Odds that we see disc brake only bikes go back to having rim offerings?

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Spinnekop
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by Spinnekop

joejack951 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 3:12 pm
You may choose to buy something else for a variety of reasons, though.
Correct.

So I CHOOSE to buy a Cannondale rim brake bike.
Ooooohhhh....sorry.....I CAN NOT......South Africa's Cannondale importer decided that they will only bring in disc spesific frames for future sales.

Hence my pissyness surrounding the the whole disc frame.

In your boring wet world with insane decents where you NEED discs....no worries....you CHOOSE to buy what you buy.
I can't. I am at the mercy of the greedy bike industry.
"In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is DESIRE.
No reason or principle contain it or stand against it........"

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Spinnekop
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by Spinnekop

joejack951 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 3:12 pm
If the cycling market is anything like it's been for the past few decades that I've been around it, you'll have plenty of choices, starting from ~$50 for a complete bike.
In the past 4 decades I have been around the "industry", I have seen VARIOUS "innovations" and "must haves" that have come and gone.

Obviously we are not talking about $50 bikes so why in the world would you refer to it?
"In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is DESIRE.
No reason or principle contain it or stand against it........"

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Spinnekop
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by Spinnekop

joejack951 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 3:12 pm
Spinnekop wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 1:10 pm
If you don't like the continuous stream of marketing that is the nature of every single consumer product in existence, I suggest learning how to ignore it.
I have enough gray hair and experience to ingnore anything on this plannet.
How cool is that?

Marketing is AWESOME.

But LIMITING my choise as a consumer just for the sake of making money. Not my idea of fun. And for that I call BS.
Marketing discs in MY country as "the better option" is BS. On our dry flat roads it just is not the better option for the avg bike rider here.

I suppose in the end......you have your opinion and I have mine. How boring would the world be if everyone just thought like I did!??! :thumbup:
"In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is DESIRE.
No reason or principle contain it or stand against it........"

youngs_modulus
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by youngs_modulus

Respectfully, JoeJack was responding directly to your claim that the industry might force you to buy a new bike in the future. He even quoted you.

(“I am fortunate enough to be able to buy a new bike if the industry forces me to.”)

JoeJack’s reasoning is pretty clear and unambiguous, IMHO. If you didn’t mean what he understood you to be saying, what did you mean?

cro2
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by cro2

Spinnekop wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 6:38 am
So I CHOOSE to buy a Cannondale rim brake bike.
Ooooohhhh....sorry.....I CAN NOT......South Africa's Cannondale importer decided that they will only bring in disc spesific frames for future sales.

Hence my pissyness surrounding the the whole disc frame.

In your boring wet world with insane decents where you NEED discs....no worries....you CHOOSE to buy what you buy.
I can't. I am at the mercy of the greedy bike industry.
The fact that the importer decided to only source disc brake bikes most likely means that it's anticipated that most profit will be made selling those. As it was already mentioned in this thread it's much cheaper for the manufacturers and sellers to only have a limited number of SKUs rather than a plethora of bikes to choose from. Don't take it as some kind of conspiracy of "the greedy bike industry" aimed against the customers with the goal of emptying their pockets. And if you really need a bike that's not available at your LBS, you can import one overseas or start an importer business.

youngs_modulus
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by youngs_modulus

Karvalo wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 6:16 pm
youngs_modulus wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 5:41 pm
I’m asking what “studies” Northwestern is anticipating and why he thinks those “studies” will appear for road bikes when they didn’t for mountain bikes or cyclocross bikes.

I suspect Northwestern’s comment had more to do with self-congratulation on seeing through “marketing” and “experts” who have “education” (i.e., those who whould conduct the anticipated studies) than with any actual anticipated revelations that somehow all industry engineers have missed. I await his/her response...maybe Northwestern will surprise me.
To be fair, have you ever seen the kind of industry Whitepaper that it has become de rigeur to release along with a new aero-bike, written and released alongside a new CX or MTB? I don't remember ever seeing one, even though available frame design variables are arguably far more important to the performance and handling of a full-suss MTB than they ever will be to a UCI legal road race bike with even remotely conventional geometry.

