You are reading a single comment by @ffm and its replies. Click here to read the full conversation.
  • This thread is both very interesting and really frustrating. I'm totally in favour of general arsing about with mechanical things because quite often the solution (or part of the solution) to a genuine problem is found in the tinkerings of someone decades before. So this may be the solution to a real problem down the line (although there's no problem it solves right now). My beef with this is that nothing has actually been solved in terms of the way the bike rides. 4 years ago, this claim was made:

    My explanation is simple and Ive stated it some times now I think: After some thorough research I have found a way to compensate and neutralize the camber thrust force of angled wheels on a bicycle.

    I wont repeat it again cause its becoming ridiculous....

    ...but absolutely no evidence has been given that this is the case. As @mdcc_tester has pointed out it's perfectly possible to ride a bike with canted wheels no-hands. I can back this up because I recently discovered that I'd been riding for 3 years on a front wheel that didn't locate properly into the fork ends and so was canted by at least 5mm at the top. I could ride it no-hands but always felt like I had to lean slightly; essentially what I was doing was to lean the frame out-of-vertical so that the front wheel was vertical to eliminate camber steer. I think this is what all the demonstration videos/photos actually show i.e., that any decent rider can compensate for canted wheels by un-canting them by canting the frame instead. This is ergonomically horrible, because you have to carry your weight off-centre relative to the frame, so it may well cause problems for your lower back (and knees, because you aren't pedalling straight up and down).

    It's pretty obvious from the pictures of the bike that the geometry is not vastly different from normal, so the "special geometry" (if it exists) therefore presumably entails some pretty precision production of the fork/nork and dishing of the wheel to get the contact patch right, which may well counteract any manufacturing simplification. In addition a large number of problems have been created (including asymmetrical tyre wear, difficult mounting of brakes/racks/mudguards) to "open up the design space" in some way that doesn't seem to be any better than a normal "lefty" fork. As such, the whole thing just smacks of rather pointless self-promotion.

About

Avatar for ffm @ffm started