The Wrong Tool For The Job

Well, we've had this year's warped rim incident.  It happened in a century ride, on a hill that the rider described as "incredible.  Long, steep, and windy..."  The rider is a big guy (240 pounds), making his situation a perfect storm of the sort that I described here last year.   The disappointing thing about this is that the rider who had this happened got in touch a few weeks ago to tell us that he loved the wheels, but had popped a tube on a descent and wondered if the 145psi he regularly used was too much pressure.  We reiterated that we recommend no higher than 125psi, that 145 was dangerous, and that we did not recommend carbon clinchers for situations where one might need to control one's speed for long distances. Exactly the kind of situation he was in. 

A lot of companies out there will tell you that carbon clinchers are a great choice in any situation.  It's our firm belief that this has never been the case and that it is not now the case.  Carbon clincher manufacture has improved, as has brake pad compatibility.  Some situations that would have demolished first generation carbon clinchers are well within the envelope now.  As a testament to the strength of our carbon clinchers, consider that the rider who warped his rims had already exploded two tubes on this ride, without damaging the rims.  This is in addition to the tube he'd exploded prior.  So his tubes gave him two very loud (I presume quite literally) and clear warnings, yet he pressed on through.  

The concerning thing for us in not that we now have to make with a new set of rims and build a warranty set.  Yes, we are going to warranty this set, although the absolute disregard for what we thought were pretty customer-centric use and warranty terms and conditions have caused us to modify them (new T&Cs here).  The concerning thing is that by using such the wrong tool for the job, the rider and all of the riders around him are put at serious risk.  

Carbon clinchers are a fantastic tool for a lot of riding.  I am I don't know how many thousand miles into my set, and they have been flawless, and they are currently the only wheels I have to use.  That is the kind of faith we have in our carbon clinchers - they are the only wheels I currently use.  I'm also 165 pounds, don't ride down monster switchback descents in traffic, don't ride my brakes, maintain my brake pads, and generally stay within the use parameters we've always espoused.  Although we really don't recommend it (and have always excluded damage from it), I raced our district's annual "spring classic" - complete with one mile of dirt road per lap, for a total of six miles of dirt road taken at race speed - on RFSC38s last weekend. And I wasn't dicking around at the back of the field either, I made the break and got fifth.  Last night, I took several trips down a hill that's about 1k long, straight and steep, using several different braking techniques.  Normally, you'd get to about 35 on this hill before needing to brake for the light at the bottom.  I held my speed to 20 on one descent, and though the rims were warm to the touch, there was no issue. 

Heat warping does not happen in normal use modes.  It happens when you take the wheels out of the parameters in which they work.  There are few better wheels to use in your typical road race or office park crit than a well built set of carbon clinchers.  As evidenced by prominent rides (notably, Levi's Gran Fondo) preventing their use, there are some situations in which carbon clinchers are the WRONG choice.  Going down what would ordinarily be a fast and challenging descent with 500 or 5000 of your closest friends, some of whol might be a heck of a lot more proficient at going up hills than they are going down them, is the wrong time to be on carbon clinchers. 

Despite quite a bit of marketing to the contrary, this isn't an issue that the expensive brands have solved.  A bit of Google will show you that, and I'll tell you once again that almost exactly one year ago I saw, firsthand, a set of the most heavily marketed carbon clinchers fail due to heat - in exactly the type of conditions where we warn of their deficiency. The specific set of wheels that are more than any other responsible for the decision taken at Levi's Gran Fondo cost well in excess of $2,000.  You can't hide from physics, no matter how big your marketing budget. 

