Le Tour and Comments

The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life.. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

Something else that could be showing its face https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2alb1uoTKc&t=8s

The idea of 3D printed tetrahedral frame tubes is extremely interesting. These would not fracture like any of the other materials. If would have better strength and reliability than CF. Also it would be virtually fully automated so that after initial costs it would be extremely low cost to manufacture. No special assembly required. What with CC50 bottom brackets being merely pressed in now, all they would need is a headset that doesn't require anything special to install. I would suppose that a tapered roller bearing would solve that problem and simplify the construction.

Presently a UCI legal bike is about 10% or so the weight of a Pro cyclist.. Even if you were to make it lighter, you have hit the turn in the curve so that you have diminishing returns. Though going from 25 lbs to 20 lbs can be noticed, it isn't very remarkable. The difference between the 20 lb bike and the 16 lb bikes cannot be accurately measured outside of experimental instrumentation and anything lighter than that is sort of like the difference in rolling resistance of the top 10 competition tires - only valuable to racers. One sneeze and you lose more time that a 15 lb bike would save you on a 16 lb bike.

We have watched the technological improvement of the bicycle up until about 2000. After that there is more change for changes sake that for improvements save for the very highest skill members of the Pro peloton. There isn't any real improvement after 8 speeds on the rear and the components require much more frequent replacement. I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds. 11 speeds must be worse and 12 and now 13 speeds are using a single front since the width of the rear cassette makes derailleurs difficult to say the least.

I will admit that the Campy Skeleton brakes are a lot better than the older style but that is simply because they've been given more mechanical advantage. That means you have to keep a close watch on pad wear. Though nowhere as close and eye as disk pads need. In five rides on returning home the brakes were making noise and looking at them I saw that the pad was completely gone.

The light aluminum rims wear out and you better watch them closely because they can wear to the point where the tire pressure blows the brake surfacing off of the rim. That isn't a guess because I've had that occur to me on, of all things, a set of Mavic MA40s.

Since the 2000's the bikes have become more and more likely to wear out if you're riding top end equipment so be aware and ready to maintain.

That is a depressing post Tom.

Lou

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn..

Something else that could be showing its face https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2alb1uoTKc&t=8s

The idea of 3D printed tetrahedral frame tubes is extremely interesting.. These would not fracture like any of the other materials. If would have better strength and reliability than CF. Also it would be virtually fully automated so that after initial costs it would be extremely low cost to manufacture. No special assembly required. What with CC50 bottom brackets being merely pressed in now, all they would need is a headset that doesn't require anything special to install. I would suppose that a tapered roller bearing would solve that problem and simplify the construction.

Presently a UCI legal bike is about 10% or so the weight of a Pro cyclist. Even if you were to make it lighter, you have hit the turn in the curve so that you have diminishing returns. Though going from 25 lbs to 20 lbs can be noticed, it isn't very remarkable. The difference between the 20 lb bike and the 16 lb bikes cannot be accurately measured outside of experimental instrumentation and anything lighter than that is sort of like the difference in rolling resistance of the top 10 competition tires - only valuable to racers. One sneeze and you lose more time that a 15 lb bike would save you on a 16 lb bike.

We have watched the technological improvement of the bicycle up until about 2000. After that there is more change for changes sake that for improvements save for the very highest skill members of the Pro peloton. There isn't any real improvement after 8 speeds on the rear and the components require much more frequent replacement. I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds. 11 speeds must be worse and 12 and now 13 speeds are using a single front since the width of the rear cassette makes derailleurs difficult to say the least.

I will admit that the Campy Skeleton brakes are a lot better than the older style but that is simply because they've been given more mechanical advantage. That means you have to keep a close watch on pad wear. Though nowhere as close and eye as disk pads need. In five rides on returning home the brakes were making noise and looking at them I saw that the pad was completely gone.

The light aluminum rims wear out and you better watch them closely because they can wear to the point where the tire pressure blows the brake surfacing off of the rim. That isn't a guess because I've had that occur to me on, of all things, a set of Mavic MA40s.

Since the 2000's the bikes have become more and more likely to wear out if you're riding top end equipment so be aware and ready to maintain.

That is a depressing post Tom.

