Nobody knows about RR

Neil Brooks writes:

I thought that makers of bicycle tires would have experimentally or
scientifically based knowledge as a foundation of their
production.

I jumped in late and, unfortunately, haven't caught this thread in
its entirety, so forgive me if this has already been posted.

Interesting article:

Adobe document p.8
Magazine p.14

http://www.ihpva.org/HParchive/PDF/hp50-2000.pdf

Along with its testing and conclusions, it makes reference to the
following sources (which I haven't attempted to locate) of RR test
data:

Cycling Plus, issue 62 (Feb. ?97) ?Winter tyres?; Cycling Plus, issue
68 (Mid-summer ?97) ?Road tyres?; Cycling Plus, issue 81 (Aug ?98)
?Time-trial tyres?; Total Bike, issue 6 (Oct ?97) ?MTB tyres?; and
BHPC Newsletter, issue 58, ?MTB tyres?.

The section on rolling resistance (pp 14) has a disconcerting flavor
to it in two ways. First the author attempts to establish credibility
through his years as an engineer and long association with recumbents.
Then the test method is explained showing that no direct measurements
of drag were used but rather the derivation of drag by differentiation
of rolling speed.

http://www.terrymorse.com/bike/imgs/rolres.gif

Printing a table of myriad numbers may be a good archive but such data
is better displayed in curves and preferably curves made of more than
one data point. What we have in the IHPVA report is none of that. In
fact the information shown in the RR graphs above of decades ago is not
visible in these data.

The article, "On the Efficiency of Bicycle Chain Drives" is
particularly interesting as well.

I don't see anything interesting in that piece because the
measurements are not normalized to be comparable. Behind all this
testing is the simple concept that chain efficiency depends on
articulation angle for one cycle under load, nothing less. What
conclusions are we to draw from these measurements and to what good can
they be used?

I see this a s a major snow-job that obscures the essence to what the
test titles allude.

Jobst Brandt