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!

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

I've never actually ridden a 40k TT and don't really feel like making a habit of it, but I do spend a lot more time on a bike than I do in a wind tunnel, as do most of us.  To tell someone that this piece of equipment saves some number of seconds in a 40k does a worse job of translating relevance to the rider than the wind tunnel does to the real world.  "What does this mean in a crit, or a road race?" That's what most people want to know.  The germ of the following idea started on the third stage at the Killington Road Race last spring.  I'll spare you too many details but there were a lot of times that day when I felt like I was going much faster than I was going hard, so without actually having the cogent concept formed, I started trying to identify times where "the fast" exceeded "the WATTS."  Having been on the hunt for this for a good long while without ever being able to articulate it beyond thinking about "moments of free speed," it hit me during last weekend's race.  And now I am going to use a cheap literary technique that Mike and I criticize our favorite poorly written blog about how well the authors write about cycling for using all the time: the overly dramatic one sentence paragraph.

The way to think about advantages you get from aero gear or light gear or any kind of gear advantage is to think of it in terms of the number of matches it saves you. 

When you hold huge speed through a close turn because your frame is tight, your wheels are fast and you can stay in the saddle and chill through the exit when other guys need to stand and hammer to nail the gap shut, you've saved a match.  When you jump off the front just at that moment when the pack is ready to throttle back from "gone to plaid" speed to "will you guys please chill the f out" pace and hold free speed long enough to let you get an instagap and settle into the long torture, that's a big match you've saved.  When your wheels spin up instantly when that skinny f--k who's been turning the screw all day goes on the climb and you latch right to him like tp on the heel of a shoe, that's a huge match saved.  There aren't any matches getting saved at the end of the race, so that still needs to be measured in a different way - normally positioning and WATTS (capitalizing PRO serves the opposite purpose from the intended, but capitalizing WATTS is hip).

So, Mr Smart Guy, what does this mean?  Maybe I will build a chart or a graph, or a chart with a graph.  Until I build such a graph, words will have to do.  For me, I seem to save a lot of matches with RFSW50s.  I love those wheels because they corner like they should be illegal, they hold speed well, they're light enough so that my meager snap gets them going, you can roll a tight paceline in them in anything shy of a hurricane, and they just seem fast for me.  58s are pretty good in this regard, too.  There's some overlap between 50s and 58s.  If I didn't look forward to ripping the road tires off sometime in August and putting CX tires on, I'd probably go with 58s but 50s are a better go for cross.  If you are constantly looking for more SNAP, then 38s will save a lot of matches.  They go, and go, and go again, but then you're giving up something when you get to warp speed and want to stay there.  85s, well, a lot of the people for whom those are the right wheels HAVE done a 40k TT and might be looking forward to their next one and have no need to translate to anything other than seconds per 40k. 

Next time I will tell you a funny joke, discuss why I think light weight is the underappreciated red-headed stepchild in the world of quantified gains, and tell you the phrase that made me absolutely crack up when I should have been throwing up during my last race. 

Baseball is another fist bump sport, where the gesture is employed not just for when someone hits a home run, but also for when someone scores a run or even hits a sacrifice fly and advances a runner from 2nd to 3rd. Curiously, fist bumps appear to be reserved for offense. Nobody fist bumps the pitcher after a strikeout, and even if he Ks the entire inning he doesn't get the fist bump - just a pat on the ass with someone's glove. 

You'd think volleyball would be a fist bump sport too, but it may be that the occasions for congratulations are too frequent. High fives are the gesture of choice here, possibly used because most points are scored by someone leaping and then high fiving the crap out of the ball. The gesture is used at every point and side out, and distributed among the entire team, not just the person who made the last touch. 

Sports with less frequent scores - like soccer, football and hockey - transcend fist bumps and high fives and go all the way to hugs. Scoring in these sports is a big deal. If a hockey goal were greeted with a mere fist bump, it would probably offend the competition (and most likely only happen if it were the 9th or 10th goal in the game). 

In almost all of these sports though, scores that win games receive a special treatment - the victory salute, which of course we cyclists are famiar with. We throw hands, while soccer players slide onto their knees and rip off their jerseys, hockey players pile on top of the unfortunate hero, and football players embarass themselves and their sponsors with a preconceived dance. 

