As I mentioned earlier in the thread, no, we have not been present at any of the test facilities. But the fact that we haven't been present does not mean we can't analyze the data against our theoretical CFD models. I've also been in the wind tunnel, including A2 and MIT, more than I like to remember, both as a pro racer and frame designer. I have no personal desire to go back, I just want the results! Haha.

We looked at generalities when it came to turbulence, vortices, low pressure pocket locations, etc on the frames that we have experience with. The goal was to find patterns and create a nice average that we could simulate while designing our disc. This is precisely why I mentioned that no wheel will have the "best" aerodynamics no matter the situation. It's very situational. We did our due diligence to design a wheel that would have an optimal shape in the majority of situations based on the knowledge we had with a variety of frames.

Please see my previous comments regarding this. You must have data from other wheel brands as well, where the wheels are the only changing variable. Being present in the tunnel isn't necessary. Hell, many of the frames that I designed were shipped to wind tunnels and I had the results emailed to me.

This perspective strikes me as bizarre. Every manufacturer I interacted with in the recent Aero Shootout/AeroCamp insisted on being there while their equipment was tested -- which makes complete sense, given how sensitive these tests are and how dependent the results are on executing those tests properly. Without having been there for the testing, there's no way I could adequately interpret and model the output data -- and I'm talking about a very simple quantitative task (yaw-weighted drag, etc.) relative to the one you are describing. So again -- and please forgive me as I know this question has been asked -- but I am still having a lot of trouble understanding how you took Cody's results (or Joe's, or Maggie's) and validated your CFD models, or even evaluated those results vis-a-vis any CFD model at all.

Here are your words.



Note: generalities, patterns, average, simulate, situational, optimal, majority, variety -- these are all vague and cheap words. Brian is right that specific words have specific meaning, but these words don't really mean anything at all . If we're talking about a matter of maths and science...well, here's an idea: can/will you share some numbers? Can you show us a spreadsheet or workbook? Can you break out the calculations you made, or tell us how they were made? What software did you use? Who did the modeling? How specifically did the output data from these athlete's test influence the model, and which variables were most meaningful in your design heuristic?

I think all of us (at least initially) appreciate you coming on here to field questions, but so far this hasn't gone very well for you or left anyone with a very good impression of your brand or your product. So if there is substance behind your words, please show us. This is an exceptionally analytical crowd you're talking to, and we can handle the science and much prefer it over your jargon.

Failing that, I think the presumption has to be that there is essentially nothing quantitative behind this design, except maybe the dimensions and the weight. Which is fine too, because it still looks like a great product. It's made of carbon fiber; it's toobless ready; it's impressively wide (and set up toobless, likely very comfortable); and it's probably pretty damn aero. Believe it or not, that's plenty impressive for me and likely for many others. What's incredible unimpressive -- and frankly, downright unacceptable -- is your apparent attempts to claim that this product is the output of work you simply did not do.

In regards to being present: you and I greatly disagree then and you have lost me as a customer for life based on this point. Frankly, IMHO, nobody is every going to be as accountable or vested as yourself in regards to your own protocol. Can you imagine Trek or Cervelo sending their product to a wind tunnel without going there themselves. I can't. It is their baby and they want to make sure they are a second set of eyes and ears for anything that comes up.

Wind tunnel data is a selling point to almost all of us.

To be frank, I will never post wind tunnel data. It isn't applicable to anyone

We started Alto in order to bring design work to the industry that actually means something.

I disagree. I think it's applicable to me, and as a potential customer of yours -- I am in the market for a disc wheel, if I can justify the price -- you should consider that relevant and applicable.

How about this? You have intimated numerous times on this thread that you would allow select athletes to demo your wheel. I'm a seasoned profamateur, and I would like to borrow your disc to test it at AeroCamp with desert dude. I'll throw it on the back of my Felt B series and test it rider on/rider off against a Zipp 404, Zipp Super 9, Enve 7.8 SES, and Premier Tactical Comfort Disk. And then I'll publish the results. You are welcome to be there, but seems you have no interest in that. I'll send you the results, and I'll publish them for the community.

Would you support this testing?

