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

A problem with my Interbike experience is I didn't adequately prepare. In retrospect, I should have made a list of must-see booths and made sure I'd tagged all of those. I tried to do a comprehensive scan of the floor, but while this was possible on the ground floor where the booths were laid out in a fairly regular fashion, on the upper floor it was more of a maze, and attempts to systematically search the floor tended to quickly degrade into a random walk. I wanted to see Parlee and they weren't listed. Their new Z0 looks really nice. It turns out they were there, but piggy-backing on the Enve booth, which I also would have visited but simply missed. I really wanted to meet Jason of Fairwheel Bikes. They used to be a regular, indeed a highlight, of Interbike with their project bikes proving that the little guy can nevertheless impress. In cooperation with Brent/Bre Ruegamer they produced some truly impressive weight-weenie specials. But this year Freewheel didn...

In addition to equipment, there were service providers at Interbike. Here's a few which caught my attention. The Guru bike fit rig. First, bike fitting. The news was that Specialized bought Retul, then in return Cannondale bought Guru. I stopped by Guru's booth to see if they were dropping their bike line, including the Guru Photon, which at one point was my dream bike (until I started reading reports of them breaking). Guru had some slick software which took contact points and referenced them to geometry from a range of commercially available stock frames. This seemed nice because a rider who was considering custom geometry could select from a stock frame which came close to "ideal", whatever that is. Different brands follow different trajectories through fit space. For example, considering just stack and reach, at a given stack different bike brands will have different reach values. And when you consider seat tube angle, head tube angle, bottom bracket ...

There were plenty of trainers to catch the attention. So many, in fact, that I found myself who buys these things. Riding an indoor trainer is something I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to. I admit part of this may be that I don't have an optimized set-up, with preferably a heavy-duty fan and direct access to fresh, cool outdoor air. But a big part of it is I'm so spoiled: living in the San Francisco Bay area means access to world-class cycling routes. When the weather isn't to my liking, I switch to running. But for many people, a trainer is the only way they're going to get the experience of climbing 1st category climbs, or riding without the interruption of traffic signals or heavy traffic. For these poor, wretched souls, being able to escape the drudgery of riding in a small room without stimulation may be worth the considerable expense of some of the latest virtual-reality units. The first such trainer in my experience was Computrainer. They...

My last post was of racing bikes. The bikes I'll describe here deviate from main-stream racing machines, although obviously any bike can be raced, and one here is even for a particular type of race ("gravel race"). Ritchey Tandem Breakaway Ritchey showed the tandem Breakaway frame they'd showed at NAHBS this February. There was finally a formal promise it was going into production, although they were "still working on pricing". I think the Ritchey bikes all look awesome. This is the only stock tandem I've seen which I thought looked really good. Key question is whether we'd choose to travel with it. Certainly the Breakaway boxes would facilitate transport, but packing and unpacking Breakaways is a time-consuming process, not one for a few hours drive to a century or double. Velo Orange touring bike Velo Orange had a very nice touring bike, something which would have been nicely at home at NAHBS if the frame had been custom. I asked abo...

This being Interbike and all, I was surprised by the relative lack of, well, bikes. There were bikes, of course, but not nearly to the level as the North American Handbuilt Bike Show, a personal favorite. But to be fair I missed the far better forum for bicycles at Interbike, which is the outdoor demo. We've hit a saturation level in carbon fiber technology, where a light carbon frame is a commody produced in bulk quantities in Taiwan, so the sight of a carbon frame barely draws attention. Hey -- is that a new Bonk Breaker flavor? I'll come back to this bike later.... maybe. Comments on some of what I saw, starting with pro bikes. Peter Sagan's very cool Cannondale Evo Two bikes which drew my attention were the bikes in the SRAM booth. Peter Sagan's Cannondale Evo was really nice. Notable was that SRAM showed it with its competitor SRM power-measuring crank; SRAM bought Quarq and so was promoting that. But hats off to SRAM for having the confidence and mat...

Another Interbike theme was food. After flying in from San Francisco, having munched on some raw food bars from my back pack, I planned to invest my lunch calories in food samples, which are plentiful. Powerbar was there with it's high protein bars and a new flask containing fruit mash. I stay clear of protein bars containing isolated soy protein, since I don't digest it well, but I tried the mush. It reminded me of my days eating Gerber's baby food. Actually, I don't remember those days, but it reminded me of baby food anyway. Indeed I've heard of ultra-endurance riders preferring baby food on their rides, so the new Powerbar product has precedent. But I'd rather just eat fruit. They also had gel blocks. Clif was there in force, with Clif Bars, Luna Bars, their granola bars, and their relatively new Lara Bar rip-off. The Lara Bar varient was good, a lot like Lara Bars. Clif Bars and Luna Bars, like Power Bars, are made with soy protein isolate (proba...

