Slowman wrote:
"
It is also getting a bit wider, which might help?"
i'm sure it does and it would. all the tririg stuff is conceptually stunning. i would imagine every now and then every company runs afoul of the problem in the bike business: the aerodynamic, mechanical and structural elements of bikes are so complex they defy mathematics. predicting what happens to a bicycle during the process of riding it is only slightly easier than predicting cloud patterns. that's why i - conservative and a bit of a coward by nature - am usually in favor of incrementalism when "fixing" what i don't like about a bike through the introduction of a new product.
With all due respect, but in the case of loading on a stem (which is what is being discussed here), a small bit of time with an instrumented stem and a data acquistion system would get you all you need to know about the possible loadings to create an effective design. Apply a reasonable factor of safety, and the engineering is fairly routine...especially in this day and age of PC based analysis tools.
This is true of basically the entire bicycle as well. Some companies, such as Cervelo, have done such things for a long time now:
http://www.cervelo.com/.../lab-vs-reality.html, and
http://www.cervelo.com/...-reality-part-2.html Those same CAD tools also make generating a CNC program fairly easy as well. Heck, there are online sources where all you do is upload your 3D CAD model and relatively cheaply (and quickly) have CNC machined parts returned to you. For example:
http://www.protolabs.com/firstcut Now then, your opinion on this may be colored by the fact that until just fairly recently, the level of
true engineering in the bike industry was on a somewhat low scale (and in some pockets is still somewhat "seat of the pants")...so that's understandable. Even now though, and with large companies (cough...SRAM road discs...cough) I'm sometimes amazed at the lack of things common in other industries...such as not doing validation testing in thermal test chambers over the expected use environments, and instead relying on "test riders".
http://bikeblather.blogspot.com/