• The bladed spoke in the Zipp example was a rectangle with semicircular ends, which is probably not such a good shape as the New Aero, although New Aeros look worse than an ellipse to my eye, I'd guess they perform somewhere between an ellipse and a rectangle with rounded corners. I'm pretty sure a true ellipse isn't even the ideal shape*, even for a wire which has biaxial symmetry. It's an area which might yield some more gains for anybody willing to break the hegemony of the CX-Ray, which seems to have captured pretty much all of the aero wheel manufacturers. Since many of those wheels use straight pull hubs of proprietary design, the constraint which moulded the CX-Ray, of passing through flange holes designed for 14g round spokes, looks archaic.

    There is also scope to cut spoke count without losing stiffness with the larger cross section, e.g. RolfPrima use 12 Sapim CX rather than the 16 CX-Rays typical of competing products.

    *For some reason I have it in my head that the ideal leading edge curve is a 5th order Bezier with end points on the line of maximal thickness, which (again something stuck in my brain, but without any clear foundation) is at 1/3rd of the chord from the leading edge

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