Photo by Fotoreporter SirottiWhat's unique about cycling is that despite being a team sport, we have no occasion for the high fives or fist bumps that show (and create) camaraderie during the event. These little victories - the wins within each game - are what build team spirit. Even if your kid's lacross team gets spanked 8-2, at that 2 points they feel like a winning team. There is really no equivalent in cycling. Sure you can win a preme, but who on your team has ever given you a fist bump for that? It doesn't bring the team any closer to the overall win, in the same way scoring a goal or hitting a sac fly does. It just puts an XL pair of dayglow yellow socks in your pocket. Victory celebrations are reserved for victories, and a lot of teams can go a whole season without cause for one. 

My wife remarked to me the other day that there's something about bike racers that has to be very similar. Despite all the ways we're different, we all selected a sport defined by its suffering, and have a self-sacrifical approach to team objectives that's unique from anything she's ever seen. "I could pick any two of you and send you on vacation together and you'd probably have a great time," she said. Well yeah, if we could bring our bikes. 

I got a little nostalgic for the traditional team sports I played in high school when I watched my son play lacrosse. But then I realized that it wasn't the team spirit I was missing. It was the celebrations. And it wasn't nostalgia I was feeling, but hunger. My wife was right. We racers are all similar. It's not that we want to suffer - what we all want is to win. It's just that the only way to get there is through the (peaks and) valleys of the shadow of death. Unlike most other sports' athletes, we'd probably be on that road anyway. 

Race Smart. Hell, race stupid. Just race. 

The first of those three steps though proved to be a fatass stumbling block. We knew the wider rims would be heavier - how could they not be? But we were expecting maybe 20g of extra weight per rim, which is easily justified by the added width. Yeah you'd have a slightly heavier wheel, but they'd still come in at 410g per rim, which is incredibly light given the 38s' stiffness (increased with the added width), and still builds up into a wheelset a shade over 1400g. 20g extra per rim is easily justified by the added stiffness and road feel from wider rims. It's a no-brainer, even for guys like me and Dave, who deliberate incessantly over the product portfolio.

Only when I got them on the scale they weren't 20g heavier. They were 80g heavier. Per rim. They came in at 470g. I realize that's still lighter than the 500g Zipp 303 Firecrest Clinchers, but it's 80g of rotating weight heavier than our current 38s - all for an extra 2mm of width. Dave and I reeled, steadied ourselves, then huddled up. Here's the gist of what we concluded:

• 470g is a lot of weight for a rim that is not an aero depth. Lots of brands will call rims between 27mm and 45mm "semi-aero". That's like being semi-pregnant, and Dave throws the BS flag on it. At 38mm deep, we don't claim that our RFSC rims are aero, semi-aero, mock-aero or aeroesque. The advantage of the extra depth is principally that it builds into a stiffer rim that requires fewer spokes than alloy, and is incredibly light. Add an extra 80g and you've still got a stiff rim with fewer spokes, but you've given up the light weight. 
• So what if Zipp 303s are still heavier? My hat is off to Zipp. They have done a remarkable turn of work convincing people that whatever shape they're marketing this year is the most slippery rim design ever possible, and even at shallow depths and slow speeds, the aero benefits nevertheless remain readily apparent. Their story is aero aero aero, which makes it easy to obscure the actual rim weight (which they don't publish on their site, though Wheelbuilder does on theirs). Because of their aero focus, Zipp doesn't have to sell based on weight. The racers who are our customers, however, obsess over weight. I can't fault them - as a racer myself who is particularly parsimonious with his power, weight is a principal consideration of all my product decisions as well.
• So this is how fudge is made, huh? Our current RFSC 38s weigh in around 1370g almost without fail. With 160g more of rim weight, we'd be at 1530g, which is heavier than our RFSC 58s. One way to get that weight down would be to slice out some spokes, but you'll have more luck trying to convince Dave to just sit in for 95% of the race and save himself for the sprint. The only other way to bring the published weight down is to fudge it. It's certainly not an uncommon practice, particularly when you want to hit a psychological target with weight, like 1498g, when you're really 1527g. Publishing a wheelset weight that is under-represented by 20g - 50g certainly boosts sales. Say it's plus or minus 1%-3% and maybe everyone won't notice that they're inthe +3% category, right? We know our customers put their wheels on the scale as soon as they get them, and we know they email us the numbers. We have no interest in selling a wheel that disappoints a customer as soon as he takes it out of the box. Weights vary, but our published weight is our average weight for a wheelset, not the actual weight of the lightest rim in the batch paired with the lightest hub, with spokes cut down by 1mm each to shave a couple more grams.
• How much wider is 2mm? Our current RFSC 38s (and 50s, and 58s, and 85s) are 21mm wide. That's already 2mm wider than the 19mm average width of road rims. So whatever benefits 23s afford, we're already halfway there with our RFSCs. 80g for 4mm of extra width would be a tougher decision. But our RFSCs already ride awesome. 2mm more width would be nice to have, but it's at a trade off we can't countenance.
• I'd race FSW 23s over porked-out 38s. Dave and I both feel this way and ultimately that's what it came down to. Less rotating weight simply feels faster. You jump more quickly and feel more nimble, which ultimately translates into increased confidence when it matters. Would 1480g FSW 23s actually be faster than 1530g RFSC 38s? You got me. But in my mind they would feel faster, and what happens in your brain on game day usually has a bigger impact on your race than what happens in your legs.
• It's not about how much we sell, but what best meets our market's needs. The appeal of 23mm wide rims is so strong right now, we'd probably hit the jackpot with wider RFSC 38s, even at 160g heavier than our current 38s. But we don't think they're a good solution for racers, and we don't think racers would be the people who would buy them. We're a little different from some other brands that focus on moving as many units as possible. Instead, we create a product line that targets a pretty narrow niche (though at 60,000 USAC licenses per year, it's not that narrow), and work to find more people who belong to that niche. We want to be the best solution for racers, which requires us to be single-minded of purpose. 

