David Singlespeed Unrau

How geeky. Updates to some of the links and catagories while having breakfast in bed this morning. Now, off to the shop to get some carbon frames finished for the bike show.

Don’t expect many updates over the next little while.  It’s crunch time to get some bikes ready for the Toronto International Bike Show coming up March 2-4.  Try to make it to the show and check it out.  We’re planning to have some gorgeous bikes on display.  I’m in at work all weekend getting some full carbon road frames ready for the show.  On a different note, had lunch at King Tin Seafood on King at University – pretty good Dim Sum for this neck of the woods.

I’ve just been dredging through my various biking related links, and I’m getting depressed by all the web articles on various computer simulations I’m finding – like this article on frame strain energy, and this article on wheel deformations. and articles like this on frame stiffness. As an aerospace engineer that has used computer simulations and experimental setups to analyse a thing or two over the years – here is some advice: Don’t have any faith in a computer simulation unless you can use it to predict something you then measure in the lab. Don’t have any faith in something you can measure in the lab unless you can observe it in the world. This is called VALIDATION. So, if you want to conclude something about spoke tensions in a wheel, get out the tensiometer and grab yourself a bike wheel, as this is likely to work a good deal better than your computer. Experimentation is important, but without validation, you’re just guessing.

I’ve added a section for my bikes. I have quite a few, so its going to need a whole section. It’ll take a while to clean up some photos and get things posted, so it’s definitely going to be a work in progress for a while. Here is a sneak peak at my ‘winter’ bike:

The winter is in parenthesis, as after getting it built up and seeing how pretty it is, I haven’t been able to face bringing it out into the salt…