i don't think scientific data is proof in the putting.. take wind tunnels for instance.. sure they "prove" which frame is faster in the "perfect" environment, but in the real world, does it matter? especially for us who aren't riding for the hour record, or to win a triathlon. how many times have you been on your bike where you can honestly say "wow i could feel the aerodynamic advantage this frame gives me"? But you think that, because cervelo did the testing.

just ride a carbon bike and see. if you don't feel the difference... don't buy it.. no one is going to convince you.. I agree that if you're going to test ride a few bikes, take your own wheels and use them on all the bikes.

When you get those numbers could you have the researcher also forward the unified theory and Amelia Earharts whereabouts?

Just kidding but if you get a chance to talk with an engineer involved in any form of ergonomics about "comfort" you will be amazed at how difficult a problem it is. "Absorbing vibration" is just the tip of a very large iceburg.



Styrrell

Hmmm, guess I should confess I am an engineer, although not with a huge amount of experience of ergonomics.

I see ergonomics being more a factor of positioning rather than vibration etc.

As for vibration I guess it does get complicated as it depends on which frequencies get absorbed by what frame material, configuration etc. I guess what I would like to see is clear evidence that frame x absorbs a lot more general vibration. I would love a sexy carbon bike but find it hard to justify when in terms of ride comfort the only bike which I have ever ridden which was clearly better/different was softride.

Aluminium, steel, carbon, of the bikes I have ridden none had a significantly different ride quality....

I thought my new (carbon) bike rode really well, then I swapped out the Michelin Pro Race tyres for some more prosaic Rubinos and it felt very ordinary. Back on the Michelins now and it feels really sweet, even on NZ roads. Also discovered that training tyres and racing tyres both get shredded when you ride over a bottle, so I'm sticking to comfort.

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__________________________________________

Those who know do not speak, those who speak, do not know.

Prove itself? Hopw many Tour de France wins? The last 6 consequatively....

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Tom Demerly
The Tri Shop.com

Re: New Editorial and ammendments to the P3SL review on bikesportmichigan.com [The Big Cheese] [In reply to] Can't Post

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The Big Cheese,



Adam posted the following a while ago.

Check the link below, Bob Bundy provides a good explaination.

Vertical Compliance Test: Softride Bike

• Trek 5500(Carbon) 0.012in
• Klein Quantum Race(Aluminum) 0.021in
• Cervelo(Aluminum) 0.015in

A static load of 200lbs was applied vertically into the seat post of each frame using pneumatics. Each frame was held with a fixture allowing the wheelbase to expand/contact as it would naturally under such load. A dial indicator was used to measure vertical deflection of the each frame set.

Individual materials have gained reputations for certain ride characteristics. The tests we perform are used to educate our inside and outside sales staff on the different materials that are used in today’s market place for real answers to some of the marketing campaigns that are used by different bicycle manufactures.

In our Softride Performance Service Seminars (SPSS), which focus on the dynamics of cycling and the frame materials used in the bike industry, we test many other manufacture’s frames. The material does not seem to make much difference as far as compliance goes. (i.e. Aluminum, Titanium, Steel , Carbon, fiber) The structure of the frame does.

For further information on this topic please see the information provided in this link: http://draco.acs.uci.edu/rbfaq/FAQ/8e.2.html

If you have any questions please contact Softride @ 800-55SOFTRIDE

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Brady O'Hare
Softride Inc.
brady.ohare@softride.com

"Prove itself? Hopw many Tour de France wins? The last 6 consequatively...."

The proof was in the rider (some guy named Lance), not the material.

Brady,

Are these pictures representative of the test fixture as it was actually used?

Did you really apply the downward force in the test through the Cervelo seatpost, and directly onto the collar area on the other frames?





.

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Tech writer/support on this here site. FIST school instructor and certified bike fitter. Formerly at Diamondback Bikes, LeMond Fitness, FSA, TiCycles, etc.
Coaching and bike fit - http://source-e.net/ Cyclocross blog - https://crosssports.net/ BJJ instruction - https://ballardbjj.com/

Where any titanium or steel frames also tested?

