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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [tilburs] [ In reply to ]
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"Has a factor in the riding of 650c bikes also not been the issues surrounding gearing?"

we have more gear options available to us now than we did in, say, 1993, when most of the fastest bike splits in kona were ridden on 650c bike both in the mens and the womens races.

how fast do you want to be going when you're still pedaling? 40mph? okay. that's a pretty big gear. but that's no problem on a 650c bike.

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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These have been covered, but I ride the Felt DA (2012), on Zipp Firecrest wheels, GP4000S tires, in 650c. I checked the Felt site, and this frameset is still available in that size (47cm, 650c wheels).
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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I haven't seen them in person but I have seen them on ebay.

I assumed those models are 650's because of the Bottom Bracket drop as well as the stack.

It is possible that they just moved the bottom bracket up but the head tube length suggests a 650 wheel as well
Last edited by: jaretj: Apr 14, 17 14:36
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [jaretj] [ In reply to ]
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"I assumed those models are 650's because of the Bottom Bracket drop"

well okay, you have a point there don't you, you smarty pants you. that's the other geometric tell. i'll inquire and see. thanks for pointing that out. i was just on the phone to them yesterday, so this will be one of my follow up questions.

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [jaretj] [ In reply to ]
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Look at the BB height, it goes up with the reduced drop rather than dropping.

BB went up to reduce stack, not for ground clearance with little wheels
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [cyclenutnz] [ In reply to ]
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Cannondale Slice 44cm womens 2016 women's model has 650c Vision tech rims/wheels. Found on e-bay.
Last edited by: Billyk24: Apr 14, 17 15:10
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Billyk24] [ In reply to ]
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i guess what i'm looking for is what is sold TODAY. i have a personal knowledge of some 650c products sold throughout history ;-)

i'd like to know what's offered NOW, so that if someone asks i can tell them what's currently for sale. thanks.

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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I started a thread with the same intention a little while back:

http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...0travis%20r#p6202120

Travis Rassat
Vector Cycle Works
Noblesville, IN
BikeFit Instructor | FMS | F.I.S.T. | IBFI
Toughman Triathlon Series Ambassador
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Travis R] [ In reply to ]
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bravo! i'll add that.

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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To add to your data - from this graph, about one in ten males is 5'5 or under.

While I don't expect manufacturers to build for the margins, this number adds to the half of women who are not being catered for on appropriate tri frames.

'It never gets easier, you just get crazier.'
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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it seems to me they've all dried up but the 45cm P series bikes.


Although Cervelo may still list the 45cm, they no longer manufacturer it. Me and SallyShortyPants bought up some of the remaining 45cm frames on the market. Ditto for Trek and Giant. Last time I looked they listed 650 bikes but when contacted, confirmed they do not manufacture them.

Felt still produces 650 in the B series. Quintana Roo lists the 650 for a couple of models. I don't know if they are being produced.

As far as road bikes go, there are "junior" bikes by Specialized, Argon and Felt. However, gearing is limited to less than 10x2, and they are aluminum frames with carbon forks.

Also, on the list of wheels, add Renn disc. As far as I can tell, it is the only structural 650 disc available in clincher.

No coasting in running and no crying in baseball
Last edited by: Tri3: Apr 14, 17 18:00
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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650 latex tubes

https://www.ginkgo-veloteile.de/...-Inner-Tube-571.html

They are 700c tubes that were modified.
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [jaretj] [ In reply to ]
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New Cannondale Slice 44cm women's model with 650 x 23c wheels selling at Nytro and TriSports today.
Last edited by: Billyk24: Apr 14, 17 19:22
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [SallyShortyPnts] [ In reply to ]
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Please PM or email me at service@culpritbicycles.com

We use our croz blade color selector for frameset as a reference for custom colors.

Hope to hear from you.

Joshua
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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Too hard to add pics in FB comments on main page article so I'll respond here. Your comments quoted.
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now, let's take the greatest country on earth, NZ, where i think better than 1 in 3 triathletes is a woman, yes?

The Gender split for our HIM national champs for the last 18 years has averaged 32% ladies.
At IMNZ this year 28.7% of Kiwis entered were missing a Y chromosome

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if half those women are shorter than 5'5",

Is 5'5 still the cutoff? It is now possible to get 700C wheeled bikes that match the X dimensions of the previous generation 650C bikes.


Once again we have the crowdsourced data.
The red line is the minimum PXY range possible on a 48cm Cervelo P3/2 MKII using original vision clipons and FSA SL-K -20 or Syntace Flatforce stem. Pushing the limits of what can be done with 700c wheels.
From that we derive our zones.

Blue shaded area is the 'must use 650'
Orange (or yellowish depending on your display) is 'should use, or at least seriously consider, 650'

4.44% of respondents are in the must use zone.
It's worth noting that Tri3 at 155cm (5'1) and PXY 416/533 is in the should zone. And I definitely think that she has made the right choice for handling and sizing. But it wasn't compulsory for PXY, might have been for seatpost extension.