We like our customers, and want them to enjoy cycling and be safe and have stuff that performs well.  It doesn't take a lot of customer education to convince people that, for example, a mountain bike race is the wrong place to use your road bike.  Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit more effort to convince people that carbon clinchers are not a wheelset for every condition - even direct and specific warnings emailed personally go unheeded.  That being the case, we feel it necessary to take a couple of actions.  First, the terms and conditions have been updated.  Second, we will no longer be selling carbon clinchers in spoke counts higher than 20/24.  The world's most powerful sprinters don't need higher spoke counts than that (although they do all seem to prefer 24 spoke wheels), so wheel stiffness is not a concern.  This move is purely to discourage those riders who are bigger than would be adequately served by 20/24 spoke counts to choose wheels other than carbon clinchers.  We will lose sales because of this, we know that.  There are cases in which riders might wind up with the exact same rims we sell, but with higher spoke counts.  We simply feel that this is the reasonable and responsible course of action for us and our customers.  

See you at the office park!

38s, 50s or 58s?

Someone out wheel shopping asks us this question every day. Actually, they usually ask, "Which should I get - RFSC 38s or RFSC 58s?" To which we usually reply, "You know, we also offer RFSC 50s via pre-order, and will begin stocking them in June," hoping to simplify the decision by splitting the difference. Instead, it complicates it.

The answer, of course, is to get the RFSC 38s. They're 1370g for the set, making them our lightest clinchers - ideal for hilly races or crits with a short sharp hill every lap. The low weight comes from the rims, which are only 390g. So not only are you carrying less weight, you're carrying less rotating weight. The 38s accelerate whiplash fast, making them the perfect choice for technical crits where you need to jam out of each corner, or a race where the finish is 200m from the line and the winner is not the one who can go from 32mph to 40mph, but the one who can come out of the corner at 26mph and be the first one up to 34mph. So absolutely get the 38s.

Unless you spend a lot of time with your nose in the wind. If that's your style, definitely go with the RFSC 58s. At 460g, the rims build into a wheelset at about 1525g. They don't spin up as fast as the 38s, but the added depth helps you keep the speed you've generated, making your long attacks more formidable and your rest time rotating through the paceline in the break more fruitful. Oh and for a long sprint that's all about high speed, you'll adore the 58s. Aerodynamic benefit is more evident at high speed so you'll save more watts at 36mph than you will at 32mph. So don't even think about it anymore - get the 58s, for sure.

Except if you like climbing, and crits, and attacking, and sprinting, and accelerating, and conserving energy. Then the 50s are for you. A wheelset weighs in at 1485g, thanks to the 440g rims (about the same weight as Mavic Open Pros). They're not as snappy as the 38s but they're plenty quick. Nor are they as slippery as the 58s, though they have ample speed. They're not as versatile on windy days as the 38s, but are more sprightly on climbs than 58s. So if you do everything - or nothing - well, there is no choice for you except the 50s.

So I guess the answer comes down to who is asking the question, and what qualities of your riding you are trying to either accentuate or mitigate. Ultimately though, they all do everything pretty well so it's not like you're doomed on a solo attack if you ride the 38s, or have no chance on an uphill finish on the 58s. There is no wrong answer. And since every event has a mix of terrain and efforts, I'm not sure there is one that is more right than another either.

So don't over think it and just get whichever you think looks coolest on your bike. 

The Road to Legit

I prattle on to Dave all the time about what I call "the road to legit." Any new brand faces the challenge of establishing itself as at least a reasonable alternative to its entrenched competitors. In order to even consider buying from a new brand, the first threshold it has to clear is that its products are suitable for their intended purpose. After that, a nearly infinite amount of purchase criteria are applied, depending on the customer and the perspective. But without at least inspiring confidence that the brand is on the level and capable of producing what it has claimed it has produced, a brand can't even make it into the choice set - that group of products in every customers' minds from which a purchase decision emerges.

People buy our stuff for different reasons, but nobody would buy any of it if they thought it was crap, no matter how good the deal. It's not crap, by the way. For some of you, hearing me say that and seeing me and Dave and the rest of The November Bicycles Road Trip team back up the claim by racing on our stuff is enough. Whether or not you believe the Wheelhouse is as good a bike as an SL4 or a SuperSix is not as important as realizing that people can race frequently and aggressively on November equipment and not suffer a spontaneous eruption of carbon shards. 

