So why so quiet?  Well, there's a lot going on.  The Rail pre-order is steamrolling along until Friday, and we are continually working with the five and change pre-production sets we've got on hand. We're getting closer to announcing our next frame, making sure everything's taken care of with our European Rail partner, and starting a research project that we can't even believe we somehow got ourselves into.  Plus, if you didn't notice it's the heart of racing season, so I've been busy getting throttled in my first season of mountain biking as a Cat 1 (it's a rapid and hostile environment, but when I don't flat I'm doing just fine, thanks).  The focus shifts to road this weekend, although the course and weather forecast seem to indicate that the transition won't be a clean one - there will be mud. 

The majority of my time has been spent getting pre-production Rails built up, tuning up our wheelbuilding team, and making sure every last detail on the Rail is as it should be.  Since I don't personally have the capacity to build all of the Rails that we're selling (at least if people want to use them this year), we've been developing a small team of builders.  I'm very excited with where we stand on this, from a production point of view but primarily from a quality perspective.  Each wheel built of course goes through my stand and I do my worst to it to ensure it's exactly where I want it, and in that process it becomes very evident whether the builder really cared about the build.  Building skills I can teach, commitment I can't. 

It's been windy lately around here, usually windy enough that you instinctively question whether a 50mm deep rim is the sane choice.  What each and every person who's ridden on a Rail has mentioned as a first impression is how calm they are in wind.  People are freaked out about it, to be blunt.  We knew they'd be good in this regard, we just didn't know how good. 

After some initial head scratching I think the braking performance is officially where we'd aimed for it to be, at least.  I'll admit, until we learned the ideal set up we heard some squeals that would have made a fire truck take notice, but we've got that sorted out now.  Actually coming to a stop was never an issue, it was just how many hundreds of people knew about it.  Now that answer is "no hundreds." (my relief at figuring out the brake issue is a nice double meaning for the title of this post)

Stiffness.  Umm.  These are stiff.  Yes sir.  They track corners exceptionally well, and they absolutely laugh at the though of my meager (although a lot less meager than it used to be, strangely enough - am I seeing an early rush of old man power??) sprints knocking them out of plane.  Quite stiff. 

In the next couple of weeks we'll be sending some wheels out on an impromptu road show to get more complete third party impressions of them, but at this point we feel like we've got the whole nut very very dialed in.  Full steam ahead. 

Tire of choice was a Vittoria Corsa Evo CX, for the primary reason that I'm exceptionally familiar with the tire and wouldn't get any noise from it.  The reason I'm so familiar with it is that it's a tire I really really like.  Normal butyl tube with an 80mm stem.  I used my Wheelhouse, which after two and a half years couldn't be more of a known quantity. 

Time was a bit short since I still had a ton of stuff to do to get ready for the 13 hour mountain bike relay race we were doing on Saturday, fortunately I have a loop nearby where I can quickly get the measure of how a wheel generally behaves.  Doing my opener ride as part of this deal would kill two birds with one stone.  What I learned was that it seemed to handle very very well, seemed stiff, didn't show any weird behavior at all, and it made me excited to race it on Sunday. 

Before Sunday's race there was this small matter of doing nearly 5 hours of singletrack at pop your eyes out (literally - two of us blew out contact lenses) pace.   Consider doing 7 cyclocross races in a day, that's roughly what Saturday was - one heck of an opener workout. 

Off the front about halfway through. Front wheel is a Rail 52, rear is a wide 50 that we've been using as a construction test while waiting for the Rail mold to get up and running.  Picture credit to Daniel Meaurio.

Cursing Mike for telling the internet that I was racing on Sunday, I lined up for the 1/2/3 race at Carl Dolan on Sunday.  Dolan is kind of an egg shaped course, about 2 miles long, with one really fast tight downhill right hand turn and an uphill finish.  A gusty wind had me thinking "oh crap, maybe I should have brought a shallow front wheel?"  An ambulance on the course delaying our start had me thinking "maybe this skinny tire racing isn't all it's cracked up to be?"  I'm always jumpy before the race starts and then settle down as soon as we get going, which we did soon enough. 

I'm very pleased with how the wheel worked.  There was enough wind that it was a top of mind thing at all times in how you positioned yourself, but never once was there the remotest amount of steering feedback from the wheel getting blown around.  I can't say that this wouldn't have been the case with other wheels, but it wasn't with the Rail.  Not the most technically demanding course in the world but the one real turn there is is a tricky one.  I was able to find a sneaky and tight inside line that no one else was using, which helped me to save a lot of hard pedal strokes every time I used it (you couldn't always get to it safely from where you were in the pack). With about a bazillion and six hard corners in my back pocket from Saturday, I might just have been sharp at cornering, but that was the line I wanted and the wheel sure seemed to like it as much as I did. 

At one point I jumped off the front of the field headed toward a break up the road.  A couple of guys bridged to me and we got a huge chunk of the way across, but teammates of guys in the break came and sat on us and then the field decided they wanted the whole thing back anyhow.  All I can say is that the bike felt fast and I was riding with guys who are way stronger than I am.

It may sound like I'm damning the wheel with faint praise, which obviously I'm not trying to do.  Quite the contrary, I pretty much don't ever want to use any other wheels anymore ever.  I loved it.  But absent something that has a baseline chance of 0% (like me winning that race) coming to pass, it's hard to say too much about what the wheel did or didn't do.  I loved riding it and you'll pry it out of my cold dead hands. 

Hi XXXX,

For our 2013 road bike, the bottleneck is me. For the last few weeks Dave has been riding the frame we liked enough on paper to transition to the road. He liked it plenty but for one thing - it was the wrong size for him. He's a solid 56 and I'm a reliable 54 (even though we're exactly the same height and inseam, which is a blog for another day and ought to include the picture Dave should have taken of the guy "test riding" a $6K aero road bike in street shoes in the parking garage below the fancy-pants bike shop in our town, but that he only texted me about without actually committing to photo). Still, it rang all the right bells and pulled the right levers for him - exceptional cornering, faultless power transfer, light, confidence-inspiring, noticeably comfortable. The only thing it lacked was my corroboration. I spent the week in Florida for spring break (the part of the state where a friend advised my wife not to take her shirt off for anyone claiming to be producing an "independent film," whereby inspiring me to use the line more frequently than should have been funny yet somehow still was), but am back now and really want to ride it. But I really need to do about 20 other things, not even including producing an independent film starring my wife. So but for me, we may well have made a decision on next year's road bike. I'm the bottleneck. By this weekend though I should have resolved, um, myself. 

Because we build wheels to spec and have traditionally offered our customers a choice of hubs and spokes across a vast assortment of rims, our perpetual bottleneck has long been our build queue. On the one hand, waiting 3 weeks for a custom built set of wheels doesn't seem like a lot. But are we custom wheelbuilders, or a wheel company that builds by hand? We have debated that for about two years. While we've done so, we've traditionally set ourselves up more as custom wheelbuilders. Recently though we started acting more like a wheel company and "productizing" (the quote marks mean I actually use the word out loud but think less of myself for having done so) our wheel lineup by scaling back on some of the options. After taking wheels to the wind tunnel, for example, we could not see a lot of sense in offering CX-Ray spokes in our alloys so removed them as an option. And for the forthcoming Rail, we're looking at two "colorways" (quote marks as above) - a dark one (black hubs and spokes) and a bright one (red hubs and silver spokes). Simplifying offerings allows us to build in advance for inventory, since there is a greater chance that what gets built also gets sold. When we offered 4 different spokes and 4 different hubs (in as many as 10 colors) across each of 4 depths of carbon clincher rims, trying to guess what someone might buy and have it ready ahead of time was a fool's errand. 

