On Thursday, July 11, 2019 at 9:39:06 AM UTC-4, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, July 7, 2019 at 12:51:05 AM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
These rims are so mechanically strong that they cannot be flexed so the only thing that it can be is the less tight spokes.

I'd say that evenness of tension in a wheel is more important for accurate steering and resistance to handling challenges than outright tension, but that doesn't mean that a certain minimum tension is not hugely desirable, in fact essential to a correctly responding wheel.

I can't say I take kindly to the implication by ticket-punched "engineers" that an unevenly slack set of spokes won't change the distance between the driven or steering hub and the contact patch, both items which will make for uncertain steering. I suggest that the clowns who're propelling themselves down the dead-end of an absolutely indefensible theory check their instinct to hound Tom Kunick and set their brains free to think the subject out before they start shouting "Wrong, wrong, wrong, because it is Tom who says it."

What Tom claimed isn't wrong because Tom says it. It's simply wrong. Less tension
in a wheel's spokes do not measurably change the stiffness of the wheel. (And
Tom said nothing about uneven tensions. That's a Jutian smoke screen.)

From https://www.sheldonbrown.com/rinard/wheel_index.html

"1. Does stiffness vary with spoke tension? Some believe that a wheel built with tighter spokes is stiffer. It is not. Wheel stiffness does not vary significantly with spoke tension unless a spoke becomes totally slack."

Detailed measurements are given for confirmation, meaning this is fact, not
"indefensible theory." Although anyone who can read and understand a stress-
strain curve should be able to figure it out without the test measurements.

- Frank Krygowski