We were hoping to introduce the 23mm wide RFSC 38s with the current (May 7th) pre-order, but for all these reasons we're not going to go with them. We just don't see them filling a need for our customers because the compromise they require isn't justified by the benefits the new design affords. They're a square peg. If they were lighter (or if they get lighter - these were some of the first demos made available by our supplier) we'll absolutely reconsider.

And it's not like there's anything wrong with our RFSC 38s just the way they are. We still think they're plenty really friggin sweet. 

It turns out that the advice, however sage, was not an original thought by the coach, but rather borrowed from Reggie Jackson, appearing in a Puma magazine ad in 1978 (see right). Which I'm fine with - ideas want to be free for the borrowing, and the ad is an early and exquisite example of content marketing. Plus Reggie Jackson was in 1977 as Philippe Gilbert in 2011, both to his sport and to me. I can't take offense to someone borrowing his quotation any more than I could to someone dropping me on the 1km climb to the finish.  

When we set out, it was to fill what we saw was a vacancy in the industry - the ability to buy a high quality, reliable racing frame from a trusted brand, at a fair price. The model we came up with to strip out as much of the expense as possible was the pre-order model: by pre-selling our entire order of frames before we bought them, we strip out inventory expense, inventory risk and the inevitable discounts and margin erosion that come from having a lot of stuff you need to turn into cash immediately today now. In theory, that's the way our frame business operates.

In practice, however, there is this detail called MOQ, for Minimum Order Quantity. It's what separates the suppliers whose bikes you are happy and confident selling (and racing), from the suppliers giving you a deal that may be too good to be true. Better suppliers want more reliable customers, and the MOQ wards off buyers who aren't serious about a long-term vision in the bike business. It is very easy to find a trading company on Alibaba who will sell you 2 or 6 or 10 frames - enough to paint in different schemes, take pictures of, put on your website and claim - poof - you're a bicycle brand. (Or, more commonly, a "manufacturer.") It's another thing entirely to get them from a supplier you know to be reputable, who does EN testing, navigates patent law and is not just looking forward to their next order, but is looking forward to your next order. Simply, MOQ is a barrier to entry if you want to buy frames or rims or components of known and reliable provenance. 

MOQ is also what - so far - prevents us from executing on our model with complete purity. We did not pre-sell all the frames we needed to in order to hit our MOQ this year (which was higher than last year's MOQ, and is multiples more than 2 or 6 or 10 like you'll find on Alibaba). As a result, we have about 20 frames in inventory. (And by inventory, I actually mean in Queens, NY being loaded on a truck, right now.) We failed. We made a mistake.