Most people, however, need a little more convincing. And so we find ourselves in the same situation that every other bicycle technology company faces at one point in their career - how to become Legit. To me, a brand is legit when customers have to stop defending their purchase. Yes, we're a good deal, but we haven't progressed very far down to the road to legit if our customers respond to questions about their new bike with, "Oh, November? Yeah, it's some cheap bike I got online. I really wanted a Willier but need to put a new roof on the house instead. Maybe next year." We're happy to have these folks as customers, as part of our objective is to provide an alternative to unaffordable brands. But we'd much rather hear them say, "Oh, November? I was looking at a Willier but honestly couldn't justify the difference in price. The Wheelhouse is a great race bike without all the trappings that push the price up. And that Mike guy is irresistibly handsome."

In cycling, the road to legit almost inevitably travels through pro cycling sponsorship. My belief is that big brands that sponsor pro cycling do so largely to create content and context for the rest of their marketing programs: they get to splash ads in the magazines showing racers winning on their equipment, and can build charity rides, video content and online promotions organized around sponsored riders or the races they're competing in. For smaller brands it's a different story. Lacking the marketing budget to amplify the sponsorship commitment in the same way as bigger competitors, I believe smaller brands typically sponsor pro teams for two reasons: 1) to demonstrate (to consumers and the press) that their products are perfectly suitable for the demands of competition, and b) to get their logo on websites and in magazines without the expense of advertising.

It's a flawed model, of course. While it is true that professional athletes have many more race days per year over much longer and more demanding courses than your local office park crit, they also have the most pampered equipment on the planet, painstakingly maintained by a team of mechanics with a staggering supply of replacement parts at the ready, should any product suggest even a hint of failure. And many of the products the pros use are actually modified versions of what's offered to the public - frames stiffened with extra carbon layup, wheels built with different spokes, derailleurs with modified cages for stiffer shifting. 

You want a real test of a bike's suitability for the rigors of amateur racing? Sponsor a team of flat broke college kids who can't afford to replace a tube without selling a textbook halfway through the semester, or a squad of track racing clydesdales who test a frame's stiffness significantly more than 140-pound Vincenzo Nibali, who is desperately in need of a sandwich. 

Still, there is some validity in the pro sponsorship formula. It's overplayed and hyperbolic, but I do believe that the equipment that pros race on - including what they are paid to race on and supplied at no cost, which is almost everything (more on that next time) - is perfectly suitable for racing. I don't think you can look at results and say that this frame is faster than that one, or these wheels are better because this guy beat the other guy on those wheels which can't therefore be as good. But if you see pros race on something, it's safe to assume that it's capable of being raced on. 

Now part of the reason I believe this is because we believe that the equipment at this level is 98% similar. Our frame may have triangular tubes instead of squoval, and our carbon rims may be a peaked U instead of a blunt U shape. But it's all raceworthy equipment just the same. The challenge new brands face is how to convince a market of that quickly and credibly enough to fuel growth.

The easy thing to do would be to throw a bunch of equipment at a pro team and be done with it. If we did that we'd likely hop in the HOV lane on the road to legit and get there a lot faster. So far though, Dave and I are still recoiling at the idea. The marketing ROI appears promising, but for the reasons I've discussed here we throw the BS flag on the whole practice. It may help us sell a boatload more bikes and wheelsets, but the tacit implications of pro sponsorship compromise our brand integrity. If it turns out that we think the increased sales volume from sponsoring a pro team allows us to improve on our current value proposition - by delivering even higher quality stuff, or even lower costs - we might come around (though if we did, we'd approach it with our trademark candor and skepticism). 

Maybe we're naive. I'm totally fine with that if the alternative is to be seasoned, formaulaic and hackneyed. I just don't think we need to do what everyone else has done in order to get products of exceptional quality and unrivalled value under as many racers' butts as possible. 