So in that sense, if the next gen of aero road bikes does re-include rim brake models (which I doubt) there probably would be an associated 'study' by the manufacturer of that model explaining why they are better again.
I missed this post earlier; I regret that because you've made a really great point.

Yes, I'm familiar with those whitepapers. I love them. That said, the quality varies. IMNSHO, Trek does an outstanding job with their whitepapers. They show enough of their work that I find their whitepapers highly convincing. Also, I came to engineering from a liberal arts/writing background, and engineers are (by and large) terrible writers. Trek is either paying a fantastic technical writer to produce those whitepapers or one of their engineers happens to be an outstanding writer.

I think whitepapers get published primarily because the companies that publish them have sunk a lot of money into building good R&D departments and they're trying to get the most value they can from those investments. That seems reasonable to me from a business perspective. In a way, everybody wins: otherwise-anonymous engineers get to show off their work; marketers get to market and consumers get more insight into why the company in question thinks its products are better than those of its competitors.

I may be at the center of the target audience for those papers. I'm a mechanical engineer who specializes in simulation and structural analysis, so I love reading about boundary conditions and which tools/codes the company in question chose to use. But maybe that also skews my perspective: it's pretty easy for me to tell when a company is bullshitting (not because I'm so sharp, but because they make obvious mistakes and invalid assumptions). But if I were, say, an attorney or a plumber, I wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference between a technical tour de force and a deeply flawed whitepaper. So maybe most consumers--maybe people like Northwest--can't easily tell how much of a whitepaper is solid engineering and how much is marketing spin. In that case, I can see how someone might conclude that the study says whatever the marketing people want it to.

And I must acknowledge that these are not peer-reviewed papers: it's possible that even the ones I really like are fabricated from whole cloth. In general, though, it's more work to fudge the data and generate flow plots that support the fudged data than it is to just do the work. It's easy to tell a small lie, but if you tell enough of them, you'll forget what you said and thus reveal all the lies. It's a losing strategy. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but there's some reason to think that the whitepapers, while curated, mostly represent what they claim to.

You're right that you don't see a lot of whitepapers about CX and mountain bikes. I'm pretty confident that the reason is that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software is very expensive. A seat of CAD software like Solidworks might cost $5,000. A good FEA program that handles composites well starts at around $30,000. Decent CFD software starts there as well, and can approach six figures with enough extras. (OpenFoam, though, is a great open-source option. It can be hard to use, but third parties sell GUI interfaces to OpenFoam for about $5,000/year).

A bike company has very few capital expenses as large as analysis software. Most people (including everyone in the purchase-approval chain) thinks that Adobe Creative Cloud is expensive software ($250-$600). Solidworks is 10 times that price. CFD, at 30-100 times that price, blows bean-counters' minds. So there's a lot of pressure from executives to monetize that asset, as the B-school kids say. Because CFD software tends to be expensive--and because aero drag is nearly impossible for non-engineers to evaluate on their own--bike companies publish whitepapers on their aero bikes. FEA (my first love) is invaluable for designing cutting-edge carbon bikes, but stress plots don't excite consumers the way CFD plots do. And the kinematics of suspension are easily modeled in a general-purpose program like MATLAB. It's not pretty, but you can even model suspension kinematics in a spreadsheet. In a way, a publishing a whitepaper on suspension kinematics is like announcing that you've memorized your times tables: it's work that needs to be done, but no one thinks it's all that impressive.