Yet like a home run, our mistake is actually a happy accident - for anyone in the market for a frame, at least. It is not easy to find a new standalone carbon fiber racing frame, particularly for under $900. Yet we have some. Us, those pre-order guys who make you buy a bike at the very moment you want to stop thinking about riding for a month, we're the ones who can actually feed the need, and without the months-wait compromise we normally ask customers to make. 

Of course, our model doesn't take kindly to inventory, so our best prices are still reserved for the customers who paid in advance. Still, even at $885 the Wheelhouse Frameset - with frame, fork, headset, headset spacers, compression plug, BB cable guide, seatpost clamp, a couple water bottles and a sleeve of Veloshines - is still the best deal we've seen, and the best price we're - by definition - able to offer.

Honestly, we wish we didn't have any to offer right now, but we do. So if you're in the market, we hope you'll take advantage of our screw-up.

Disc brakes for road are irrelevant to us from a sales perspective until they become legal to race on the road.  We think about it, we try hard to become educated about it, and our wheel business is in a great position to go either way with it, but we aren't looking to press the issue forward or to define the bleeding edge of the state of the art. 

Carbon frame construction was the most recent REALLY profound change in the road bike manufacturing game, and it changed everything.  Among other things, bike manufacture had never been as capital intensive as it became with carbon.  You want to braze up some steel-tubed frames, you need a few hours to make some jigs, buy the tubes and bam you're in the game.  The big barriers to entry were skill, experience and reputation.  In 1992, American bikes (which at that time would have meant actual American-built bikes, even if they said "Huffy" but were built by Serrotta) weren't exactly ruling the Tour de France peloton - they had a small toe hold.  Fast forward 20 years and the only company (off the top of my head, here) that had a bike in the 1992 Tour that has a real shot at having its bike win the Tour this year is Pinarello (Voeckler might slap me with a glove if he were here to do it).  Specialized, Trek, BMC - they might have existed back then, and they might have been getting pretty big, but they were NOTHING like the behemoths they are today. Big disruptions often put new players at the table. 

Do disc brakes look like changing things that much?  Probably not.  They didn't change the pecking order that much in mountain bikes when they took over there.  Even the move from 26" mountain bikes to 29ers, while it's been better or worse for some companies, hasn't caused a wholesale shakeup.  What I expect you will see is companies going in directions where they can differentiate themselves somehow, and staking out that ground.  That's what I see American Classic and Cervelo doing now, per my previous post.  It's funny to me that Scott is the company which has the first world cup race winner on a 650b mountain bike, simply because their 29ers are VERY well thought of, and having a great success for the company.  I guess they aren't waiting around for anyone to move their cheese. 

On the 650b thing, it may have come off as me being anti-650b, which I'm absolutely not.  Honestly, I'm totally ignorant about the bikes, having never ridden one.  The going argument for them seems mostly along the lines of a bike built around 650b wheels fits a range of rider sizes better than either 29 or 26.  Whoever you ask, at 6' I'm personally in the rider height/bike size range where 29ers are thought of as having a decided benefit.  I can tell you that my old hardtail 26" bike beat the living heck out of my back, and I can ride harder, more aggressively, and longer on the 29er and be way better off afterward than I ever was on the 26.  Other people might have the same experience at other sizes - my wife (who's a very very good mountain biker) isn't convinced that she prefers 29er over dual suspension 26".  But she would never use a 26" hardtail, she's watched that movie and hated it.  If the difference between either 26 or 29 and 650b is as profound for a guy who's 5'8" as a 29er is versus a 26 for me, then by all means the 650b needs to be in the picture.  I just suspect that it's not, and wish in any case that gear didn't need to be as specific.  It's a lot more challenging for the world to supply, sell, and buy highly targeted solutions than it is to do one size fits all, but if that's the way it must be, c'est la guerre.  

In any case, our focus is just going to be on sourcing and supplying great options for people to get what they want to use.  We aren't in the game of making a case to tell you what to use - we're editors, not writers.  Whatever twists and turns come up in what equipment looks like and how it works, we'll try to make sense of it from a "what would a racer want to race on" perspective and pursue it from there.