In article <[email hidden]>,
Quoted message said:Mike Jacoubowsky said:Quoted message said:> Excel Sports had Shimano R560 wheels with drive side radial lacing
> on sale for just $188.88. That's a good deal, but I think they
> ought to pay me a little more to take them off their hands :-) Was
> the builder drunk when these were put together? Can the rear wheel
> be re-laced correctly by swapping the non-drive and drive spokes?
> Is Shimano and Excel crazy for trying to foist these on
> unsuspecting buyers?
Not so. Torque is transferred by change in tension of spokes and
their angle as long as no spokes are slack. If you grab a copy of
"the Bicycle Wheel" off your shelf, you'll find a magnified diagram
showing a wheel with torque.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Interesting.
The only thing I find interesting is that the shaft of the hub must be
substantially larger to take the torque. On the one hand, riders
worry about every gram of components and then they use deep cross
section rims and hubs with a large center piece.
Jobst Brandt
Fair enough about the big hubs, though as you know you can make a big
hub with thin walls and be pretty close to break even on the weight. I
won't pretend to defend Shimano's unusual design; even my wacky
low-spoke-count race wheels aren't that eccentric.
But as I've noted in the past, if you're going to trash gram-counting
riders for deep-section rims, you ought to at least acknowledge that
said rims are the right compromise of aero versus weight if you care
about performance. On all but the steepest climbs, the aero wheel is
going to be measurably (not greatly, but measurably) faster, assuming
equal riders.
Are there riders who shouldn't really fret about such stuff so much?
Sure. I once saw a rider walk away from a middle-cat Spring training
race holding a broken Zipp wheel. He probably wishes he had raced on his
cheap wheels. I raced my entire CX season this year on a garage-sale
Bianchi road frame, and a canti-post fork I traded an old leather saddle
for. The rest of the bike was just as ghetto, but it mostly worked, and
I had fun.
The average century rider should probably worry about this stuff even
less. My supervisor at work bought a $1000 "fitness" (flat-bar road)
bike this year, and is enjoying it. When I looked over the specs, the
only thing I fretted about was the frou-frou wheels, which were clearly
anti-functional for any likely purchaser of this model. And yet I'm sure
the mildly funky wheels helped sell these bikes.
My club-mate swears one day I'm going to buy a complete shiny bicycle
and be converted to non-bodgery, but I'm skeptical. And cheap.
--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos