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Old November 18th 17, 03:03 AM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Andre Jute[_2_]
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Default Opinions of Gates Carbon Drive system?

On Friday, November 17, 2017 at 10:32:59 PM UTC, AMuzi wrote:
On 11/17/2017 3:52 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, November 17, 2017 at 5:38:25 PM UTC, AMuzi wrote:
On 11/17/2017 10:40 AM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Friday, November 17, 2017 at 3:04:17 PM UTC, jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 9:13:13 PM UTC-8, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 4:25:14 PM UTC, wrote:
Sounds like the Gates Drive is a solution to a problem yet to be invented!
Andre Jute
"Because we could." isn't a reason, it's an excuse

Yes, I was thinking the same thing, Andre. So why are some of the bicycle manufacturers using it? What do they gain by making this kind of bike?

Because the people in their target market already have one or more of everything else. With a new product they might catch a few fashion victims, or even many fashion victims, what Duane calls "product differentiation". Lou took one for the team here, but not everyone knows a Lou, and some aren't even smart enough to ask him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...c4&app=desktop

OTOH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWAKtYGJZSM I thought SIS was a joke and step-in pedals, too. You have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Specialized produces a lot of chaff -- but some wheat, too. The problem is early adoption, and after a few product generations, you can tell what is wheat and what is chaff pretty easily. I steered away from buying a replacement Roubaix because I didn't want active suspension, but more importantly because I didn't want to buy into proprietary hub dimensions. It's the proprietary stuff that is a PITA.

-- Jay Beattie.

Not all products that survive are necessarily objectively the best. Vide successive Microsoft operating systems, which currently are crap copies of Apple OS, which in turn was a dead system (the bosses couldn't believe their techs were dumb enough to come up with a user-friendly interface that would them all out of work) which Xerox just gave to Apple. But Bill Gates had three advantages: primacy, massive early adoption because, third, Gates was a brilliant salesman who persuaded IBM to put his OS on their early PC's. Peanuts!

Nobody can accuse Lou or me of being technophobic when we turn thumbs down on a new component either by analysis or by trial. We've served our time in the trenches; check what's on my bike, then check what I've tested and thrown off as inadequate; or check the bikes in Lou's garage. The Gates belt in an automobile is a brilliant problem-solver but on a bicycle it is superfluous to requirements. Notice that the only two people who have actually given the Gates Drive lots of attention, one an engineer, one a premium goods marketer, have not volunteered an opinion on the most important aspect of a multi-million dollar investment: whether the Gates Drive will still be around in ten or twenty years. It's competently engineered, therefore it won't fall flat on its face, which in turn means that psycho-economic factors come into play, including irrationalities like whether its time has arrived as perceptively superior and therefore essential to new elite cyclists who may have an entire

ly
different outlook to those whose cycling gestalt was formed by Peugeot ten-speed racing in the 1970s.

When did you last see a shaft drive bicycle? That one failed in the market, again, recently, this time by inadequate engineering (plastic gears! -- Jesus wept). I predicted that it would happen; it was such an obvious case of the marketing department and the cost-accountants overriding the engineers, not always a bad thing for poorer consumers than the ones I generally appeal to but in this case disastrous. However, a shaft drive light enough and durable enough for bicycles isn't rocket science, so, if a shaft drive is possible, and offers all the advantages of the Gates Drive without requiring a split frame and in addition is aesthetically superior, why don't we see shaft drives buzzing around on all sides?

It is of course possible to apply all the same arguments to the Rohloff hub gearbox, which is a huge success. But, actually, that was off to a slow start, and taken up by the "wrong" market, tourers rather than the intended mud pluggers. It just so happened that the particular wrong guys the first OEM fitter of the Rohloff catered for were opinionformers, and Rohloff was up and away. It's a striking example of what I'm all always trying to explain to that bonehead Krygowski, that the interpretation of random sampling statistics is an art form, not a license to lie. In this case, cyclists, asked in advance, would probably have said overwhelmingly that the Rohloff was surplus to requirements, that derailleurs always did the job adequately, etc, all the familiar arguments. Nobody would have thought of asking Utopia's tiny market what they though: they were guys who bought V12 Mercedes, so entirely out of the target market... That's the sort of irrational chance, though entirely pre

di
ctable to those of us with the right experience and outlook, that I see for the Gates Drive. I admire the Gates management for rolling the dice and not cutting financial corners.

Andre Jute
"I'm not a fashion victim. I just pander to them." -- The late, great Rosser Reeves in private conversation (Mr Reeves was the original model for Vance Packard's meretricious The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit)


One of the best handling, elegant and well built machines I
have ever ridden was a 1913 Pope Columbia shaft drive fixed.
Hugely expensive when new but nicely done; there's no
inherent technical barrier to shaft drive.


Quite. It's just unnecessary, except perhaps in niche markets, as Jay points out.

How much was the Pope shaft drive bike when new?

Andre Jute
So much can be concluded from comparative economics


A quick search or two seems to indicate $180 when typical
annual incomes ranged $500(schoolteacher) to $600(railroad)
and the bulk of period ads show lots of name brand machines
from $15 to $30

Than again that was before the dreaded income tax...
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971


Mmm, about four months of the entire gross pay of a professional man. Even in the days before the government made itself every man's sleeping partner, that was a pretty pricey investment, say at about the level of a Porsche today for a young merchant banker who fancies himself a dashing man around town.

Thanks for that, Andrew. It kept me amused through after-dinner port (Australian Penfolds, the good stuff -- a financier chum I was advising bought a wholesaler for the property value and found a store of ancient cases at the back of the cellar below the warehouse, and I took my fee in kind).

I had an Auburn boattail that I bought for a thousand Rand (about USD2000 at the time) in Johannesburg off the lot of a back street trader on the way to an ice rink in a less salubrious part of town where my girlfriend, a champion skater, went to practice. The thing couldn't make the 100mph promised by the plaque on the dashboard (actually, what it said, was that it was tested at 100.3mph) but I only tried once, since anything over 60mph was dead frightening, it was such an incompetent automobile: zero brakes. Anyhow, this monstrous sports car about twenty years after the Pope bicycle sold new for $995 which proportionately must be around the same comparative fraction of annual income as the Pope.

Andre Jute
Relevance to the thread? Which thread?
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