Originally Posted by
Kilroy1988
bulgie Mark,........ Do you think tens of thousands of professionals go through their lives studying, designing and fabricating bicycles and advancing related materials like carbon fiber simply because it seems like it'll make them a buck more than the older stuff and that they're only trying to maintain consumer demand? ......
-Gregory
This seems like a premise for a very interesting thread!
Without the benefit of the participation of folks who were designing or specifying bikes, I doubt we can reach any conclusion. However, I can't help but notice that after decades of being happy with very narrow tubular tires, the pro's are now riding wider tires (are they clinchers or tubeless?). This suggests that bike manufacturers and race teams can overlook some basic aspects of bike design.
My impression is that companies are fine with tinkering around with frame material and are even doing some work with aerodynamics, but there are other areas where they appear to be blissfully ignorant. That might be due to the difficulty of quantifying effects or just having no background in the subject. Either way, it seems very possible that the total effects of frame stiffness might not have been evaluated.
OTOH, the whole business of Bicycling magazine having a frame stiffness tester, and the results of it being barely mentioned in its pages just seems odd. Was it a case of the results contradicting what the industry was trying to sell? From my perspective, I'd think that the ability to offer a tailored (and quantifiable) level of stiffness to each segment of the market would be an advantage, not unlike what Specialized does with its Roubaix model.
Steve in Peoria
(still curious about what varieties of stiffness and flex can be achieved with 853 tubing)