Even with a simplified product line, wheel pre-orders always create bottlenecks of their own. Hundreds of rims arrive at the same time and need to be built here by hand immediately today now into hundreds of wheels for expectant customers. One of Dave's full time jobs right now is training and prepping a crew of wheelbuilders so we can manage peak periods much more quickly, and also build for deeper inventory so that in-stock wheels are ready even before you order them. Obviously, this wouldn't be possible without some level of the productization we've started to implement above. Yes you can still get Chris King and PowerTap hubs in the Rail and our other wheelsets; we just won't have them built in advance and ready to fly out the door.

Onward and upward. And since I know most of you are here just for news about the Rail I'll remind you to come back in a few days when the first Rails to pop out of the new mold emerge from customs and are in our hands.

In these days where any internet forum on any topic can tell you exactly what you ought to think, it takes some doing to separate bombast from insight.   The thin veneer of "everyone told me I'd love these wheels (this helmet, these pedals, this size of bike, this pro-looking saddle to bar drop)" is just that - a thin veneer.  You only get so much time on your bike, and every ride during which you use less than the best setup you could, given whatever resource restrictions you've got, is a missed opportunity to have had more fun, gone faster, or been more comfortable. 

People who know me best might well describe me above all else as an anti-dogmatist.  They would likely soon thereafter describe me as long-winded, which makes perfect sense.  Every time I get involved in a topic, it's like one of those old make your own adventure stories.  Each door passed through leads to subsequent decisions that go further and further down a road particular to your situation, and away from any universal "this is the best."  So many people have it in mind that they want "THE best bike (wheels, tires, etc)" rather than the best bike (wheels, tires, etc) FOR ME."  Small change, big difference. 

Listen to, or read, how people phrase things, and how they legitimize their information.  Statements like "I put these wheels on and beat my old personal best on my 10 mile loop by 4 minutes" have a tendency to see me very sharply question whatever else that person might have to say.  I recently felt like I had to justify some acuity that I claimed to have regarding wheel performance, which I thought I effectively did by explaing that I've ridden the last 15,000 or 20,000 or so miles with a sometimes burdensome awareness of my equipment.  There really is no "just go ride" for me anymore, and I have the luxury of being able to think I'm feeling something, and make a considered equipment change relevant to that facet, and fairly effectively either validate or dismiss that feeling. 

I'm far from saying that you have to sentence yourself to this lifetime of acute awareness to what's going on - a ton of the enjoyment that people get from riding and racing is in just "going with it" and tuning a metric ton of other stuff out.  What I am saying, however, is that everyone who will read this probably spends more than enough time in the saddle to develop a very useful awareness of your equipment in what is a pretty equipment-relevant activity. 

The better you arm yourself with awareness of what equipment does and doesn't do for you and the people in your context, the better capacity you will have to select and manage the equipment that is going to be the most beneficial for what it is you want it to do. 

Become your own expert. 

I read this article in the New Yorker that just came out, and it's about this guy Ron Johnson who became the CEO of JC Penney.  He's had an illustrious career at Target and was the guy who developed the Apple Store concept, but by most accounts he's failed at JC Penney. 

A big initiative of his was to do away with coupons and specials and sales and just go to a strategy called "fair and square pricing."  The thrilling sounding name notwithstanding, it's an idea after our own hearts - don't make people jump through hoops or hit the timing just right in order to get their best deal, just make your best price THE price and go that way.  At Penney's, it's been a resounding failure.  A professor at Columbia says "this game of cat and mouse with regular, ever-changing discounts is illogical, but it's one that lots of consumers like to play."  I can't disagree with his assessment, but we're still not doing it. 

A lot of cycling gear is made available through discounts and bro deals and team deals and shop nights and all of that stuff.  People are trained to ask for discounts and we understand that, which is why we really don't tear our hair out when people ask us for discounts (we used to - oh, how we used to).  On the other hand, we are a lot less wordily apologetic about our strategy and our adherence to it.  If we lowered the prices for some, we'd have to raise them for everyone else.  It's that simple.  We had a few special cases when we started, we discovered that it didn't work well for us, and we ended them quickly. 