Also, IME, many triathletes are well-paid professionals who think they're at least as smart as the next guy (or the next woman). There's nothing wrong with being a doctor/lawyer/management consultant, but those white papers have the same effect on that demographic as Malcom Gladwell articles: they make the reader feel smart, even if they don't actually understand what's going on. Because aerodynamics are very important in triathlon and because a plurality of triathletes are educated professionals, I suspect (but cannot prove) that triathletes lurrrve whitepapers. More to the point: whitepapers sell aero bikes. But that doesn't mean that whitepapers are just marketing spin. And of course, there are lots of informed triathletes who know quite a bit about aerodynamics.

The flip side of whitepapers is that they expose your company's technical underbelly. I've seen a few lame mistakes in whitepapers, but in general, companies only publish them when they know they've done great work. If I saw a gross error in a whitepaper from Trek, Specialized, Zipp or anyone else, I'd shout it from the rooftops (or at least post here). I'm not the only one, either. Lots of engineers are bike people, so publishing a whitepaper with mistakes invites the ire of a thousand engineers--it would be a big mistake, and a marketing move that would backfire badly.

mattr
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by mattr

youngs_modulus wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:56 am
AW84 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
[The industry] knows a middle-aged dentist will spend anything if it can convince him that new technology will make him ride like a pro, when reality later proves otherwise.
You might want to find a new, less credulous dentist. Have you ever met a rider (regardless of career choice) who believed that upgrading their bike would result in pro-level speed? I haven't. "Dentist bikes" are totally a thing, but I've never encountered an out-of-shape-but-wealthy rider who believed that equipment was a substitute for fitness.
It's not just dentists, it's customers generally. Go and work in a mid/high end shop for a while, or read a magazine or two, a huge chunk of the industry is geared up around "gain 20 watts when you buy these wheels/frame/helmet/widget/pair of socks/aerodynamic earcovers"*

*only valid at 50kph and zero yaw, and in our windtunnel using our testing protocol. May not be realised by actual riders in actual races.

I, personally, have had customers complain that their TT times haven't reduced by the calculated times based on power output/savings, or that their fanstatically expensive multi compound tubeless tyre won't grip wet roots. Even though X, Y and Z magazine said it was the best tyre since Dunlop was a lad.
youngs_modulus wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:56 am
Why do you object to the idea of people spending lots of money on bikes, regardless of how fast they are? I like to think that these consumers subsidize R&D for the rest of us.
Because the harder these "superbikes" and their low budget clones get marketed, the less choice the rest of us have. And they are more likely subsidising advertising and marketing drives than R&D. ;)

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tymon_tm
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by tymon_tm

mattr wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 9:12 am
youngs_modulus wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 2:56 am
AW84 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
[The industry] knows a middle-aged dentist will spend anything if it can convince him that new technology will make him ride like a pro, when reality later proves otherwise.
You might want to find a new, less credulous dentist. Have you ever met a rider (regardless of career choice) who believed that upgrading their bike would result in pro-level speed? I haven't. "Dentist bikes" are totally a thing, but I've never encountered an out-of-shape-but-wealthy rider who believed that equipment was a substitute for fitness.
It's not just dentists, it's customers generally. Go and work in a mid/high end shop for a while, or read a magazine or two, a huge chunk of the industry is geared up around "gain 20 watts when you buy these wheels/frame/helmet/widget/pair of socks/aerodynamic earcovers"*

absolutely true. not to mention people asking "how fast does this thing go" or commenting how I must be doing 50kph easy on my ride :mrgreen:

people do attribute qualities to the products based on marketing BS and general idea that top-of-the shelve products do stuff by themselves. I remember years ago in a skiing shop some dude getting his first pair was arguing with staff top slalom skis will be better for him and he'll learn faster :roll: (for those who don't ski - it's totally the other way round)
kkibbler wrote: WW remembers.

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Maximilian
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by Maximilian

youngs_modulus wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 8:11 am
Karvalo wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 6:16 pm
youngs_modulus wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 5:41 pm
I’m asking what “studies” Northwestern is anticipating and why he thinks those “studies” will appear for road bikes when they didn’t for mountain bikes or cyclocross bikes.

