Adding weight to a wheel on trainer

grahamspringett said:

I'd love a Kurt Kinetic indoor trainer as it has enormous inertia. It apparently takes 60 seconds to coast down from 40kmh. My trainer takes 3 seconds.

I was wondering if it's practical (or indeed safe) to add weights to my wheel so my indoor trainer takes a while longer to coast down and thereby emulate road riding a bit better.

Or am I asking for a destroyed bike/trainer/house/body by propelling weights at high speed across the room?

It all depends upon where and how securely you attach the weights. It is not something that I would do and your homeowners and life insurance companies may not be thrilled about it. The more I think about it, if you decide to do it, it was nice knowing you Graham😄.

It never seemed a good idea but I was wondering if there was some safe way of doing it. Maybe a KK trainer seems a better idea...

grahamspringett said:

It never seemed a good idea but I was wondering if there was some safe way of doing it. Maybe a KK trainer seems a better idea...

I actually did that a couple of winter's ago. I bought a box of adhesive tire balancing weights on line and stuck a pair back to back around every spoke out at the rim and then covered the whole thing with electrical tape to make sure they wouldn't rotate as I rode. I ended up adding 9 pounds to the wheel IIRC (back to back 2 oz weights on 36 spokes).

I rode that setup for about two months and ya know what? It didn't make the slightest difference in terms of my ability to sustain higher power indoors. It seemed a little easier to spin at low power, but I don't really do that on a trainer. I eventually pulled the weights off and sold the spare PT wheel to a freind. My indoor power numbers didn't suffer at all with a normal low inertia wheel. It was an interesting experiment that cost me something like $20 in wheel weights and some time but at least for me the CompuTrainer has plenty of inertia or at least I'd need a lot more to make a difference in my sustainable power numbers. And of course this was with a big fan, plenty of water and an open window to a Wyoming winter so I doubt it was heat. I still see a power bump of 7% or more every spring when I get back outside but it's more than wheel mass in my case.

YMMV,
-Dave