I'm not sure if you know the engineers at Trek and Cervelo or if you're just making generalities. Either way, I've worked with most of the engineers in this industry, having been in it as a pro athlete and engineer for 12 years, and can assure you that our methodology is standard across the board. Your assumptions are misguided. I understand that you've been told various things through brand marketing, and I understand that what we're doing is going against the grain. But that's the road we've chosen in trying to bring actual/tangible results to the industry. I'm sorry to hear that you'll never give our wheels a try, I think it's important to operate with due diligence and at least see for yourself how a product performs.

What does this even mean? What do you offer that Zipp, ENVE, or Flo can't?

Your quote basically says Zipp and others designs don't mean anything.

I do know a few Trek engineers - actually Carl and Lavery participate on here. Although the marketing guys don't want anything to do with me, I was fortunate enough to spend some time touring Trek's HQ (Carl gave me the tour) and had lunch with their engineers. In addition to one of the head engineers on the SC project, who I happened to race with over the years (Lavery), I also got to do some blind testing for them last year in which case I met with Carl for the second time. Both Carl and Lavery have been very kind in answering both my public and private questions.

I also happen to be friends with TJ Tollakson he runs and operates a company called Dimond and have toured their HQ as well and talked to him about his companies testing in the wind tunnel. I know both of these companies actually go to the wind tunnel to validate their CFD. I did talk to Trek specifically in my visit about their computers and just how much processing power they have behind the CFD. They don't just pass it off the wind tunnel part. If you are in Ashville you are a hop, skip and jump from there. I don't really see why you couldn't go test yourself.

Great! The wheel only vs. wheel on back of bike thing is something that could be tested on the same day. We could see whether the aero rank order changes or not, and what the relative disparity is for both evaluations. I think this would be instructive in settling some of these debates

Yes, SolidWorks and Abaqus provide quite a bit of processing power for both FEA and CFD. Obviously we aren't "passing off" anything to wind tunnel testing. Alto is based in Sarasota, FL, not Asheville. I do still have a place there because I lived in Asheville while racing, but moved to Sarasota full time last year.

Although as a programmer in an earlier life, including big huge legos, small legos, and even making the legos themselves for others to use, the way you write software can matter. But this was not what I was referring to. I was referring to "processing power" in hardware terms. How much are you spending on hardware to run this cfd, how often are the machines running, what are you power bills like? It seems like every time I try to answer a question you are trying to bring it down another path. So I will just ask very simple questions from now on.

- Do you really think you are spending anywhere close to the amount Trek or Cervelo is spending on CFD?

- Can you spit ball a number here. Are you doing 1/1000th of the work they are? 1/100th?

- Does Trek, Dimond, Ventum, Cervelo go to the wind tunnel to oversee the wind tunnel process firsthand?

Does Trek, Dimond, Ventum, Cervelo go to the wind tunnel to oversee the wind tunnel process firsthand

I promise I am doing my best to answer your questions, it's the only reason I signed up for the forum.

- No, of course we're not spending anywhere close to Trek or Cervelo. Or Zipp, Mavic, Enve, etc for that matter. We are two engineers and a handful of employees making wheels for about 3 years, so this question is a bit silly. I'll also admit that their marketing budget is larger than ours, haha.

- We are spending a LOT less than Trek, haha. Maybe 1/1000? I don't know. But the actual design work and due diligence is the same. And better in many areas, which I will detail below.

- Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It was the same when I was at CSG, and I spent a lot of time in tunnels. But it depends on the project, and again, isn't necessary most of the time.

- I will add my own question here at the end, regarding quality control and creative ability. You obviously know how large corporations work, so you know they go from product manager to industrial design to engineering. By the time the engineer gets the project, it's "you have this amount of money to hit these specs, go." You think you know a better way to make the product but want to spend an extra 10 cents? Too bad. Make the product because we're producing 20 thousand of them, and hit your timeline. At Alto, we can work in the opposite direction. We can make a product as best as it can possibly be, regardless of cost. If Shawn want's to spend an extra 4 dollars to cut a labyrinth seal into the shell or spec a different material, we can do it. Why? Because we aren't beholden to anyone and we're selling 70-80 wheel sets a month, not 900. We an eat the extra cost to ensure that the product is our absolute best work, and the retail price comes out at the other end. We can also check every press fit dimension (every axle OD and shell ID) on a laser probe CMM to ensure we hit an extremely tight tolerance that will give you the best bearing rolling resistance possible. And we do. Why? Because it matters, and we're not so big that it costs us a ton of money. These are the differences between us and some of the larger corporations that I'd love to be focused on.

