fdegrove wrote:A good skewer effectively couples the wheel to the frame so that not only it is well secured but moreover it also serves as a crossing point for vibrations (road buzz etc.) to be sunk into the frame's mass and subsequently dissipated as heat.
While the absolute weight of the skewer is of little relevance to achieve this, design details such as choice of materials, clamping area and of course clamping force are relevant to this.
Ciao,

This is an interesting point, and I think valid, however looking at some of the skewer pics posted by others in this thread, I don't see much difference between clamping areas. This is dictated by the side of the fork dropouts, which is pretty standard, and skewer ends are thus fairly standard so that people don't whinge that their expensive new skewers don't fit their forks.
Given that Titanium has pretty good tendencies to absorb and dampen down vibrations, would a Ti skewer be better than a steel one then?
Forks are fairly stiff laterally. The amount of play (pulling the blades apart) is pretty minimal, and requires a lot of force. If it didn't the fork wouldn't be worth a cracker round a corner. ~2-3000N of force to stop the fork blades pulling apart laterally ought to be plenty. Also, figure that the skewer stops the wheel falling downwards and out of the eyelets if the wheel is lifted off the ground momentarily. Anyone running >200kg front wheels? Of course this can be complicated off-road, for example if something hits the wheel from the top. But in road scenarios (this is a road thread), I doubt that's ever an issue except in a crash, then who cares.
For vibrations to transmit from the skewer to the fork blade, I doubt there would have to be much force involved. Lets halve those Newtons, so, say 1000N on each side. That's 100kg of weight. That's a lot of weight or force over a very small area. That's right, high pressure! Think that road buzz won't be transmitted to the fork blade? Hell yes! Whats a standard skewer end diameter, I dunno, lets say 1cm^2 (didn't ride my bike to work today...naughty boy...so can't measure it). That means that 1000N is pressing on 1cm^2. Or, in tyre pressure terms, ~1450psi.
Which is plenty of pressure to transmit road buzz!
