.

+1. I have a copy of the third edition, and the only mention I can find of changed content is that spokes had improved enough since the first edition that some of his best practices would not have been as obvious as before.

I think it's kinda fun to own multiple editions of a book. My 1971 copy of "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive" has a much funkier charm than the later editions. :thumb:

Was given "The Bicycle Wheel" as a present for being part of my friend's wedding in 1976(?). I read it and enjoyed but have never built a wheel. Need to see if I still have that copy. No, not planning on building a wheel.

My copy is copyrighted 1988 and is the 2nd edition. The first edition was copyrighted 1981 according to my book. However, mine was published by Avocet and there may have been previous editions by other publishers with earlier copyrights.

I used to hang out on rec.bicycles.tech when Jobst was a regular contributor. I remember him commenting once that he could not have written the book based on modern materials due to lack of failure data.

Interesting. That dovetails with Wheelsmith founder Ric Hjertberg's point that all studies he's seen attempting to show the value of butted spokes (in a more durable wheel) fail to find a difference. He says most spoke breakage happens from crystal imperfections in the wire structure of a spoke, and as such it's statistically much more difficult to find a "signal" amidst the noise. Not that any such studies of spokes exist in Jobst's younger era, but the general problem of of more noise than signal was probably more widespread back then.

Yeah I miss those days. The level of arguing was at such a higher level than in here.

that's just so "whole earth catalog" - ish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

I have the 3rd printing 1985. It covers butted spokes.

Ill sell my copy..

Ummm...you can download the book for free...just do a search for it...

I have the second edition and the spoke strength page is the same as the book on line, the third edition.

Hey old guys. I was in rec.bicycles.tech, too! Jobst and I even emailed each other a few times.

Yeah, I had a few back and forth discussions with him. He was a prickly old coot.

He was, but he was kind to me. Some people assumed that since he was prickly, he must have been wrong. That's not very good logic.

Agree. Nor is it good logic to assume that he was right because he gets quoted more on the internet than others. Nor is it good logic to assume that he was always right merely because he occasionally debunked long-standing conventional understandings.

In all cases, his arguments should stand on their own. Which, for the most part, they do. But not always. He was human, after all.

I never had the pleasure of any personal interactions with him. But this book was and is a pretty fundamental text in my bicycle education.

Prickly AND wrong, that was Kunich.

Right, @Ghrumpy. He's been shown to be wrong in some cases, but he measured his findings and took the trouble to explain them, which is better than some can say.

Haha, now that you mention him, @DiabloScott, I remember Kunich. Some people just want to argue. It was a good place for negative role models. In 2003, I moved to Maplewood, NJ, which has an extremely active community forum. Lots of people there are nasty and post anonymously. I joined and decided to use my real name and be as nice as possible, since I was conversing with my actual neighbors. I learned a lot at that.

He's a member here too - don't let on though. Posts mostly in Road and General.
https://www.bikeforums.net/search.php?searchid=3112900

Like the hub standing on the spokes? But he was always right -- according to himself.

I'm sad that I didn't back up more of Carl Fogel's pictures before he decided to withdraw from online bike discussion. He hosted quite a few of Jobst's pictures. :(

I used to enjoy Carl Fogel's contributions. Always wanted to get an inside look at the Fogel labs he was always talking about.
And of course, Sheldon was at least as active there as he was here.

Aye, there's the rub....

The "hub stands on its spokes" thing is a headline which he immediately qualifies. It's also kind of metaphorical, but his explanation is lacking, IMO.
A compression-spoke wheel does actually stand on its lower spoke. You could remove the rim, and the spoke itself would statically support the load. This of course would not happen in a tension-spoke wheel. But it functionally "stands on its spokes" or supports the load because of the stability of the entire tensioned structure.

This is an example of how sometimes I think his desire to debunk things got in the way of a clear explanation. A tension-spoke wheel doesn't "stand" on its lower spokes any more than it "hangs" from its upper spokes. But he got hung up (pun intended) on explaining it in a way that had to contradict the "hanging" explanation.
He was also trying to write a book for people without a ME degree, so the explanations had to be more metaphorical, I suppose. It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that metaphors are sort of definitionally not physical descriptions, too.