Slack Spokes Cause Poor Steering

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."

The correct response of the tyre in drive and roadholding, and particularly beyond the limits of roadholding where handling questions become important, in its design assumes a stiff wheel, and in practice suffers if the wheel is not stiffly built.

Handling is what happens when the bike runs out of roadholding either by pilot error or through road conditions. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, the cyclist's ability to save himself and his bicycle when adverse conditions are encountered. If your wheels deliver unexpected inputs because they aren't stiff enough (i.e. indifferent or neutral to tyre inputs), the cyclist's opportunity to effect a handling save decreases.

Slack spokes are simply dangerous unless the cyclist crawls along like the proverbial little old lady who rode her bike only to church on Sundays. It's dumb for anyone to gainsay such an obvious truth, and doubly dumb for a ticket-punched "engineer" looking to embarrass Tom.

Andre Jute
Hey, Jumbo, come back; I retract everything I ever said about Timoshenko