alto's carbon clincher shootout test

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BobbySweeting
Posts: 37
Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2017 5:37 am

by BobbySweeting

Spartan, thank you for chiming in with the correction.

Boyd, you misunderstood our testing protocol entirely. We qualify our rims for production at 90J, which I mention in the video, as that is what we consider an allowable factor of safety when compared to our strain gauge measurements of real world impact. However, as I previously pointed out, our rims test up to 250J at Topkey before seeing any sort of failure, and those results are corroborated on our in-house testing jigs.

The fact that we build our equipment does not make it wrong, and there is no difference in accuracy between our results and those at your factory in Taiwan. Most companies create their own purpose built equipment, which Enve has done as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcSqTlkvkj0) (http://www.highcountryvelosales.com/201 ... r.html?m=1), and use simple mechanical systems for actuation. This is what we did at Cannondale's Bedford testing facility, and it is preferable to being reliant on your Asian producer to qualify products on your behalf. It doesn't mean they are less accurate than the equipment is Asia, it simply means that the engineers on staff are capable of producing equipment for the same purpose at less cost. The first rule of design is to keep it simple, because introducing unnecessary programming and pneumatics creates potential points of failure that will eventually need fixing.

I find it interesting that Mavic believes it to be impossible that a new company, founded by engineers, could create IP that could compete or surpass what they have done. The reason I find it so interesting is because Enve did so within just a few years as well, and Mavic's parent company was forced to acquire them. If anyone should be aware of the possibility for new and better systems being put in place by young engineering companies, it should be them.

Instead of claiming that our testing is magically incorrect, hopefully this will inspire other brands (including Mavic) to improve their product's capabilities.

TheKaiser
Posts: 653
Joined: Thu Sep 05, 2013 3:29 pm

by TheKaiser

BobbySweeting wrote:
Wed Dec 27, 2017 4:10 pm
I find it interesting that Mavic believes it to be impossible that a new company, founded by engineers, could create IP that could compete or surpass what they have done. The reason I find it so interesting is because Enve did so within just a few years as well, and Mavic's parent company was forced to acquire them. If anyone should be aware of the possibility for new and better systems being put in place by young engineering companies, it should be them.

Instead of claiming that our testing is magically incorrect, hopefully this will inspire other brands (including Mavic) to improve their product's capabilities.
Yes, instead of tired (no pun intended) old appeals to authority, Mavic, as well as a number of other companies, could use a little fresh air, to improve both their transparency of testing, as well as explaining their blind adherence to ISO standards (which now seem to be finally shifting). Instead, we've been getting all this crap where legal is afraid to try something new, so engineering is handcuffed and only allowed to make tiny incremental improvements to the product, but then marketing sells the hell out of it claiming that they're the experts and anyone who is doing something new is reckless or naive. If Mavic has really found that their new brake surface treatment is 2x better in terms of CoF than their old smooth one, then publish the results. And you know that they're testing other companies products too, so publish those results too. Logical fallacies don't cut it in 2017.

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BobbySweeting
Posts: 37
Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2017 5:37 am

by BobbySweeting

You're spot on. The engineers at some of these larger corporations have all of the ability in the world, but they can sometimes be bound pretty tightly by product management. I don't know the inner workings of every brand in the world, but that can be fairly common in any industry.

One thing to keep in mind: I don't want people to take the braking power shown in this test as something that is at all accurate to real world conditions. If brand pads were used they would respond very differently to various brake track textures (for example, a softer pad can conform more to an Enve brake track). So the braking power of each rim could be significantly better or worse with their own pad. This test only shows heat transfer properties and relative braking power with a Black Prince pad, that's all. A totally different protocol would be required to accurately test braking power.

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