MetriGear Vector in CyclingNews Readers' Poll

It's been awhile since I mentioned the Metrigear Vector; I've been interested lately in solving the more fundamental issues of how fluctuations in speed, wind speed, and road grade affect power. Indeed, I fear that I may have made an error in my analysis of grade fluctuations. But I'm still checking over these calculations, so back to the Metrigear Vector for now.

First, congratulations to Metrigear for getting the Vector nominated as one of candidates for "best new product" in the 2009 CyclingNews reader poll! And they clearly contributed to the nomination of "Power Meters" in the nomination for "best tech innovation". Now I need to come clean here. I didn't vote for it in either category. Well, for "best new product", it's not a product until the blue tape is retired.


And for tech innovation power meters have been around for a long time, and there continues to be incremental improvement. And while the Vector promises to take a major step forward (or perhaps back to 1992?) with its focus on force measurement, that's not demonstrated yet. So I'm all over it for the 2010 poll, but not quite yet.

Instead I voted for SRAM XX for the product and "electronic shifting" for the tech innovation. Love it or leave it, and I choose the latter, you've got to admire the engineering of Di2.

So I'm looking forward to 2010 as being the year where Metrigear takes the CyclingNews Poll. However, Vector winning CyclingNews best product for 2009 is a bit like Obama winning the Peace Prize in 2009.

Next time I'll look at some data just posted to the MetriGear blog.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more