Race Smart.

Focus Focus Focus

Say that five times fast!

On a slightly more serious note, focus has been a huge topic in the hallowed halls of the November Service Course and Low Velocity Wind Tunnel lately.  As our business grows, we continually have to tighten up our operations and get more efficient with our time and resources.  As anyone who's ever started a business probably knows all too well, what worked when you were getting "x" orders out per week has a tendency not to work as well when you're putting out "6x" orders per week.  The balance between what you want to be able to do, and what you can reasonably do well, is one that takes discipline to achieve.  For example, we are now big enough that we're building a significant volume of wheels with each of the hubs that we offer.  Each of them offers something that the others don't, and between the lot of them they cover a huge breadth of what anyone could want in hubs.  There are other hubs out there that make compelling cases for themselves, but in order for us to offer the four that we do as well as we can, we need to focus on just those four.  

There was a comment on another company's blog that best illustrates an angle of focus that Mike and I have to be diligent with.  Discussing various products to possibly come from this other company, one guy commented "I'd love to be able to consider a titanium singlespeed 29er from you guys."  We try to be as customer focused as anyone around, but seriously?  Titanium singlespeed 29ers are a niche of a niche of a niche - of a niche - and compared to the size of this niche's market, it's a pretty well served niche.  Consumers have the ability to consider different offerings and choose something that's a darn near exactly perfect match for what they want.  It's not a niche that's served particularly cheaply (titanium's an expensive material and requires great skill and particular working conditions); after all the more specific your requirements, in general the more you're going to pay for them.  It's a blessing and a hard won one at that (for us and this other company and for anyone else) to have developed an audience of people who'd like to buy anything from popsicles to postage stamps from you.  Trust me, when you are building an audience from scratch and someone wants to buy WHATEVER from you, it's flattering and your impulse is to absolutely do it.  But if you aren't in the business of popsicles and postage stamps and not headed toward being so, it's not going to benefit either you or the customer, really.  And so you have to find a way to amicably disappoint the people who want to buy popsicles and postage stamps from you. 

Which segues nicely into announcing that the 29er and TT bike are on indefinite hold.  We're doing well with road and cross bikes, but doing them as well as we want to is pretty demanding.  Supplier management is a constant ongoing thing, and we are striving hard to become an ever more important and significant customer to our suppliers.  In the case of at least one of the above projects, we were going to have a new supplier.   The products and markets for both TT bikes and 29ers have some overlap with the core of what we do, but they both also have a lot of specificity.  We love that people want us to "Novemberize" the 29er and TT markets, but we aren't at the moment capable of doing them in a way that would equate to full scale Novemberization.  The other areas of our business are growing in such a way that they require our full attention. 

Two conversations with friends sort of sum up where we stand right now.  The first, when I was discussing the 29er project with one friend who is both a pretty smart business guy and someone who wants us to have a 29er for him to buy, was him telling me "yeah, it'd be great for me if you guys had a 29er, but to be honest I was blown away that you were able to get the cross bike going so quickly.  Launching products takes A LOT!"  The second is sort of a one liner that my other friend, who's also building his own business, occasionally throw back and forth at one another: "congratulations, you've now graduated to the next set of problems that you'd hoped to have some day!"  Tackling these new, higher rent problems as well as we can takes lots of focus. 

Notes From The Wheelbuilder

Sometimes we don't blog very much, sometimes we have diarrhea of the keyboard.  When I wasn't ignoring our motto (I raced like a gigantic idiot) this weekend, I was putting a bunch of OT into bringing our build queue down to reasonable levels.  Banging wheel builds out one after another, when you are building "the same" wheel over and over but changing variables like spokes and hubs makes small differences obvious. 