With the new gen small 700c bikes and the easier availability of shorter crank lengths (I used to use Stronglight Junior or cut down cranks) to mitigate the stack difference between 650 and 700 the must line has definitely shifted from where it was a decade ago.

From the 1988 Ansur data


This is where your statement about the proportion of riders needing 650 gets major backing. If, as a reasonable adjustment for the new bikes, the threshold is 5'3 = 1600mm. 18.9% of tri bike sales should be 650. Interestingly, if we move the threshold to 1550mm, we get only 5.3% of riders needing 650, which agrees much more closely with the proportion behind the red line in the ST PXY data.

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and if cervelo is the only company making a tri bike with 650c wheels in that size, this that means 1 out of every 6 tri bike sales transacted in your country (including everyone, both genders, all sizes, all brands) should contain that particular frame SKU (45cm p2/p3). and i'm quite fine with that. cervelo, ramp up production!

About the only way a petite rider ends up with 650C in my country is if they see me. Because I strongly agree with you that the industry is failing a large chunk of riders.

As a few people have referenced - the problem with Cervelo is that they only make bikes if distributors order them. So if the distributor doesn't think they can sell through MOQ in a reasonable timeframe you won't see certain bikes every year. Track bikes have been a great example of this. As have 650 wheeled tri bikes which only seem to roll out every two years.
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [rlh212] [ In reply to ]
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Very nice.


Reminds me of this 650c vs 700c article I wrote a few years ago:

https://web.archive.org/...aller-cyclists-.html

It includes this graph, which might be from the same data:


Damon Rinard
Engineering Manager,
CSG Road Engineering Department
Cannondale & GT Bicycles
(ex-Cervelo, ex-Trek, ex-Velomax, ex-Kestrel)
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [damon_rinard] [ In reply to ]
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Very interesting read. I love the JND part, not because of the vibrations I can regulate with inflate pressure, but of the rw tire grip I lost with 100psi on a rail road last summer. The article is a complete help for a part of my job!

*
___/\___/\___/\___
the s u r f b o a r d of the K u r p f a l z is the r o a d b i k e .. oSo >>
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [damon_rinard] [ In reply to ]
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Great article, Damon. I had not seen that before. I'll add one more reason for 650 bikes: stand over height. Those couple of centimeters difference between 700 and 650 are very important for us shorties.

No coasting in running and no crying in baseball
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [cyclenutnz] [ In reply to ]
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i'm not saying that you CAN'T fit on a bike with 700c wheels if you're 5'2". i'm saying you shouldn't have to be forced into it. for example, let's take specialized, who in general is a very good maker of very good women's bikes:

1. find me any specialized with a front/center less than 57.5cm, any size for any gender.
2. do you think front/center has any impact on how a bike handles?
3. can you tell me the reason why a woman should be limited to 57.5cm of front/center?
4. if a 69° or 70° head angle on a road or tri bike is appropriate, then why don't we just scale that bike up?

in other words, what if, instead of starting with a 55cm bike and scaling it up and down, we started with the 44cm bike and just scaled it up? everybody gets to ride 70° head angles on their road bikes. no? you don't like that idea? you won't sell any bikes to men if you do that? because the bikes will handle like crap? so the shoe is on the other foot now!

here's the flip side to the "availability" thing. you can't get stuff in 650! okay. not true, but okay. let's stipulate to that. the other side of it is that the available aerobars and stems - and the available bikes where the distance from the armrests forward to the pursuits - gets pretty slim and skinny if you make that small rider sit aboard a bike with 700c. here's a 700c-wheel bike you can ride, dearie! (but with this aerobar only.) don't like that aerobar? not comfortable? don't complain. you're a girl. what do you know anyway?

which leads us to the larger question of what it is that would really make a difference in women's access to sport. (a debate in which i would be happy to wade right into.)

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [damon_rinard] [ In reply to ]
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those numbers are from the kona survey. when i started this, in 1992 (and until i gave it up after 2006 or 2007) we used to track seat angle and wheelsize. it's hard to track. both of those metrics. you have to have an eye for it. you have to really know bikes to track seat angle, but i digress.

those numbers you have are from the two charts i had on my surveys way, way back in the day, which are below side by side.



most people have no idea how prevalent 650 was. now, certainly, threadless headsets dropped the front end. then integrated headsets dropped it further. then carbon bikes dropped it further (remember the 47cm airfoil pro, with a head tube, top to bottom, of 73mm i think it was?).

all that lowered heights. pad heights. then we started getting lower profile aerobars, which lowered them further. that meant you could ride a 700c bike down to 48cm pretty easily. you could have a 65cm saddle height, 8cm of armrest elevation drop from the saddle, and somehow squeeze aboard a bike with 700c wheels.

but there remained two issues. first, the 700c wheel didn't get any thinner front to back. you could get the bike lower, yes, but you couldn't get it narrower. yes, you could pull the armrests back, but unless you also pulled the pursuit bars back you had an unfortunately long distance from the saddle to the pursuits.