Weird, too -- like his friend with Di2 whose battery that was "supposed to last a week." Does he mean a year and a week? Is this the friend with the custom Italian bike from the secret factory that makes disposable CF frames?

And with Di2, you don't manually move the rear derailleur when the system dies -- it moves itself, assuming its not already in the first cog. You lose the front derailleur first, at least with the Shimano system. The rotors on my discs are not sharp or ever red-hot. That's an off-road thing. The Trek SLR series is not available in a Tiagra -- the lowest model, the SLR6, is an Ultgra bike, and BTW, all Ultegra and not Ultegra shifters with some cheesey FSA crank. Great bike.

Aluminum rims wear out and blow at the brake track if you ignore them for years or ride in pumice and rain a lot. I never blew mine, but they got close, so I swapped rims. I have 11sp and never miss a shift unlike TK on 10sp. I don't know how it is possible to miss a shift on a well adjusted STI system with a non-worn chain and cassette.

Sure, 8sp was fine. 11sp is more expensive to own because it doesn't not wear as well, but it certainly shifts as well. High end stuff does wear out faster, assuming its a wear item. I don't get the bit about headsets, which are easy to install (no pressed cups or even crown races in most modern CF frames -- its a five minute operation), and headsets do use angular contact bearings. And WTF is a CC50 bottom bracket? A BB30/90/86 -- PF30? The post is like Eeyore doing bike tech.

-- Jay Beattie.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 10:18:05 AM UTC-4, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic.. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car.. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 7:18:05 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic.. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car.. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 5:30:13 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 7:18:05 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

Something else that could be showing its face https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2alb1uoTKc&t=8s

The idea of 3D printed tetrahedral frame tubes is extremely interesting. These would not fracture like any of the other materials. If would have better strength and reliability than CF. Also it would be virtually fully automated so that after initial costs it would be extremely low cost to manufacture. No special assembly required. What with CC50 bottom brackets being merely pressed in now, all they would need is a headset that doesn't require anything special to install. I would suppose that a tapered roller bearing would solve that problem and simplify the construction.

Presently a UCI legal bike is about 10% or so the weight of a Pro cyclist. Even if you were to make it lighter, you have hit the turn in the curve so that you have diminishing returns. Though going from 25 lbs to 20 lbs can be noticed, it isn't very remarkable. The difference between the 20 lb bike and the 16 lb bikes cannot be accurately measured outside of experimental instrumentation and anything lighter than that is sort of like the difference in rolling resistance of the top 10 competition tires - only valuable to racers. One sneeze and you lose more time that a 15 lb bike would save you on a 16 lb bike.

We have watched the technological improvement of the bicycle up until about 2000. After that there is more change for changes sake that for improvements save for the very highest skill members of the Pro peloton. There isn't any real improvement after 8 speeds on the rear and the components require much more frequent replacement. I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds. 11 speeds must be worse and 12 and now 13 speeds are using a single front since the width of the rear cassette makes derailleurs difficult to say the least.

I will admit that the Campy Skeleton brakes are a lot better than the older style but that is simply because they've been given more mechanical advantage. That means you have to keep a close watch on pad wear. Though nowhere as close and eye as disk pads need. In five rides on returning home the brakes were making noise and looking at them I saw that the pad was completely gone.

The light aluminum rims wear out and you better watch them closely because they can wear to the point where the tire pressure blows the brake surfacing off of the rim. That isn't a guess because I've had that occur to me on, of all things, a set of Mavic MA40s.

Since the 2000's the bikes have become more and more likely to wear out if you're riding top end equipment so be aware and ready to maintain.

That is a depressing post Tom.

Weird, too -- like his friend with Di2 whose battery that was "supposed to last a week." Does he mean a year and a week? Is this the friend with the custom Italian bike from the secret factory that makes disposable CF frames?

And with Di2, you don't manually move the rear derailleur when the system dies -- it moves itself, assuming its not already in the first cog. You lose the front derailleur first, at least with the Shimano system. The rotors on my discs are not sharp or ever red-hot. That's an off-road thing. The Trek SLR series is not available in a Tiagra -- the lowest model, the SLR6, is an Ultgra bike, and BTW, all Ultegra and not Ultegra shifters with some cheesey FSA crank. Great bike.