I suspect Northwestern’s comment had more to do with self-congratulation on seeing through “marketing” and “experts” who have “education” (i.e., those who whould conduct the anticipated studies) than with any actual anticipated revelations that somehow all industry engineers have missed. I await his/her response...maybe Northwestern will surprise me.
To be fair, have you ever seen the kind of industry Whitepaper that it has become de rigeur to release along with a new aero-bike, written and released alongside a new CX or MTB? I don't remember ever seeing one, even though available frame design variables are arguably far more important to the performance and handling of a full-suss MTB than they ever will be to a UCI legal road race bike with even remotely conventional geometry.

So in that sense, if the next gen of aero road bikes does re-include rim brake models (which I doubt) there probably would be an associated 'study' by the manufacturer of that model explaining why they are better again.
I missed this post earlier; I regret that because you've made a really great point.

Yes, I'm familiar with those whitepapers. I love them. That said, the quality varies. IMNSHO, Trek does an outstanding job with their whitepapers. They show enough of their work that I find their whitepapers highly convincing. Also, I came to engineering from a liberal arts/writing background, and engineers are (by and large) terrible writers. Trek is either paying a fantastic technical writer to produce those whitepapers or one of their engineers happens to be an outstanding writer.

I think whitepapers get published primarily because the companies that publish them have sunk a lot of money into building good R&D departments and they're trying to get the most value they can from those investments. That seems reasonable to me from a business perspective. In a way, everybody wins: otherwise-anonymous engineers get to show off their work; marketers get to market and consumers get more insight into why the company in question thinks its products are better than those of its competitors.

I may be at the center of the target audience for those papers. I'm a mechanical engineer who specializes in simulation and structural analysis, so I love reading about boundary conditions and which tools/codes the company in question chose to use. But maybe that also skews my perspective: it's pretty easy for me to tell when a company is bullshitting (not because I'm so sharp, but because they make obvious mistakes and invalid assumptions). But if I were, say, an attorney or a plumber, I wouldn't necessarily be able to tell the difference between a technical tour de force and a deeply flawed whitepaper. So maybe most consumers--maybe people like Northwest--can't easily tell how much of a whitepaper is solid engineering and how much is marketing spin. In that case, I can see how someone might conclude that the study says whatever the marketing people want it to.

And I must acknowledge that these are not peer-reviewed papers: it's possible that even the ones I really like are fabricated from whole cloth. In general, though, it's more work to fudge the data and generate flow plots that support the fudged data than it is to just do the work. It's easy to tell a small lie, but if you tell enough of them, you'll forget what you said and thus reveal all the lies. It's a losing strategy. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but there's some reason to think that the whitepapers, while curated, mostly represent what they claim to.

You're right that you don't see a lot of whitepapers about CX and mountain bikes. I'm pretty confident that the reason is that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software is very expensive. A seat of CAD software like Solidworks might cost $5,000. A good FEA program that handles composites well starts at around $30,000. Decent CFD software starts there as well, and can approach six figures with enough extras. (OpenFoam, though, is a great open-source option. It can be hard to use, but third parties sell GUI interfaces to OpenFoam for about $5,000/year).

A bike company has very few capital expenses as large as analysis software. Most people (including everyone in the purchase-approval chain) thinks that Adobe Creative Cloud is expensive software ($250-$600). Solidworks is 10 times that price. CFD, at 30-100 times that price, blows bean-counters' minds. So there's a lot of pressure from executives to monetize that asset, as the B-school kids say. Because CFD software tends to be expensive--and because aero drag is nearly impossible for non-engineers to evaluate on their own--bike companies publish whitepapers on their aero bikes. FEA (my first love) is invaluable for designing cutting-edge carbon bikes, but stress plots don't excite consumers the way CFD plots do. And the kinematics of suspension are easily modeled in a general-purpose program like MATLAB. It's not pretty, but you can even model suspension kinematics in a spreadsheet. In a way, a publishing a whitepaper on suspension kinematics is like announcing that you've memorized your times tables: it's work that needs to be done, but no one thinks it's all that impressive.