The engine is way overrated. Carbon can make any man a superstar, and other materials will ensure him a spot at the back of the pack.

This is a little goofy ... all these ad infinitum posts about carbon this and carbon that. Re: "Ignoring fit/geometry issues"? You can't ignore these, they matter more than anything. Material is maybe 7th (or 12th, maybe) on the list of factors that matter. Color, of course, is first, followed by:

* Geometry -- Fit -- Handling -- Whatever you want to call it. It's all the same thing. This matters more than anything else. Ride a Merckx MXLeader... it's a heavy SOB but probably the fastest bike you'll ride. Cuz it's built right. Same thing with a Serotta Legend. Pegoretti Fina Estampa. And Colnago C40/50.

* Quality of construction ... is it straight ... do all the miters match up.

* Parts ... don't put a 90mm stem on a Colnago. It aint right. Dont use crappy tires. Use a good seat. Not a light seat. Handlebars are super important. 'Anatomic' bars are not great bars.

Great frames are made from every material. So are crappy frames.

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*****
"In case of flood climb to safety"

I quite agree with you about fit, handling, geometry being far more important,and your right european classics tend to be fantastic rides no matter what they weigh.

I guess what I was interested in is some manufacturers make bikes with identical geometry in aluminium and carbon. So in theory the fit, handling etc should be very similar or identical.

Often the carbon frame is twice the price when the only benefits I can see are a small reduction in weight (not significant, for me, perhaps for fly weights) and what I consider an unproven claim of greater comfort due to vibration absorption/damping.

I consider comfort very important (I race for fun) and would happily pay more for comfort...but if the bike has identical geometry would there be any difference at all or am I only paying for the porn factor?

porn factor

Yup, porn. Nothin wrong with that. Porn's a huge business. But you gotta pay for it. One way or another.

Seriously though. Take a Soloist and an R2.5. Given the price difference, is there a commiserate performance difference. I'd say no. I think the R2.5 is 'better', but not a bunch better.

It becomes a slippery slope, diminishing returns and all that.

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*****
"In case of flood climb to safety"

I haven't read ALL the posts regarding carbon lately, just skimmed through them so forgive me if I am repeating somebody. I haven't seen much mention of the lack of consistent, measurable construction with generally accepted principles on how to quantify the carbon. Allow me to explain.

With steel, we have SLX, we have Reynolds 843 etc. With aluminum we have 6000 or 7000 series, we have easton ultralite, we have Deda U2, we have Columbus Starship. For TI there is 3/2.5 and 6/4. We have cold forged, heat treated, seamed or not. Single Butted, Double Butted, etc. These are all Industry standards for the respective tubes, and it's pretty easy to find a wide and agreeable consensus as to what all those things mean to the integrity of the tubes and how they affect ride quality.

We don't have any of that with carbon right now. We have companies that are marketing "carbon" bars and seatposts that are simply aluminum wrapped in a thin layer of carbon. We have carbon that is 90% carbon and 10% epoxy, and we have carbon that is 50-50 and anywhere in between. The problem is, we as consumers and retailers don't really know what is what...yet. And therein lies the problem. A carbon frame that is 50-50 carbon to epoxy/resin is going to have a harsher ride than a good aluminum frame in many cases.

This is what I mean when I talk to people about carbon proving itself. There needs to be industry standards available for consumers and retailers to measure the true worth and value of carbon frames and components. I think we'll see it start to happen in the next couple of years as the smart companies realize that they need to distance themselves from the cheap "barely-carbon" carbon components that are starting to flood the market.

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Ian MacLean
http://www.imfit.ca
Success comes when fear of failure goes

Fredly,

Yes, the photos were from the actual test. The Cervelo frame's seat tube would not match up with my fixture, so I used thier seat post. I know this inconsistent, it should have given them an advantage if anything. However, looking at the results it did not matter. If it were a long laid back seat post I would not have done this.



Cerveloguy,

Yes we have tested many other frames in our Performance Service Seminars, including Ti, and Steel. The problem is, I have done a very poor job recording the data. I will do better in the future.