Aluminum rims wear out and blow at the brake track if you ignore them for years or ride in pumice and rain a lot. I never blew mine, but they got close, so I swapped rims. I have 11sp and never miss a shift unlike TK on 10sp. I don't know how it is possible to miss a shift on a well adjusted STI system with a non-worn chain and cassette.

Sure, 8sp was fine. 11sp is more expensive to own because it doesn't not wear as well, but it certainly shifts as well. High end stuff does wear out faster, assuming its a wear item. I don't get the bit about headsets, which are easy to install (no pressed cups or even crown races in most modern CF frames -- its a five minute operation), and headsets do use angular contact bearings. And WTF is a CC50 bottom bracket? A BB30/90/86 -- PF30? The post is like Eeyore doing bike tech.

-- Jay Beattie.

As a lawyer you have the unmitigated gall to ask me what factory said that? After you've spent your entire life screwing over people for a living, if you think that I would say anything that might give you another hand up you're crazy.

Hmmm. I just tuned in and really should let this sit, but what the hell. I'm also trying to eat less. Might as well give in.

When you tell these lunatic tales, expect to be called on it. Nothing about your story makes sense. And don't sling mud or crab walk into some other subject or expect us to believe that the story is beyond question because your friend is a former NCIS investigator. Even if that were true, the guy could be a former NCIS investigator who has a hearing loss from dodging bullets or doesn't understand broken English from some Italian factory worker. I was just in Italy, and even buying a jersey at a small shop was a bit of a communication chore (guestimating sizing for my son). All of the manufacturers I represent would not allow product on the market with an expected life-span of one race, even a grand tour.


At what point did I say that STI skipped gears? I use Campy and although it has some advantages, getting it to shift cleanly isn't one of them.

I said you missed shifts on 10sp, and to quote you:
"I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds."


8 speeds are all that are necessary for the average rider. Even racers. It was Lance Armstrong who demanded Shimano give him another speed so that he could carry a climbing cog. Campy won't even shift a climbing gear. The largest cog they will shift is a 28 though people are pushing them with 29's..

I'm climbing the sides of barns in a 34-28 and everyone is spinning by me.. The only complaints I have with Shimano is that they aren't repairable like Campy. And I've been using Campy for so long that I have a hard time remembering how to shift Shimano.

After Lance showed up with 9 speeds EVERYONE wanted them and so "more speeds" was born and now they're approaching 14. Joe Sports Rider NEVER uses most of his gears these days. I use the 28/25/23 on the hills, 16 one the flats and 11 down hills. When you come up to a climb you can hear EVERYONE shifting multiple gears.

I would hope they shift gears. That's what they're for. Did you ever race Cat's Hill? In the old five-speed days, the turn into the climb was carnage as people over-shifted, couldn't get a gear, pulled out of toe-clips humping up the hill straining out of the saddle. I did a warm up lap with a guy who broke a chain on Nicholson. Now you just sit, shift and spin up the hill. The old way is inefficient -- getting out of the saddle is nice to stretch out and for loping along or for a short effort, but if you have to be out of the saddle just to turn the gear on a long climb, you're slaughtering yourself with the additional upper body effort.

-- Jay Beattie.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 6:13:56 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 5:30:13 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 7:18:05 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

Something else that could be showing its face https://www.youtube..com/watch?v=z2alb1uoTKc&t=8s

The idea of 3D printed tetrahedral frame tubes is extremely interesting. These would not fracture like any of the other materials. If would have better strength and reliability than CF. Also it would be virtually fully automated so that after initial costs it would be extremely low cost to manufacture. No special assembly required. What with CC50 bottom brackets being merely pressed in now, all they would need is a headset that doesn't require anything special to install. I would suppose that a tapered roller bearing would solve that problem and simplify the construction.

Presently a UCI legal bike is about 10% or so the weight of a Pro cyclist. Even if you were to make it lighter, you have hit the turn in the curve so that you have diminishing returns. Though going from 25 lbs to 20 lbs can be noticed, it isn't very remarkable. The difference between the 20 lb bike and the 16 lb bikes cannot be accurately measured outside of experimental instrumentation and anything lighter than that is sort of like the difference in rolling resistance of the top 10 competition tires - only valuable to racers. One sneeze and you lose more time that a 15 lb bike would save you on a 16 lb bike.