I'll jump in to defend Bobby a bit,. There are times when companies have sent product to test with 1 person who wasn't an engineer. IIRC A2 has rolled out the robot for some of the big name companies when the geeks can't be there.

We've even discussed using the robot when Heath or I have been testing for 3-5+ hours by our self's. It's never a bad thing in our opinion, to have a second set of eyes especially for longer testing sessions if one of us can't make it.

Now if you're not there and things go sideways, say a rim cracks or spoke breaks, then it's an expensive trip for the manufacturer

Sure I get what you are saying and that is the one thing I love about small business. Frankly, when I talked about the possibility of riding a Dimond bike 2 years I told TJ, this decision is an investment in YOU, not DIMOND. I believe in YOU TJ to make me faster. A decision for Dimond is a vote for YOU. Ultimately I told him only if we could make me faster than my Trek that I would consider it. And that applies here as well. The same would hold true for Jimmy/Diaa, Nick @ TriRig etc. I like small business because frankly you can move faster and at the pointy end of the sport I am looking for every possible legal advantage to do so.

The flip-side is that a big part of my software development days was specifically surrounding process. I was building in automation and controls so humans would NOT make stupid mistakes, like that fat-finger a few weeks back that took out AWS and the entire Internet for half a day. I mean we have the biggest cloud computing company in the world and someone fat-fingers something like that. That could have been a billion dollar mistake. More process, while slowing down innovation, leads to less mistakes.

As a real world example of this, last weekend at a local sprint, I did a half-ass job of preparing for it. I was stretched too thin and I let some things slip and wouldn't you know it, I showed up to the race without rubber bands for my shoes. Now had I just followed my process (a simple checklist on my phone), I wouldn't have had this issue, but the reality is I did. I was simply stretched too thin and that is something I worry about with small up and coming companies. It is a reason why I don't even think about riding a critical part unless the company has been in business designing something in that product segment for a few years without incident.

So while I admire building the company, and I admire the flexibility and ability to go the extra length, and using lasers to verify things, I also recognize that companies like Zipp simply have more resources to dedicate to everything and that is a huge competitive advantage at this point. The market for wheels is simply very crowded.

I think we all need to take a step back.

Yes, Bobby is new to the forum, and Alto is a young company that hasn't made much in the way of press in the past.
Sounds to me like that is by design. 2 engineers and a handful of staff to process orders and ship. Lean and mean.

It's also a little strange to hear an engineer say they aren't crazy interested in being present for the validation testing of their products. I certainly wouldn't pass up that opportunity, but I'm also not a mechanical engineer, who has lived their entire career inside of SolidWorks and has come to completely trust both the FEA and CFD packages. I think that's a difference you'll see in the under 30 crowd vs. some of us older fellows. CFD was garbage 15 years ago compared to today. The software has evolved, and the processing power has as well, to support much faster design iteration and improve accuracy.

So just a couple of things to go over:

Bobby was a pro cyclist:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/sweeting-overcame-rare-cancer-to-continue-pro-career/


Then he worked for Cannondale.


Now he's doing his own thing with Alto. It sounds like he ran into some issues where a larger company was not willing or able to make design changes mid-stream. Maybe that was anecdotal, but I doubt it.


This is the profile of the Alto 86mm wheel:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0712/6901/files/Alto_CC86_Clincher_Tubeless_Rim_Profile_large.jpg


I can verify that it's quite a bit different than the Chinese 86mm wheels (which are lovely for how cheap they are). The width at the rim is the same, but the widest part of the Chinese rims is 27.5 or so, compared to 30.2 for the Alto's. That's up into Knight 95 territory for width.


So lets all just slow down a bit. Ask pointed questions, but give the guy a chance to clear things up without being so accusatory.
Treating people fairly is how we get manufacturers to keep coming here and being a part of the conversation.