Also, IME, many triathletes are well-paid professionals who think they're at least as smart as the next guy (or the next woman). There's nothing wrong with being a doctor/lawyer/management consultant, but those white papers have the same effect on that demographic as Malcom Gladwell articles: they make the reader feel smart, even if they don't actually understand what's going on. Because aerodynamics are very important in triathlon and because a plurality of triathletes are educated professionals, I suspect (but cannot prove) that triathletes lurrrve whitepapers. More to the point: whitepapers sell aero bikes. But that doesn't mean that whitepapers are just marketing spin. And of course, there are lots of informed triathletes who know quite a bit about aerodynamics.

The flip side of whitepapers is that they expose your company's technical underbelly. I've seen a few lame mistakes in whitepapers, but in general, companies only publish them when they know they've done great work. If I saw a gross error in a whitepaper from Trek, Specialized, Zipp or anyone else, I'd shout it from the rooftops (or at least post here). I'm not the only one, either. Lots of engineers are bike people, so publishing a whitepaper with mistakes invites the ire of a thousand engineers--it would be a big mistake, and a marketing move that would backfire badly.
Young's Modulus, I feel complled to say that this is one of the best comments that I have read on this site.

As it happens I also agree with you on the white papers. The first one I read was Trek's when they introduced Kamm tail tube shapes to the Madone around 2012. At the time many people called bull----, however, for the reasons that you highlight, I argued that it wasn't. I also have an engineering background (mechanical, manufacturing and automotive). You're 100% correct with the statement that it is more difficult to fabricate results and write a paper based on those ficticious results than do the work properly in the first place.

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C36
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by C36

youngs_modulus wrote:
AW84 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
youngs_modulus wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:52 pm

There’s no cabal of executives rubbing their hands together at the prospect of taking money from naive enthusiasts by fabricating “improvements” that aren’t improvements.
That's exactly what the industry is doing.
No, it's really not. You're being paranoid. The bike industry isn't run by Monty Burns.
With your background I am very surprise you are so “naive” or you talk about the 20th century. Do all marketing plans work (regardless if BS or not), no. Is there shared interest to force DB « everywhere » yes, it has the best equipment renewal potential road bikes ever saw in history since frames, wheels, groups need to be changed.
Similar plan worked on MTB, I already comment I saw an internal marketing slides on the subsequent wheel stds changes from 29 « to something intermediate between 26 and 29 » (several options were considered) with a $ value and projections at few years (3 or 5 if I recall properly).



AW84 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
The industry is unlikely to do an about-face and convince us that rim brakes and 9-speed drivetrains are the way of the future
And this what sparked my initial reply: the assertion that the industry would generate fake information to "force" the market to revert to an earlier standard. I asked for specifics, but never got any. You just agreed that isn't likely to happen, so I guess I've made my point.
Not recent but we have now enough feedback to have no doubt it was uber BS: Giant and their Compact Road geometry that spammed all over the magazines that with this geometry and their rubbish adjustable stem 3 sizes could fit all (when some brands had 10 to 14 sizes back then) whe it was purely a stock reduction exercise.

Regarding some comebacks, We could mention the BB where some brands abandon the Pressfit, the integrated seatposts, the below BB brakes (ok never really picked up)...

I don’t have a crystal ball but once this DB plan will run short in fuel, another plan will come in action.
If the weight limit drops it could (COULD) be “lighter all around aero bikes with rim brakes” or any new standard that would ideally push for large material replacement (passing all the rear hubs to new spacing, new integrated disc brake callipers needing new frame, whatever the mkt dept, doing their job, will see potential in).