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Brady O'Hare
Softride Inc.
brady.ohare@softride.com

With steel, we have SLX, we have Reynolds 843 etc. With aluminum we have 6000 or 7000 series, we have easton ultralite, we have Deda U2, we have Columbus Starship. For TI there is 3/2.5 and 6/4. We have cold forged, heat treated, seamed or not. Single Butted, Double Butted, etc. These are all Industry standards for the respective tubes, and it's pretty easy to find a wide and agreeable consensus as to what all those things mean to the integrity of the tubes and how they affect ride quality.

Well I respectfully disagree. I don't think "it's pretty easy to find a wide and agreeable consensus as to what all those things mean to the integrity of the tubes and how they affect ride quality" this is true at all. Even without getting into hard to quantify attributes like ride quality, I've heard and read so much mis information on hard facts like weight, strength, and stiffness for steel Al and Ti that it makes my head spin. Not just from "local" experts either, but from manufacturers.

Styrrell

Some of the smarter manufacturers have started to state what their carbon is. Zipp used to show it in their adverts. The problem is that the companies that are starting the glut of "carbon" components have not been all that much forthright with their claims, and nobody has called them onto the carpet for it (yet).

I admit that when I was doing Campy Delta brake covers, I did not bother telling whether or not it was unidircetional carbon fibre, what harness it was, or anything, as it was a non-structural part. But it was 100% carbon composite, with no metal or even fibreglass. But if I were to start selling anything to the public that was more than a cosmetic carbon, you had better believe that I would say what harnesses I was using.

If anything, a 50/50 carbon/epoxy ratio is pretty darned good coming from the bike industry. I don't know of too many people (save aircraft and car racing fabricators) that are doing anything better than a 70% carbon/30% epoxy ratio, save carbon/carbon (what we won't see in the bike industry for many years).

You get into stuff like 8K twill weave, it is hardly formable for the complex curves of a bicycle frame. It would be great as flat stock for a disc wheel, however. Bigger number is not always necessarily better.

Anyway, there is a bit of standards in carbon tubing, as Mac Clean Composites (who makes the Wound Up fork, Reynolds Carbon wheels, as well as supplies bicycle tubing to many fine bike manufacturers who are not first-timers or corner-cutters) makes standard and custom-spec tubing for bicycle manufacturing. But most companies who sell carbon bikes would like to make out that they did it all by themselves, which is why you will probably not have a MacClean Composites tubing sticker on a carbon bike in the near future.

But I imagine that the Faux carbon will go by the way side in the next couple of years, especially when consumers see real carbon components lower in price than previously and lighter in weight than the fake carbon. Fake carbon will still cost less, but it will be called out as a phoney when it is cheaper to produce real carbon parts. Consumer will ask questions when this comes to pass.

The root problem with certifying carbon components is that there are infinitely more ways to screw up a part than just using cheap fabric, or a poor grade of yarn, or a bad resin system. This is one of the reasons that the aerospace industry has taken 15 years to print MIL-17 handbook, and now that it is out, we're still arguing about it. The reality is that poor layup technique, misalignment of unidirectional fibers, fabric wrinkles, or poor compaction could all lead to parts which are significantly weaker than design, much more so than using even the lowest grades of fiber. With otherwise perfect processing and technique you can find incremental improvements through using more exotic fibers, but the reality is that a part made with MR50 fiber (~$65 per pound) containing a wrinkle will likely be weaker than the same part made with T300 (~$15 per pound) containing no wrinkles. This is why aerospace has been so slow to really do large production with these materials. It takes longer to make the parts, and then every part has to be inspected 100% before shipping to ensure no errors were made, and when errors are made the entire part has to be scrapped and cannot be re-worked, unlike many metalic parts which can reworked in numerous ways to bring them back into spec, or re-heat treated, etc.

