: MTB Misinformation

By: g | No Comments » |

I am a little chuffed today as a project that has taken us something in the vicinity of 8 months or so now moves to the next stage, as the factory prepares to quote for the production of two of the key 2011 Mountain Cycle frames.

It’s been a lot of work, a lot of money but the end results, or those so far, are pretty damn cool; at least everyone so far seems to think so. But what is a little saddening is that despite the fact that the head engineer is responsible for some of the most renowned bikes on the market today, we all know that people will question what we have done, not because they know different but because they have consistently been fed a load misinformation, masked thinly as fact, by marketing departments over the years. So thorough has this information been that I would hazard a guess that that an entire swag of today’s mountain bikers don’t actually understand why their bike stays upright, or at least not in a real world sense.

As part of the line launch, a new site is being designed for Mountain Cycle and a key component of this will be a section dedicated to explaining the dynamics and structure of bicycles, or pretty much any two wheeled vehicle. Putting the section together has been a re-education for me, as I have not studied these texts in detail for quite a few years, so creating it has been a refresher course in dynamics – something I have not looked at since my days obsessing over motos in Italy. The end goal though is to create a completely neutral presentation of the information, distilled from a number of texts and keeping to the ‘real’ physics, not some imagined ‘marketing dynamics’. I’ll give all the sources and associated ISBN’s so people can go look it up for themselves.

After I completed the first draft, I handed it over to Mr. X, our engineer just to make sure I was not off the mark and luckily I have not been. What is most striking though is how it belittles so many of the claims touted as fact in order to sell new bikes. As I switched between texts and broke the, often complex, information down into something that is easy to read, it became very clear that claims made by some as ‘fact’ is nothing more than sham. It’s not that I have found some holy grail, far from it, it’s more that the claims made by some that seemingly now have become ‘lore’ simply defy the laws of physics. It reminds me of a conversation I had with an ‘informed’ and oten published mountain biker years back, who point blank refused to accept the principle of counter steer, the most basic of the physics forces that affect a bike. He had been told otherwise by someone in the ‘industry’, so how could I be right? I have an equation somewhere that says why but that’s not the point. Marketing hype overruled the laws of physics.

It’s all a little alarming.

I am not going to ‘publish’ the info I’ve compiled just yet, that’s due in September. But the next time you read an advert that makes claims about suspension, braking, whatever, have a good long think about it – if what they are telling you sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

g

 

Share the love...?



Tweet

Leave a Reply...

You must be logged in to post a comment.