We have watched the technological improvement of the bicycle up until about 2000. After that there is more change for changes sake that for improvements save for the very highest skill members of the Pro peloton. There isn't any real improvement after 8 speeds on the rear and the components require much more frequent replacement. I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds. 11 speeds must be worse and 12 and now 13 speeds are using a single front since the width of the rear cassette makes derailleurs difficult to say the least.

I will admit that the Campy Skeleton brakes are a lot better than the older style but that is simply because they've been given more mechanical advantage. That means you have to keep a close watch on pad wear. Though nowhere as close and eye as disk pads need. In five rides on returning home the brakes were making noise and looking at them I saw that the pad was completely gone.

The light aluminum rims wear out and you better watch them closely because they can wear to the point where the tire pressure blows the brake surfacing off of the rim. That isn't a guess because I've had that occur to me on, of all things, a set of Mavic MA40s.

Since the 2000's the bikes have become more and more likely to wear out if you're riding top end equipment so be aware and ready to maintain..

That is a depressing post Tom.

Weird, too -- like his friend with Di2 whose battery that was "supposed to last a week." Does he mean a year and a week? Is this the friend with the custom Italian bike from the secret factory that makes disposable CF frames?

And with Di2, you don't manually move the rear derailleur when the system dies -- it moves itself, assuming its not already in the first cog. You lose the front derailleur first, at least with the Shimano system. The rotors on my discs are not sharp or ever red-hot. That's an off-road thing. The Trek SLR series is not available in a Tiagra -- the lowest model, the SLR6, is an Ultgra bike, and BTW, all Ultegra and not Ultegra shifters with some cheesey FSA crank. Great bike.

Aluminum rims wear out and blow at the brake track if you ignore them for years or ride in pumice and rain a lot. I never blew mine, but they got close, so I swapped rims. I have 11sp and never miss a shift unlike TK on 10sp. I don't know how it is possible to miss a shift on a well adjusted STI system with a non-worn chain and cassette.

Sure, 8sp was fine. 11sp is more expensive to own because it doesn't not wear as well, but it certainly shifts as well. High end stuff does wear out faster, assuming its a wear item. I don't get the bit about headsets, which are easy to install (no pressed cups or even crown races in most modern CF frames -- its a five minute operation), and headsets do use angular contact bearings. And WTF is a CC50 bottom bracket? A BB30/90/86 -- PF30? The post is like Eeyore doing bike tech.

-- Jay Beattie.

As a lawyer you have the unmitigated gall to ask me what factory said that? After you've spent your entire life screwing over people for a living, if you think that I would say anything that might give you another hand up you're crazy.

Hmmm. I just tuned in and really should let this sit, but what the hell. I'm also trying to eat less. Might as well give in.

When you tell these lunatic tales, expect to be called on it. Nothing about your story makes sense. And don't sling mud or crab walk into some other subject or expect us to believe that the story is beyond question because your friend is a former NCIS investigator. Even if that were true, the guy could be a former NCIS investigator who has a hearing loss from dodging bullets or doesn't understand broken English from some Italian factory worker.. I was just in Italy, and even buying a jersey at a small shop was a bit of a communication chore (guestimating sizing for my son). All of the manufacturers I represent would not allow product on the market with an expected life-span of one race, even a grand tour.


At what point did I say that STI skipped gears? I use Campy and although it has some advantages, getting it to shift cleanly isn't one of them.

I said you missed shifts on 10sp, and to quote you:
"I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds."


8 speeds are all that are necessary for the average rider. Even racers. It was Lance Armstrong who demanded Shimano give him another speed so that he could carry a climbing cog. Campy won't even shift a climbing gear. The largest cog they will shift is a 28 though people are pushing them with 29's.

I'm climbing the sides of barns in a 34-28 and everyone is spinning by me. The only complaints I have with Shimano is that they aren't repairable like Campy. And I've been using Campy for so long that I have a hard time remembering how to shift Shimano.

After Lance showed up with 9 speeds EVERYONE wanted them and so "more speeds" was born and now they're approaching 14. Joe Sports Rider NEVER uses most of his gears these days. I use the 28/25/23 on the hills, 16 one the flats and 11 down hills. When you come up to a climb you can hear EVERYONE shifting multiple gears.