secondly, armrest elevations went right back up again. the best aerobar out there is profile design, j4 bracket, f35 armrest. nothing touches this. the only bars that might be close are zipp and 3t, but they also have about 60mm of pad height between the bar bore and the pad top (unless you configure the zipp undermount, which gives you a spatial problem between the pads and extensions (because there is no extension built specifically for undermount).

so, what you have are a bunch of workarounds. asterisks. a 5'2" woman doesn't need a 650c bike because she can ride a 700c bike fine, assuming asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

we have, basically, still, a male-oriented (if not chauvenistic, or even misogynistic) approach to product design in the bike industry. and every time a manufacturer tries to do something about it it gets spanked at retail and we shrink back. and those who are in charge of gender equity are distracted by the shiny object that is easy to understand, leaving no room for the discussion on how to actually make products (bikes, saddles, apparel) that a woman would want to ride. (how many decades did it take to get us short reach brake levers?)

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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Yep, those charts are the source of the data. Thanks again for all the work you did gathering the numbers.

So how do we get products designed for smaller riders to succeed in the market?

Damon Rinard
Engineering Manager,
CSG Road Engineering Department
Cannondale & GT Bicycles
(ex-Cervelo, ex-Trek, ex-Velomax, ex-Kestrel)
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [damon_rinard] [ In reply to ]
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"So how do we get products designed for smaller riders to succeed in the market?"

before i get to that! one more thing. when you write about the aerodynamics of 650c (when anyone writes about it) there is a pretty big element people tend to leave out. every time i went to the wind tunnel - every time! - to see wheels tested, the same hub, same spoke count, was used on all the wheels. why? because HED (as an example) made a "wheel". a rim. and a hub. and the hub had 80mm of flange width, c:c, and 24 holes or however many.

and i would say wait! same hub, same rim, that's not equity. wheels of different sizes of the same strength, that is equity!

so finally we had HED make us wheels, 90mm front and rear (because, as you note, less steering torque because less wheel, less surface area). we had these built on special hubs, 60mm flange width. 16 spokes in the front, 20 in the rear. the men rode our bikes too. at various times we had wolfgang dittrich, jimmy riccitello, jürgen zäck, ryan bolton, spencer smith, kenny glah, scott tinley, scott molina, ray browning, and a bunch i'm forgetting, all on 650c wheels.

we augmented this by building a fork with greater spacing between the blades, like the old wynn fork that tested so well. we had a river of space between this (narrower) wheel and the blades.

anyway, that's something that bugs me, i guess, that the industry has had only enough imagination to copy what we did back in the late 80s and early 90s, but not to really understand and optimize it.

how do we build better bikes? that will sell? i think we have advantages now we didn't have in the early 90s, when i was flogging this at QR and you were flogging it at kestrel (and eventually at cervelo). we have a much better pathway to get our narrative to the consumer. could you imagine, in 1993, a successful consumer direct bike brand? remember the attempts? why can that model work now? we have better pathways to purchase. informational pathways.

and i think this has caused an urgency at B&M. now the LBS doesn't have the luxury to remain imperious, retro, ignorant, chauvenistic. now it's got to hustle. why have 1,500 of these guys come through our fit workshops? because they know they have to hustle now. they have to be better, better informed, nuanced, educated.

further - and i might be wrong about this - i think women are less likely now to passively accept the counsel of men, whether those men are coaches, husbands or the person at the LBS. back then women thought a 650c wheel was demeaning to them. they wanted the big wheel, like the men had. i think the market is sophisticated enough to respond, "do you also want to wear pants that the men wear, that are 6 sizes too big for you?"

and finally, the market has been strangled for 650c frames, but the 650c infrastructure is still there. i didn't have that luxury in 1988, but cannondale (as an example) has it now. hopefully all the people who worked at cannondale during the era of this bike are gone...



so the institutional memory of its eventual market failure won't be remembered, and cannondale will give it another try ;-)

imagine if somebody comes out the gate with a strong 650c narrative and product offering. if it's really true that no one is making 650c production frames right now (road or tri) this might be the very time to do it.

Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [culpritbicycles] [ In reply to ]
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culpritbicycles wrote:
Dan it's not a tri bike but I make culprit Junior bikes 650c and our junior two can be custom painted. Aero alloy frame with carbon dual offset post.

Not sure if it fits your bill but it is an option.

https://culpritbicycles.com/...ucts/2016-junior-two

Is the frame reach on the Culprit 2 really 424, I would expect that to be nearer 390ish? Or is that to the shifters on the bars?

The front/center doesn't really match that frame reach
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [jaretj] [ In reply to ]
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Yes it's correct. Been selling for years. This is the first time I have been asked this.
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Re: a little help? 650c tri bikes (and wheels, and tires): who's making them? [Slowman] [ In reply to ]
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