My technique for building rear wheels is that I bring all the spokes (both sides) to one level of initial tension.  This is not very much tension at all, basically I turn the nipples until they JUST over the last thread on the spoke.  Then I get the drive side up to nearly full tension, do a quick and dirty true so that I can then get the wheel round, do some horse trading between spokes to get things true and round with balanced tension between spokes, and then tension the non-drive spokes.  This brings the rim into center and allows you to true using primarily the lower tensioned non-drive spokes.  Smaller adjustments at the non-drive side have a greater side to side effect because of the greater bracing angle of the non-drive side, but their lower tension allows very small adjustments, and adjustments made at the non-drive side have a much smaller effect on radial true (roundness) than those made at the drive side. 

The big thing that's critical in that process is accurately estimating what percent of final drive side tension you want to bring those spokes to before you start bringing on the non-drives.  Basically, the longer the spoke, the closer to final value you get.  In an FSW, the centering tension of the non-drive spokes adds so little tension to the drive side that you get pretty much all the way there with the drives before hitting the non-drives.  On an 85, the drive side tensions will rise RAPIDLY with every increase in non-drive tension.  This is all basic geometry and very intuitive but as with most things if you do it again and again and again it becomes like second nature. 

I built with every kind of hub we offer this weekend with the exception of White Industries.  That's not to say that we aren't selling a lot of WI hubs lately because we are selling A LOT of them, there just weren't any in this segement of my queue.  Chris King hubs build stiffer front wheels.  They are a bit heavier than other front hubs but the big diameter, wide set flanges make phenomenally laterally stable builds.  WI have a similar geometry.  In the rear wheels, Powertap classic (current Pro) hubs have the greatest disparity between drive and non-drive tensions.  The deal of fitting those electronics into the hub means that basically you have to have a wide set, large diameter flange on the non-drive.  Novatecs and Kings build similarly in regards to drive to non-drive tensions (non-drive tension is roughly 60% of drive tension).  Kings have a slight edge here and are nice in other regards but Novatecs aren't giving much away on this front. 

One thing I am continually blown away by is how much easier it is to build with silver spokes and nipples as opposed to black.  Black spokes and nipples are painted, and that paint interferes a small but critical amount in the thread interface between them.  It's not something that can't be overcome, but the resolution available with silver will always be that bit better than it is with black.  Even after lubricating the interface between non-drive nipples and rim, and the rim/nipple interface and spoke threads on drive side, the difference remains.  I use Marvel Mystery Oil at all nipple/rim meetings and on the spoke threads at all drive side spokes and all crossed front spokes.  Radial spokes (front and drive side) don't get lube on the threads but get Loc-Tite 290 wicking thread lock installed post build.  The fronts don't really need it from a thread locking perspective but as a corrosion preventive it has some value. 

In any case, silver spokes and nipples turn more smoothly, which gives me greater resolution for small adjustments.  In the case of silver CX Rays, I've got no problem making a 1/12th of a turn adjustment - the bladed spoke basically eliminates the chance of windup.  I suspect a lot of wheelbuilders prefer bladed spokes for this reason - even if some of the bladed spokes out there offer some pretty profound disadvantages in terms of weight and cross wind profile - CX Rays are the only ones we use.  DT Aerolites are also good they are just ridiculously expensive (even over and above CX Rays).  I built a set of 85s yesterday where I was just blown away by how precise it all was, and how pleasant it was to work with.  The set of 58s I built with black CX Rays just after wound up as a set I proudly sign my name to, but if I had to enter the World Championships of wheel building I'd instantly go to silver CX Rays.  Silver Lasers are moderately easier to build with than black CX Rays, you just have to be VERY diligent about destressing them. 

As I was thinking about this, in the back of my mind I was thinking about a lot of "bikes of the pros" features on sites and in mags, and how you almost always see pro bikes with silver spokes.  It's a notable thing, and I bet it's got at least some scintilla of input from the wheelbuilders in there - "look, dude, we're going to be able to do a better job more efficiently if we use silver." 

Just a few thoughts.  Back to the pile.