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Mep
Posts: 516
Joined: Fri May 28, 2004 4:11 pm

by Mep

youngs_modulus wrote:Mattr:

Yes, a lot of CX racers had issues (and sometimes DNFs) due to worn-through pads—absolutely. My point is that by switching from organic to metallic or semi-metallic pads and bedding them in—that is, by actually learning how to use new equipment—the issues some perceived to be show-stoppers simply evaporated. I don’t see why the same won’t happen in the realm of road bikes.

Regarding the advent of disc brakes for mountain bikes: I started racing on the road in 1986 and I began racing mountain bikes in 1989. I remember when people were saying that disc brakes were fine for downhillers, but XC guys would never accept the extra weight of discs. I was working for a bicycle industry trade paper at the time, and I saw what you’re referring to: NOS cantilever-braked mountain bike frames got discounted as much as NOS cantilever-braked CX frames are right now.

I agree that performance consistency is a benefit for mountain bikes with discs and that the consistency is great for road bikes too. Ironically, I’m much less likely to ride off-road in the wet (due to concerns about trail erosion) than I am on the road. I recently moved to Oregon, in the US Pacific Northwest, where the weather approximates that of Normandy, so wet road rides are a thing for me. The quantifiable benefits are pretty much the same for mountain and road bikes...whether those benefits are “worth it” for any particular rider is a subjective question answerable only by the rider in question.

But your point about the price of entry being too high for the benefit you see is (I think) at the center of all this. Yes, there are benefits to disc brakes on road bikes. Yes, most new road bikes will be sold with disc brakes. For people buying a new bike to get into the sport, disc brakes are not good or bad but simply the brakes on their bike. The cost/benefit analysis you legitimately bring up doesn’t exist for a lot of bike buyers.

You, Matt, will soon have disc brakes on your training bike. I might be mistaken, but I imagine that at some point, the convenience of being able to swap wheels between your training bike and your fancy road bike—coupled with falling weights for road disc groups and the likelihood that the fastest aero rims will soon be those without brake tracks—will convince you (or at least many like you) that your next high-end road bike needs discs too. In other words, when the costs of keeping rim brakes become too high, people will switch and not think twice about it.

In other words, it’s not that road discs are so much better that one simply can’t ride without them—it’s that, on balance, they’re “better enough” that they’re worth having for most bike buyers. And that “better enough” may have more to do with mundane convenience (like having the abilities to swap wheels between all your road bikes) than raw performance.

About two years ago, I built up an “experiment bike.” It’s a fixed-gear belt-drive CX bike with tubeless tires and a front disc (and no brake on the rear). I wanted to play with wide tubeless road tires/rims and drop-bar hydraulic discs (TRP Hylex) just to know what those things were like. I also wanted to see if I wanted those things on my road bike. It turns out that they work just fine and, yes, I want them on my road bike.

The difference isn’t huge, but yeah, the discs are a little nicer and feel a little better. I’m not winning or losing races because of my road bike’s rim brakes, but if/when I buy a new bike, I’ll take the slightly nicer option. Most people will, and that’s why the market will shift.

Once that shift is complete, there won’t be a high cost to “switching” to discs; there will be a high cost to sourcing rim-brake frames and parts, so those things will become niche items, like cantilever-braked mountain bikes are now. At least, that’s my prediction.
Very thought provoking post. From what I've seen, especially on this forum, there has been quite a strong resistance to adopting disc brakes as the de facto norm for all road bikes. Perhaps strong enough to keep more than a few manufacturers producing top end bikes in the rim brake variety. Whether they continue to do so will be up to whether the sales numbers prove that rim brakes are in demand.

Sure this forum probably doesn't represent the majority of riders out there, but probably none of us can claim to know what the majority of consumers want. I'm curious, given your comments about the MTB parallels, did you see the same magnitude of resistance? It appears to me that the benefits (better braking in all-weather conditions) and costs (higher weight) are skewed for road bikes. Namely road bikers likely gain less of a benefit if they primarily ride during good conditions, and they'd feel more of a weight gain from their bikes on the road than on a trail.