I would hope they shift gears. That's what they're for. Did you ever race Cat's Hill? In the old five-speed days, the turn into the climb was carnage as people over-shifted, couldn't get a gear, pulled out of toe-clips humping up the hill straining out of the saddle. I did a warm up lap with a guy who broke a chain on Nicholson. Now you just sit, shift and spin up the hill. The old way is inefficient -- getting out of the saddle is nice to stretch out and for loping along or for a short effort, but if you have to be out of the saddle just to turn the gear on a long climb, you're slaughtering yourself with the additional upper body effort.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, he was stationed in Italy for 20 years and speaks Italian better than a lot of Italians. Everywhere he goes people ask him how he can know Italian that well since I guess Italian isn't on the list of languages that people learn anymore.

I just caught hell yesterday for saying that electronic shifting was unreliable. Well a little bit ago Valverde - the World Champion for crying out loud - had his ES fail and had to have a bike change. If it won't even be reliable for the world champion what do you suppose it's like for the worker bees?

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 6:13:56 PM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 5:30:13 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 7:18:05 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

Something else that could be showing its face https://www.youtube..com/watch?v=z2alb1uoTKc&t=8s

The idea of 3D printed tetrahedral frame tubes is extremely interesting. These would not fracture like any of the other materials. If would have better strength and reliability than CF. Also it would be virtually fully automated so that after initial costs it would be extremely low cost to manufacture. No special assembly required. What with CC50 bottom brackets being merely pressed in now, all they would need is a headset that doesn't require anything special to install. I would suppose that a tapered roller bearing would solve that problem and simplify the construction.

Presently a UCI legal bike is about 10% or so the weight of a Pro cyclist. Even if you were to make it lighter, you have hit the turn in the curve so that you have diminishing returns. Though going from 25 lbs to 20 lbs can be noticed, it isn't very remarkable. The difference between the 20 lb bike and the 16 lb bikes cannot be accurately measured outside of experimental instrumentation and anything lighter than that is sort of like the difference in rolling resistance of the top 10 competition tires - only valuable to racers. One sneeze and you lose more time that a 15 lb bike would save you on a 16 lb bike.

We have watched the technological improvement of the bicycle up until about 2000. After that there is more change for changes sake that for improvements save for the very highest skill members of the Pro peloton. There isn't any real improvement after 8 speeds on the rear and the components require much more frequent replacement. I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds. 11 speeds must be worse and 12 and now 13 speeds are using a single front since the width of the rear cassette makes derailleurs difficult to say the least.

I will admit that the Campy Skeleton brakes are a lot better than the older style but that is simply because they've been given more mechanical advantage. That means you have to keep a close watch on pad wear. Though nowhere as close and eye as disk pads need. In five rides on returning home the brakes were making noise and looking at them I saw that the pad was completely gone.

The light aluminum rims wear out and you better watch them closely because they can wear to the point where the tire pressure blows the brake surfacing off of the rim. That isn't a guess because I've had that occur to me on, of all things, a set of Mavic MA40s.

Since the 2000's the bikes have become more and more likely to wear out if you're riding top end equipment so be aware and ready to maintain..

That is a depressing post Tom.

Weird, too -- like his friend with Di2 whose battery that was "supposed to last a week." Does he mean a year and a week? Is this the friend with the custom Italian bike from the secret factory that makes disposable CF frames?

And with Di2, you don't manually move the rear derailleur when the system dies -- it moves itself, assuming its not already in the first cog. You lose the front derailleur first, at least with the Shimano system. The rotors on my discs are not sharp or ever red-hot. That's an off-road thing. The Trek SLR series is not available in a Tiagra -- the lowest model, the SLR6, is an Ultgra bike, and BTW, all Ultegra and not Ultegra shifters with some cheesey FSA crank. Great bike.

Aluminum rims wear out and blow at the brake track if you ignore them for years or ride in pumice and rain a lot. I never blew mine, but they got close, so I swapped rims. I have 11sp and never miss a shift unlike TK on 10sp. I don't know how it is possible to miss a shift on a well adjusted STI system with a non-worn chain and cassette.

