how many deaths can you attribute to high speed flat tires?
And, once again, you fail to understand the nature of the death wobble. A tire is a passive participant in a flat tire incident – the external agent pierces it, but the tire does nothing to contribute to its own demise. In a death wobble the frame is an active participant: it takes a mild external excitation and amplifies it to a crash-inducing oscillation.
If you want to provide a tire analogy, here’s a more appropriate one: your tire steps on a thorn, and the moment it does so, it explodes. In this case the tire did not passively deflate (i.e., a gradual failure), but it actively self-destructed (catastrophic failure). How would you feel about the tire manufacturer in this case then?
there is no damper you can place into a bicycle that would altogether stop speed wobble without significantly altering its functionality
Wait, I thought you had said earlier that, to your knowledge, no one had done the analysis, simulations, and testing to explore the vibrational modes of a bicycle frame. So now you’re telling me that you did all this work overnight in your head and came up with the conclusion that the solution is not feasible to implement?
bike makers have been wrestling with how to best optimize these features since the first world war
And apparently they are still stuck with the techniques used in that era.
The world has changed Dan. Back in those days engineering was not even a proper scientific field: the full equations describing these complex systems are unsolvable, so without modelling there is no way to understand what is truly happening dynamically with the system. Various industries, depending on how critical they are, have been transitioning to this new engineering methods since the early '60s – but the bicycle industry has yet to do so (and that’s why I am saying that it is an immature industry – because its methods and techniques are rooted in the artisan-era of bicycle building).
You cannot in good consience carry on building bicycles in your garage anymore; you cannot just take a bunch of tubes, weld them together to an aesthetically pleasing frame, and declare that you have a working bicycle frame. The bicycle industry needs to grow up, start investing in very expensive design methods and human capital, and stop putting out products that are based in the 1930s.
John