Originally Posted by daka

In trying to find an engineering term that might match Heine's description of "planing" (which I think was a poor choice of terms, at least from a marine perspective), the closest thing I could fathom was constructive resonance. In design we went to great lengths to avoid that since it can give results like the disintegration of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge but musical instruments use it to great advantage. However, the forces that "excite" the structure, in this case the bicycle, have frequency and amplitude which I think are going to vary from rider to rider based on how strong they are and their preferred cadence. That would imply that a bike that works well for one rider may not please another since while it may achieve a constructive resonance for one it may just feel dead to another.