Sure, 8sp was fine. 11sp is more expensive to own because it doesn't not wear as well, but it certainly shifts as well. High end stuff does wear out faster, assuming its a wear item. I don't get the bit about headsets, which are easy to install (no pressed cups or even crown races in most modern CF frames -- its a five minute operation), and headsets do use angular contact bearings. And WTF is a CC50 bottom bracket? A BB30/90/86 -- PF30? The post is like Eeyore doing bike tech.

-- Jay Beattie.

As a lawyer you have the unmitigated gall to ask me what factory said that? After you've spent your entire life screwing over people for a living, if you think that I would say anything that might give you another hand up you're crazy.

Hmmm. I just tuned in and really should let this sit, but what the hell. I'm also trying to eat less. Might as well give in.

When you tell these lunatic tales, expect to be called on it. Nothing about your story makes sense. And don't sling mud or crab walk into some other subject or expect us to believe that the story is beyond question because your friend is a former NCIS investigator. Even if that were true, the guy could be a former NCIS investigator who has a hearing loss from dodging bullets or doesn't understand broken English from some Italian factory worker.. I was just in Italy, and even buying a jersey at a small shop was a bit of a communication chore (guestimating sizing for my son). All of the manufacturers I represent would not allow product on the market with an expected life-span of one race, even a grand tour.


At what point did I say that STI skipped gears? I use Campy and although it has some advantages, getting it to shift cleanly isn't one of them.

I said you missed shifts on 10sp, and to quote you:
"I never had a Campy 8 speed miss shifts but it is quite common on 10 speeds."


8 speeds are all that are necessary for the average rider. Even racers. It was Lance Armstrong who demanded Shimano give him another speed so that he could carry a climbing cog. Campy won't even shift a climbing gear. The largest cog they will shift is a 28 though people are pushing them with 29's.

I'm climbing the sides of barns in a 34-28 and everyone is spinning by me. The only complaints I have with Shimano is that they aren't repairable like Campy. And I've been using Campy for so long that I have a hard time remembering how to shift Shimano.

After Lance showed up with 9 speeds EVERYONE wanted them and so "more speeds" was born and now they're approaching 14. Joe Sports Rider NEVER uses most of his gears these days. I use the 28/25/23 on the hills, 16 one the flats and 11 down hills. When you come up to a climb you can hear EVERYONE shifting multiple gears.

I would hope they shift gears. That's what they're for. Did you ever race Cat's Hill? In the old five-speed days, the turn into the climb was carnage as people over-shifted, couldn't get a gear, pulled out of toe-clips humping up the hill straining out of the saddle. I did a warm up lap with a guy who broke a chain on Nicholson. Now you just sit, shift and spin up the hill. The old way is inefficient -- getting out of the saddle is nice to stretch out and for loping along or for a short effort, but if you have to be out of the saddle just to turn the gear on a long climb, you're slaughtering yourself with the additional upper body effort.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, the people showing you the mechanics trucks showed that they have a whole hell of a lot more bikes than a rider, a spare and a TT bike. So that proves your BS wrong. They are expected failures.

In today's Tour they showed people getting "flats" fixed. Only they weren't messing around with the wheels - they were playing with the electronic shifting rear derailleurs. I saw two including Valverde - the World Champion - whom one would assume had the most attention paid to it.

I couldn't care less what you believe but if you can't even believe your own eyes perhaps you can get a job at a larger law office.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 9:18:05 AM UTC-5, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic.. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car.. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.

On Wednesday, July 10, 2019 at 2:23:24 PM UTC-7, wrote:

My Shimano Di2 7970 battery last 2-3 YEARS between recharges. YEARS!!!!!

I suppose if you never ride, a battery can last a long time. According to https://tempocyclist.com/2016/02/02/di2-battery-life/ "From a 100% charged starting point, the indicator light on my system changed from solid green to blinking green at 750 miles (1200km). I do change gear quite often, but not so much on the front which requires more battery power. After 1030 miles (1650km) the indicator light changed to solid red."

While I presently have about 2000 miles I would normally have 4,000 after the 7 months and since I'm riding fast I'm probably shifting more than this reporter.

But I actually only have about three months of riding about 3 to 4 times a week. That looks like I would have had to completely recharge the battery twice.

Exactly how is it that you're getting 2-3 years?