EDIT: just saw a comment from someone senior at Vision (GCN show) that majority of their sales are on disc brakes, both to manufacturers and consumers alike. So there goes my point about sales proving otherwise..
Last edited by Mep on Fri Nov 09, 2018 2:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

youngs_modulus
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by youngs_modulus

Maximilian wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:17 pm
Young's Modulus, I feel complled to say that this is one of the best comments that I have read on this site.

As it happens I also agree with you on the white papers. The first one I read was Trek's when they introduced Kamm tail tube shapes to the Madone around 2012. At the time many people called bull----, however, for the reasons that you highlight, I argued that it wasn't. I also have an engineering background (mechanical, manufacturing and automotive). You're 100% correct with the statement that it is more difficult to fabricate results and write a paper based on those ficticious results than do the work properly in the first place.
Hey, thanks! I'm glad you liked my post.

And yeah, when I taught statics in grad school, it was easy to pick out papers/design projects where students hadn't done the work. Finding inconsistencies in fabricated work isn't exactly rocket science, even when the subject at hand is rocket science.

youngs_modulus
Posts: 668
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Location: Portland, OR USA

by youngs_modulus

C36 wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 pm
With your background I am very surprise you are so “naive” or you talk about the 20th century. Do all marketing plans work (regardless if BS or not), no. Is there shared interest to force DB « everywhere » yes, it has the best equipment renewal potential road bikes ever saw in history since frames, wheels, groups need to be changed.
It's true that the industry will sell more bikes for a while as road riders move to disc brakes. Every manufacturer wants to sell more bikes, of course, but that's pretty far short of a conspiracy. And besides, there have been changes requiring lots of new equipment before: the move to 8-speed cassettes meant that road bikes required new frames (rear axle spacing went from 126 mm to 130 mm) new wheels (rear ones, anyway, for the same reason) and new groups. So you needed the same number of new things (save a front wheel) to go from 7 speeds to 8 speeds.
C36 wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 pm
Similar plan worked on MTB, I already comment I saw an internal marketing slides on the subsequent wheel stds changes from 29 « to something intermediate between 26 and 29 » (several options were considered) with a $ value and projections at few years (3 or 5 if I recall properly).
Pics or it didn't happen. ;)
C36 wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 pm
AW84 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
The industry is unlikely to do an about-face and convince us that rim brakes and 9-speed drivetrains are the way of the future
And this what sparked my initial reply: the assertion that the industry would generate fake information to "force" the market to revert to an earlier standard. I asked for specifics, but never got any. You just agreed that isn't likely to happen, so I guess I've made my point.
Not recent but we have now enough feedback to have no doubt it was uber BS: Giant and their Compact Road geometry that spammed all over the magazines that with this geometry and their rubbish adjustable stem 3 sizes could fit all (when some brands had 10 to 14 sizes back then) whe it was purely a stock reduction exercise.
I remember Giant's push for compact road geometry. At the time, top tubes were almost universally level. Now they slope just like Giant's top tubes did. And you yourself point out that it was common for bikes to come in a broader range of sizes then. (2-cm increments was typical for high-end bikes, as I recall). Now, the Cervelo S5 comes in five sizes rather than 10-14. Giant's Propel comes in six sizes. So it sounds to me like Giant was onto something: they thought that the number of sizes could be cut by ~65%, but it seems like the sweet spot for size reduction was closer to 50%. They had the right idea, but took it incrementally farther than the optimum. Now Giant's Propel is available in six sizes instead of twelve. And fewer sizes isn't just "stock reduction," though reducing SKUs helps. Precisely machined molds for aero carbon bikes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. By cutting the number of sizes in half, you cut the number of molds in half. That means that each mold can gain complexity and still cost the manufacturer less than a full set of simpler molds for 10-14 sizes.

