On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

Previously I blew it by posting that Cannondale had retained the old geometry for the new 2016 Evo. This had shocked me since I knew they'd hired Damon Rinard, formerly of Cervélo, the pioneer in stack-reach design, something the old Cannondale clearly did not follow with weird kinks and jogs in its stack-reach progression due to odd jumps in seat tube angle as sizes increased. I'd gotten the geometry chart by clicking links on the Cannondale website, but somehow I'd clicked a link for the 2015 geometry starting from the 2016 Evo page. So I'd been too hasty. Well, I was finally pointed to the correct geometry chart. Here's a comparison of old Evo and new Evo: 2015 Evo: And, finally, the 2016 Evo: Here's the stack-reach progression: Plotting stack versus reach shows the design has switched to a stack-reach focus, with continuous small increments in seat tube angle rather than descrete jumps, with a design transitioning from closer to the Trek H2 in sm...

[b]Comment:[/b] The following post is in error. The geometry chart on the Cannondale site is still the 2015 bikes. Bikerumor had an article where they described geometry changes for 2016, including adjustments to stack-reach in small and large sizes, and a general drop in bottom brackets consistent with the trend to wider, deeper tires. I'll post a follow-up post when I get the geometry chart for 2016. Cannondale just announced it's 2016 Evo . There's been a flurry of really attractive new bikes announced this year, including the new Madone 9 from Trek, the incredible Venge ViAS from Specialized, and the new Scott F02 update to the Foil. A common feature of all of these is increased focus on aerodynamics and comfort. Aerodynamics isn't new, with bikes going back to the Kestrel Talon and Cervelo Soloist Carbon examples of carbon frames designed for aerodynamic efficiency. However, the bikes have never been as popular as was predicted because in the end riders lik...

I heard at the Tour of California that the new Cannondale Evo is basically done, and I further read there's a new version of the CAAD10 which will be called the ... drumroll.... CAAD12. So what about the CAAD11? The answer is they're skipping the CAAD11 to make room for that to be used for the lower-level version of the new bike. If it's like the Evo and CAAD10 the two bikes will be very similar except for that the Evo bike is carbon and the CAAD is aluminum. I've ridden very few bikes (I always say I want to test bikes but it's surprisingly hard to make time to do this). The Evo is the 2nd to last bike I've test ridden (the latest was the Parlee ESX, the name supposedly short for "Essex". Yeah. Right). Anyway, Evo was a [i]very[/i] nice bike: the handling was spot-on, it felt good, there seemed to be no penalty for its stiffness, and it went against the fatty tube syndrome which had been in full fashion at the time it came out. Fatty tube is ...

BikeRadar announced that Trek is releasing an aluminum version of their Emonda frame. The frame is listed as 1050 grams unpainted. This is curiously less than the Emonda S series carbon fiber frame, and comparable even to the Emonda SL frame. Here's a blog post where an Emonda SL was weighed at 1040 grams . So only the Emonda SLR is substantially lighter. Adding paint the the Emonda ALA aluminum model would likely increase it to closer to the Emonda S, but brushed Al frames look pretty good. Trek Emonda Al Criterium racers get excited over Al frames because they can be made very stiff and yet there's less concern about crashing them than expensive carbon fiber. And with a bike like the Trek coming in within a pound of the lightest commercially available carbon fiber frames, the weight difference on anything other than extended climbs is almost trivial. Indeed the Cannondale CAAD-10 has such a dedicated following that Cannondale sells it with near-top-end components...

On a recent ride, I found a shop local to the day job, Cupertino Cycles, had a Cervelo Demo R5. Cool! Since reading the RCa White Paper, I've always wanted to try one. Indeed, I've never ridden any of the Cervelo R-series. Recall, perhaps, the Peloton magazine review of the RCa , the prototype which led to the present R5: There is a fury to the way the bike reacts to power -- it leaps from under you, but the feeling continues beyond the initial acceleration. Each pedal stroke delivers a new surge forward. Who wouldn't want to ride this? Deal is the Cervelo geometry is, as I've described, a bit tall. So it isn't obvious what frame to try. But is low-stack over-rates? So what I did is I started with the geometry for the Fuji SL/1, which is my race bike (since I've done little racing recently, the poor thing is getting neglected). I started with the geometry of the size small, which I ride. I use a +6 degree 11 cm stem at present (I used to use a ...

More bikes added to the stack-reach plot I showed last time. It's tempting to add more and more but I run out of colors, and humans have only 3 color receptors so there's contrast only between so many... Again the mostly vertical blue lines indicate points which can be matched to fit with the same stem but with more spacers on the lower stack, longer reach frame. Spacers reduce reach and increase stack. I additionally added mostly horizontal blue lines, which are spaced by 1 cm spacer height apart, again assuming a 73 degree head tube. These lines would correspond to points which you could reach with the same spacer height, but different length of 0 degree stem. Of course stems aren't typically 0 degrees 6 degrees, 10 degrees, and 17 degrees are popular, and these can be flipped positive or negative. But the spacing between these lines is the key point. For small riders, Cervelo and Swift rule, Swift providing less stack, the Cervelo geometry at this size only rela...