Bicycle Technology and Racing

With the FCI's weigh limitations the only reason that the teams are using carbon fiber bikes is because they can be tuned to the size and weight of a rider. You can now get steel and aluminum bikes in at the weight limit so why no steel bikes? Steel bike manufacturers are all too small and they cannot sponsor race teams or you would see steel bikes quite a bit because they are more reliable.

Since all of the CF bikes are custom made to the rider they also build them as light as possible. This allows them to bring the weight up to the limit by mounting lead weights under the BB giving the bike a low CG. What that gives you I haven't any idea since the CG is still controlled by the rider's position.

But then I also had the idea that a lb or two difference in a bike wouldn't make a significant difference in a climbing bike and it is remarkable the difference it makes. Probably has something to do with how much weight you can carry in excess to your body weight.

But the inevitable crashes in the pro-peloton break a lot of CF bikes and I think that there is some sort of agreements with the manufacturers and the media not to show these bikes turned to rubble in a crash that would scratch the paint on a steel bike. One of the team mechanics said that they get so many extra bike frames that at the end of the season very often team mechanics will filch the unused ones and pass them off cheaply on eBay as stock bikes. Then they return the used frames back to the factories for analysis I guess and pretend the missing bikes were broken and discarded.

Aluminum bikes are hard to break but they can have fatigue failures which neither CF or steel have. Luckily most aluminum failures are fail-safe. Bending rather than breaking like on a CF bike. On one of the minor peloton crashes it was pretty funny with the teammate standing in between his mates broken frame and the camera. Then when the team car arrived with the new bike it stopped in a position so that when the racer got underway the broken bike was still shielded.

Now I think that over-the-counter CF bikes are very safe these days. It doesn't require a lot of additional material to add a great deal of strength. And they can use different resins and grades of CF Prepreg up to and including Aerospace grade such is used in commercial airliners. Somewhere on the internet someone was selling wheelsets that were 1100 grams. That's about 500 grams or a lb lighter than most CF deep section wheels. I don't think that they will begin making frames this way since the best frames are already and the lowest limits. Look, Time, Trek and Specialized frames are about as thin as you can get without accidently pushing a thumb though them. You could see steel bikes getting that way too.

On Monday, May 11, 2020 at 2:29:06 PM UTC-7, wrote:
With the FCI's weigh limitations the only reason that the teams are using carbon fiber bikes is because they can be tuned to the size and weight of a rider. You can now get steel and aluminum bikes in at the weight limit so why no steel bikes? Steel bike manufacturers are all too small and they cannot sponsor race teams or you would see steel bikes quite a bit because they are more reliable.

Since all of the CF bikes are custom made to the rider they also build them as light as possible. This allows them to bring the weight up to the limit by mounting lead weights under the BB giving the bike a low CG. What that gives you I haven't any idea since the CG is still controlled by the rider's position.

But then I also had the idea that a lb or two difference in a bike wouldn't make a significant difference in a climbing bike and it is remarkable the difference it makes. Probably has something to do with how much weight you can carry in excess to your body weight.

But the inevitable crashes in the pro-peloton break a lot of CF bikes and I think that there is some sort of agreements with the manufacturers and the media not to show these bikes turned to rubble in a crash that would scratch the paint on a steel bike. One of the team mechanics said that they get so many extra bike frames that at the end of the season very often team mechanics will filch the unused ones and pass them off cheaply on eBay as stock bikes. Then they return the used frames back to the factories for analysis I guess and pretend the missing bikes were broken and discarded.

Aluminum bikes are hard to break but they can have fatigue failures which neither CF or steel have. Luckily most aluminum failures are fail-safe. Bending rather than breaking like on a CF bike. On one of the minor peloton crashes it was pretty funny with the teammate standing in between his mates broken frame and the camera. Then when the team car arrived with the new bike it stopped in a position so that when the racer got underway the broken bike was still shielded.

Now I think that over-the-counter CF bikes are very safe these days. It doesn't require a lot of additional material to add a great deal of strength.. And they can use different resins and grades of CF Prepreg up to and including Aerospace grade such is used in commercial airliners. Somewhere on the internet someone was selling wheelsets that were 1100 grams. That's about 500 grams or a lb lighter than most CF deep section wheels. I don't think that they will begin making frames this way since the best frames are already and the lowest limits. Look, Time, Trek and Specialized frames are about as thin as you can get without accidently pushing a thumb though them. You could see steel bikes getting that way too.

Somewhere I read that the Dura Ace manual group is lighter than the Di2. If that is so it can't be by much. The Di2 levers are quite a bit lighter than the manual levers. The manual group has lighter derailleurs front and rear but you also have to have cables. The stainless cables are about the same weight as all of the wiring in the Di2 combined.

By the way, we have had a Japanese invasion of the vocabulary of components and we now longer say "outer cables and inner cables" but cables and casings. I suppose that is more descriptive but it plays hell with my finding components on eBay. I ceased using Amazon when several times they showed "in stock" and then after several days past when it was supposed to be delivered I got an email saying "your part was canceled please reorder". Well, please kiss my".....

The Dura Ace front and rear Di2 derailleurs are measurably lighter than the Ultegra components and that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The weight is in the gear train and the motors and the metal components that make up the cages so how could the difference between plastic frameworks and carbon fiber frameworks be enough to tell holding them in your hands?

In any case the weight differences are very little and after trying Di2 and how well it shifts I have to try the manual shifting. The latest Dura Ace is supposed to have shorter and lighter throws. After returning to riding my Campy 10 speed stuff on the Colnago and Lemond, it was irritating as hell that you could accidently hold the lever over a little and the push button wouldn't reduce you a gear. You can't do that on Shimano top level groups

And getting used to shifting Di2 is pretty quick. I'm still thinking to shift but not a whole lot. The Ultegra shifters work best if you push the buttons on the furthest down section of the button levers so you have to feel for the length of the switch lever.

10 years ago I would have said that the end of technological improvement of bicycles was very near. Now it doesn't seem to have closed very much.

SRAM parts are absolute crap in my view. While the idea of wireless electronic group seems good on the surface that means batteries in each of the parts and some of those batteries are coin cells without a long life. Quality control of bearing surfaces really sucks. And the general design is mechanically poor in my estimation. Why would you use two different size bearings on a crankset? Yeah, yeah, it automatically provides the proper spacing of the cranks but there is certainly other ways to do that and keep identical bearings. The off-side bearing is smaller and of course it wears much faster putting an oval shape on the best of their cranksets off-sides bearing surfaces in less than a year.

Although I've used Campy parts since they first started copying Shimano brifters I have to say that they have always been a lot more art than mechanical design. The metal wearing surfaces have always been too soft and wear rapidly enough that they need replacing far too soon. Their carbon cranks were pretty good design though. Although they looked like they should have been pretty heavy and using a weird cross connection method they were lighter than the FSA carbon cranks which you would expect to be far lighter.

I haven't seen the Campy ESI or whatever its called and I don't particular care to. The sheer expense of it compared to Di2 is enough to turn off John Paul Getty. (Warren Buffet to you kids).

And while I'm thinking my final chapter in bicycles that will last the remainder of my not so long left of life, I get a call from a young friend knowing if I have an old original Campy Record quick release. Are they going backwards?