And what's wrong with reducing costs, anyway? A manufacturer that doesn't aggressively trim fat will soon find its bikes priced well above those of competitors.
C36 wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 pm
Regarding some comebacks, We could mention the BB where some brands abandon the Pressfit, the integrated seatposts, the below BB brakes (ok never really picked up)...
I asked for examples of when the industry had an intentional strategy to switch from A to B to sell lots of B, and then shifted back to A in order to sell lots more of A. You've highlighted some new concepts that turned out to be problematic, but I still don't see any examples of a conspiracy. I happened to be working for a mountain bike manufacturer at the advent of the BB standard mess. The thing a lot of consumers don't understand is that threaded bottom brackets represent hilariously bad bearing design compared to what's common in other industries. It's really, really common to use press-in bearings in machinery.

But it turns out to be harder to hold BB shells to the requisite tolerances than most people anticipated. In response to the tolerance problem, some manufacturers made goofy compromises, and it all went south. It sucked for consumers, but it also sucked for manufacturers. (Side note: when's the last time you saw a front hub with threaded, external bearing cups? When you can hold the tolerances, press-in bearings work fine).

Integrated seatposts laid the groundwork for the integrated-system approach we're seeing on the latest aero bikes. Integrated seatposts alone don't do much beyond look cool, but if there was a conspiracy to "force" them on consumers, then Sascha White (of Vanilla/Speedvagen fame) is totally in on it. White is a small builder of custom and semi-custom steel frames. I find it unlikely that he was invited to some back-room meeting with Mike Sinyard and Trek's John Burke to sip whiskey, smoke cigars and decide for the road market what features they'll force people to pay for.
C36 wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 pm
I don’t have a crystal ball
No, you certainly don't. Nor does anyone in the bike industry. That's why lots of ideas that seem promising end up failing anyway.
C36 wrote:
Thu Nov 08, 2018 4:38 pm
but once this DB plan will run short in fuel, another plan will come in action.
If the weight limit drops it could (COULD) be “lighter all around aero bikes with rim brakes” or any new standard that would ideally push for large material replacement (passing all the rear hubs to new spacing, new integrated disc brake callipers needing new frame, whatever the mkt dept, doing their job, will see potential in).
You seem to think that companies should only make big changes if they can prove (to whom?) that those changes are "worth it." The fact is that most of the technologies we use daily failed at least once before they became bike-industry standards. Clipless pedals failed when they first came to market (Cinelli death pedals). The first major carbon bike, the Exxon Graftek, literally came unglued at the lugs. Titanium bikes were terrible until new titanium alloys (grade 9, AKA 3/2.5) became available. The Teledyne Titan, the first commercially available titanium frame, cracked as though it were made from spun sugar, even though it was actually made from grade 2 (AKA "commercially pure") titanium.

New features sell bikes, and manufacturers are in the business of selling bikes, so of course they introduce new features all the time. Businesses exist to make money, after all. But the bike industry is nowhere near organized enough to implement the conspiracies some here imagine. Some new features become very popular and change how we ride; some fail and fall by the wayside. But that's the nature of product development...if you don't fail with some regularity, you're not really taking any risks.

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Dilbert
Posts: 264
Joined: Wed Dec 19, 2007 10:54 am
Location: South Africa

by Dilbert

^ an example of switching to B and then back to A happened with wheel size for mtbs. 26" was the standard, then companies went to 29", then 27.5" (exclusively in Giant's case) and back to 29". If I remember correctly, 27.5" was marketed as the best of both, which is BS.

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Dilbert
Posts: 264
Joined: Wed Dec 19, 2007 10:54 am
Location: South Africa

by Dilbert

Spinnekop wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 1:10 pm
... I am fortunate enough to be able to buy a new bike
Time to get a Baum, man 8)

:beerchug:

by Weenie


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