After I commented on the cleverness of the Da Vinci tandem drivetrain, the guy manning the booth told me "we've been here 17 years in a row". I responded, "but this is my first time here." So this may not be new, and I've likely seen it before @ NAHBS, but in any case I considered it cool. The goal is to allow the stoker to pedal independently of the captain, independently coasting, although still constrained to the same cadence. A side effect of this is the pedals can come out of synchronization, although the stoker could time reinitiation of pedaling to synchronize as desired. Despite their longevity they don't seem to have caught on, as most tandem riders seem content to remain locked together with a fixed timing chain. Da Vinci tandem drivetrain Da Vinci drivetrain, stoker close-up Another curious drivetrain was the " string bike ". This was quite remarkable, converting a circular motion on the pedals to a piston-like motion of ...

Another big theme of my one-day Interbike experiene was drivetrains. First, shifting... Shimano had a big booth and supposedly they showed a new electronic shifting system. I missed that as, I admit, I am no Shimano fan and didn't spend much time there. I did try the new Dura-Ace 9000 shifters and these had a very nice shifting action. But then all the big three have a very nice shifting action. At the Campagnolo booth my focus was on their EPS electronic shifting system. They had the system set up on a Pinarello bike on a trainer. In retrospect I regret not having tried out their mechanical shifters as well, but Vegas-and-back in a day makes for a tiring day and I wasn't 100%. In any case, the EPS shifting nicely on the test bike, and I had no problem adapting to their shifter location. However, it seemed a bit artificial to me, designed for hands familiar with their mechanical shifting rather than optimized specificially for the electronic shifters. Again, I was ne...

I had three encounters with pedals at Interbike 2012. I'll review them in order of interest. Least interesting by far was Speedplay. I didn't see anything there, other than the Syzr off-road pedal which was at the show last year . Indeed, this pedal was shown in a different form as far back as 2009 ("almost ready for production"): that's four Interbikes. Yet to my amazement someone at the Speedplay booth still talking about it not being ready yet for production. I remember doing a group ride in San Diego 1990 or 1991 where I guy I don't know who called himself Richard talked about his new pedal prototype which he was going to take into production and I laughed: the pedal market was already saturated with big hitters like Look, Shimano, Time. How was some guy in San Diego going to compete with them? So no criticism of Mr. Bryne and company, but I find the ongoing delay curious. Sometimes, it seems, it's easier for a little guy working in a machin...

I was at Interbike for the first time this year, and a big trend was crank arm-based power meters. There were at least three there: Rotor Power, Pioneer, and StagesOne. The fundamental physics behind each of these three units is the same: to propel the bike force is transmitted via a mechanical path: pedal body to pedal spindle to crank arm to (left side only) bottom bracket spindle to spider to chainring to chain to cassette to free hub body to spokes to rim to tires to road. You can in theory extract propulsive torque anywhere along this path, and when combined with rate of rotation, convert the torque into power. In the case of the crank arm-based models, torque applied to the crank arm bends it, a bending moment proportional to the torque. To decent approximation the bending is proportional to the moment, and is thus proportional to the torque, so if you can measure bending then with suitable calibration (for example, hanging a known mass from a pedal orientated horizontally) ...

Today I checked out A Ruota Libera, a handbuilt bicycle show in San Francisco. Unlike the North American Handbuilt Bicycle Show, which was in Austin this year, which is held in a large convention center, the San Francisco show was a modest affair held in a medium-sized pizzeria. Indeed most of the room was taken up by the line for free pizza. Despite this, I managed to see some bikes. First up: a shout of "hi, Bruce!" had me look up to see a guy with a "Bruce Gordon" badge. Bruce Gordon, a legend of frame building, was standing next to his carbon fiber randonneur bike. Ti lugs, carbon tubes, carbon fenders, and a custom Ti front rack were topped off with SRAM Red components. The bike had been featured in the Autumn 2010 Bicycle Quarterly. The Ti lugs were masterful work: solid Ti had been machined down to thin lugs, with the Ti chips recycled. I'm not a big lug fan, but these were really impressive. Then across the pizza line from Bruce Gordo...