Slack Spokes Cause Poor Steering

On Friday, July 12, 2019 at 1:39:21 PM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Friday, July 12, 2019 at 10:47:25 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, July 12, 2019 at 9:53:07 AM UTC-7, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Thursday, July 11, 2019 at 6:39:06 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, July 7, 2019 at 12:51:05 AM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
These rims are so mechanically strong that they cannot be flexed so the only thing that it can be is the less tight spokes.

I'd say that evenness of tension in a wheel is more important for accurate steering and resistance to handling challenges than outright tension, but that doesn't mean that a certain minimum tension is not hugely desirable, in fact essential to a correctly responding wheel.

I can't say I take kindly to the implication by ticket-punched "engineers" that an unevenly slack set of spokes won't change the distance between the driven or steering hub and the contact patch, both items which will make for uncertain steering. I suggest that the clowns who're propelling themselves down the dead-end of an absolutely indefensible theory check their instinct to hound Tom Kunick and set their brains free to think the subject out before they start shouting "Wrong, wrong, wrong, because it is Tom who says it."

The correct response of the tyre in drive and roadholding, and particularly beyond the limits of roadholding where handling questions become important, in its design assumes a stiff wheel, and in practice suffers if the wheel is not stiffly built.

Handling is what happens when the bike runs out of roadholding either by pilot error or through road conditions. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, the cyclist's ability to save himself and his bicycle when adverse conditions are encountered. If your wheels deliver unexpected inputs because they aren't stiff enough (i.e. indifferent or neutral to tyre inputs), the cyclist's opportunity to effect a handling save decreases.

Slack spokes are simply dangerous unless the cyclist crawls along like the proverbial little old lady who rode her bike only to church on Sundays. It's dumb for anyone to gainsay such an obvious truth, and doubly dumb for a ticket-punched "engineer" looking to embarrass Tom.

Andre Jute
Hey, Jumbo, come back; I retract everything I ever said about Timoshenko

I found that I was totally unable to ride above 32 mph yesterday without the wheels taking a flyer that was difficult to control on a somewhat crowded road. At 36 the bike was almost uncontrollable and slowing to 32 brought it into the realm of being able to keep it in the bike lane.

And this set are the one's I've tightened to the limit. The spokes are simply too long to bring them up to the correct tension.

Do you mean you bottomed-out the threaded portion of the spoke? What is the tension reading? If its below 100kfg, try throwing in some washers or getting shorter spokes.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I have no idea what happened to my tensiometer. And they aren't really needed anyway since all you need is a trained ear and the ability to strike the spoke with your key and listen to the tone.

A couple of the spokes are bottomed out in the thread. That means that you can't make the others tighter and maintain a true and round wheel.

You probably have a wavy spoke bed from a ****ty lay-up which means you have an optimal spoke length that varies by hole. You will need shorter spokes or washers for some holes to get all the spokes equal tension. Testing tension by tone is O.K. for balancing, but telling absolute tension from tone alone would take the Muzi-formula and an oscilloscope. Might as well spend the money on a tensiometer.

OTOH, if the spokes feel super tight, then they are. I use my tensiometer to avoid over-tension and cracking spoke holes and generally wish that I could make the wheel tighter like back in the olden days.

-- Jay Beattie.