Furthermore, full design testing and validation cannot guarantee that future parts will be manufactured properly, so as an example with our handlebars and stems we have passed the most stringent testing at EFBe laboratories in Germany for fatigue and strength both, but the lab can only verify parts they actually test as every part is considered to be different. So we can validate the design, and through strict controls can control the production of the parts, but it's not so simple as with aluminum or steel forgings where you can test one piece from a heat treat lot and certify the batch as each part is made individually, and even though that's easy there is very little of this actually done in the cycling industry. This is similar to testing a weld, you can verify the skill of a welder, but that's not to say that he won't drink too much coffee and make a crap weld once in a while, or to say that some other issue like contamination can't creep into the process and comprimise the design. So you can validate a batch of tubing for example, but you still need to inspect every weld 100% to validate an individual frame as any given weld could have had an overheat or contamination issue which would not be present in 100% of the welds.

Lastly, with many parts and designs, there will exist no good non-destructive testing regime, so the only way to determine how strong a part will be is to actually break it... obviously this can't be done 100% or we wouldn't have anything to sell. So the next best thing is to batch parts by individual employee and material lot and perform statistical testing of 2-3 parts per 100 to ensure that the employee is producing consistent parts, again, this method cannot pick out a single bad part, but can pick out a process or individual that has strayed from design intent of the production. This is another reason that it is hard to be in the carbon business, if one person breaks one part, they are all over the internet talking about what garbage the part and the company and the engineers are, but the reality is that 99% of the time is is a very minute manufacturing glitch which led to a part failure and nothing more. Not that there aren't bad designs out there, there are, but even those are generally heavily overbuilt to satisfy some basic strength requirements, so your part may be heavy due to poor design, but it generally won't break because of it.

And bunnyman is right, 70/30 is about as high carbon content as you can reasonably acheive, as carbon content increases past this parts will actually get weaker as you will have resin starved areas within the part which act as failure zones. 50/50 is about he limit going the other direction, where you just lose too much stiffness and strength and are too resin rich to be producing a high performance product. And for the record, we use 5 grades of carbon specifically placed for strength, stiffness, impact toughness, hole reinforcement, and brake friction, so we no longer state what we use in the wheels, but the lowest strength/stiffness of all these would be equivalent to T800H/S from Toray and 1 of these materials used considered 'defense critical' and not available as a raw material outside of US borders.

cheers

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http://www.SILCA.cc
Check out my podcast, inside stories from more than 20 years of product and tech innovation from inside the Pro Peloton and Pro Triathlon worlds!
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" The root problem with certifying carbon components is that there are infinitely more ways to screw up a part than just using cheap fabric, or a poor grade of yarn, or a bad resin system. This is one of the reasons that the aerospace industry has taken 15 years to print MIL-17 handbook, and now that it is out, we're still arguing about it. The reality is that poor layup technique, misalignment of unidirectional fibers, fabric wrinkles, or poor compaction could all lead to parts which are significantly weaker than design, much more so than using even the lowest grades of fiber."

Yeah, I have heard of some "clean rooms" having quite a bit of dust creeping in from the machine shop. And since the technology is still very new, as well as all of the variances in production of composites, everyone will argue for another 15 years over the MIL-17 handbook, just in time for another revised version to come out.

I have found in my own fabrication that the more exotic fibres are more sensitive to wrinkles, and that though I may have to use more of the cheaper fibres, I am certain that the part will hold up.

"... and when errors are made the entire part has to be scrapped and cannot be re-worked, unlike many metalic parts which can reworked in numerous ways to bring them back into spec, or re-heat treated, etc. "

I am able to reuse my scrap (which I had a lot of when I first started fabricating) but I sell it as scrap. I sell my scrap to a jewellery maker who uses it for their rings, pendants, and brooches. But that is all that it is good for.

" Furthermore, full design testing and validation cannot guarantee that future parts will be manufactured properly, so as an example with our handlebars and stems we have passed the most stringent testing at EFBe laboratories in Germany for fatigue and strength both, but the lab can only verify parts they actually test as every part is considered to be different. So we can validate the design, and through strict controls can control the production of the parts, but it's not so simple as with aluminum or steel forgings where you can test one piece from a heat treat lot and certify the batch as each part is made individually, and even though that's easy there is very little of this actually done in the cycling industry. This is similar to testing a weld, you can verify the skill of a welder, but that's not to say that he won't drink too much coffee and make a crap weld once in a while, or to say that some other issue like contamination can't creep into the process and comprimise the design. So you can validate a batch of tubing for example, but you still need to inspect every weld 100% to validate an individual frame as any given weld could have had an overheat or contamination issue which would not be present in 100% of the welds. "

In the case of wet lay-up, the person mixing epoxy might have just gotten off of the phone with his girlfriend, and pumped just a bit too hard the resin and not hard enough of the hardener. An interruption could have happened while putting the fabric in the mould. The lay-up person could have sneezed while putting the fabric into the mould. I have found that each individual part is your batch. Every part IS different.

Does everyone X-ray 100% of their parts when they are finished? I seriously doubt it.

In the end, one has to trust their fabricator.


"Lastly, with many parts and designs, there will exist no good non-destructive testing regime, so the only way to determine how strong a part will be is to actually break it... obviously this can't be done 100% or we wouldn't have anything to sell. So the next best thing is to batch parts by individual employee and material lot and perform statistical testing of 2-3 parts per 100 to ensure that the employee is producing consistent parts, again, this method cannot pick out a single bad part, but can pick out a process or individual that has strayed from design intent of the production. This is another reason that it is hard to be in the carbon business, if one person breaks one part, they are all over the internet talking about what garbage the part and the company and the engineers are, but the reality is that 99% of the time is is a very minute manufacturing glitch which led to a part failure and nothing more. Not that there aren't bad designs out there, there are, but even those are generally heavily overbuilt to satisfy some basic strength requirements, so your part may be heavy due to poor design, but it generally won't break because of it."

No doubt. I never bothered to test my brake covers, but I have tested my other parts by using my own primitive protocols, and borrowing a few university students. But the ultimate test is to break it or saw it in half. You have to go with blind faith in a way, which sounds scary as hell when you get right down to it.

This is where I DO think a lifetime warranty on an unaltered/ non-crashed composite part is quite reasonable, as the manufacturing glitches can sometimes not be apparent for years. And you CAN see how your manufacturing has come along, and learn from the failed part.

" And bunnyman is right". I love hearing that.


I had started repairing composites in 1996 when someone's pedal poked a hole in my Zipp disc. I had then called and was told how to do the repair. A monster was unleashed as a result of that phone call, as I have repaired quite a few items over the years. I did not start fabricating until 2003. I have a lot to learn, but the end result is that I can appreciate what really goes into making a part.

Don't worry Josh, I will continue to be nary a blip (and a teeny, tiny one with long ears, at that) on your radar screen, as I have no interest in manufacturing on a full scale. I would rather build prototypical parts on a very, very small scale.


And as far as your material specs go- your wheels have come a very long way since the first wheel I bought in '95. Obviously, with all of the advances your company has made, you can't tell everyone what fibres you use (especially on the brake track- your BIGGEST improvement). You obviously produce the F-1 in carbon. I just wish you guys would start making the 2001 again.

The root problem with certifying carbon components is that there are infinitely more ways to screw up

This is certainly true. But it seems a bit ingenuous (read "local expert" even though you are obviously a pro in the area) I have yet to hear anyone say, "XYZ product is badly made or has a 60% resin count" or that "ABC vendor vendor is sloppy and shares their prodcution line with a garbage can maker."

It is all so completely sophomoric if you can't give real examples.

From an empirical standpoint, the average consumer should be pretty safe in the knowledge that the vast majority of high tech, high stress, high cost sporting equipment is now made out of carbon: tennis raquets; sailboat huls and masts; race car parts; etc. Like bikes, those industries change over started from a few vendors who went out on a limb and then it has become either mainstream or the vast majority of the high end business (for a reason).

It would be "safe" to assume that they must have figured out the manufacturing processes by now so that there is some uniformity. The days of the West Systems two-pump process is surely a thing of the past. Can you point to any significant and regular carbon failures of any bike prodicts or vendors?