Using stuff because you got a good deal on it is a promotional thing, but in our view it's a pretty poor one.  It's usually a case that you're using it because you got a screaming deal on it, not because it's what you really wanted to have, and people recognize that.  We don't want to create a bunch of demand for our stuff at x% off of our normal prices, simply because we already charge the least we're willing to get.  The market would likely bear more, and there's plenty of evidence that broad swaths of people would bear a lot more.  We're about to launch a wheel set that legitimately plays ball with anything out there, and it's going to cost around half of what the market rate is.  We hope that it's an attractive proposition for a ton of people.  We've spent enough time telling people how we do that, but there will still be skepticism because of the price. 

It is what it is, that's the way we do it, and we're willing to be wrong. 

The three events were a short (6 minutes, more or less) prologue, a 1k 6 corner crit, and a circuit race with laps that took a bit over 6 minutes.  We raced the 35+, which had the usual dynamic of masters races wherein about a third of the guys are guns, a third are pretty reliable but maybe not sharp end of the pile, and the other third are kind of hanging on for dear life.  As always, there were plenty of lessons to learn.

1. Pre-riding prologues is absolutely mandatory.  I took turns slower than I could have, went the long way around a traffic island, and spent about one minute thinking I was off course.  Who knows how much time any of it cost, but none of it helped. 

2. To race well, you need to race often.  The guys who were really making an impact in this field have been racing for many years, and this wasn't the season opener for any of them.  The few laps it took for me to get up to speed in the crit, and then again in the road race, cost me precious energy that in both cases definitely made a difference.  In competitive fields, you need to be ready to race and race well from the whistle. 

3. Racing in a different pond is really fun.  I didn't know anyone we raced with except one other guy who made the drive.  Not knowing your competition throws some curve balls at you in that you have no idea whether the guy who just rocketed off the front is likely to explode in ten seconds or pedal off into the sunset.  The other side of the coin, though, is that you don't automatically think "oh, that guy always beats me" and plant yourself into the pecking order.  They're all just dudes, and you're trying to beat them.

4. Looks count for nothing.  Yesterday, I lined up behind the guy who had a few extra pounds, a bit too much clothing on, and a lot of gray hair.  As I was bemoaning that I'd have to get around him at my first shot, it became clear that everyone who knew him gave him plenty of respect.  Turns out it was Kent Bostick, who raced track in several Olympics, including the '96 Games when he was 42 years old.  He was never in a position I'd describe as other than perfect, he was plenty strong, and yes - he beat me by a place or two. 

5. Racing is great testing.  I'd spent a bunch of time on the frame I used, and not as much time on the wheels I used (the wheels are a set that acts as sort of a construction dummy for the Rail).  Going out and riding and thinking about what you're riding on is a very necessary step for us, but there's nothing like pointing the stuff into corners at absolute max tilt to see what it can do. 

It's always a tough balance between racing too much and not racing enough, a line that, except for cross, I've been on the "not enough" side of the last two years.  Maybe it's just the being able to ride in bibs and a jersey that's talking, but now I'm all wicked up (by the way "wicked" in this case is a one syllable word, rhymes with "kicked" - it's a sailing thing to be "wicked up") for road season to start. 

I address the problem in another way entirely, by trying to solve for "how many spokes do your wheels need in order to perform as well as they possibly can for you?"  Please note that I'm not always saying more spokes is better.  I'm 165 or so, and 24/28 is perfect for our alloy wheels for me (and a 20 front is even good).  It's what I'm using to train on, I'm sure I'll race on them, and my cx wheels are all 24/28 alloys.  I find 24 rears to be a little soft, and 28/32 tends to be overkill for me.  So it's not "more" or "less" that I'm advocating here, it's "appropriate.  Tt's rare that people want more spokes than ideal, but it happens.

What are the costs of having more spokes? 

1. You pay about 5 grams per additional spoke, using the spokes that we use (which are very light spokes).  For 8 spokes, that is about 40 grams, or the equivalent of a little more than one ounce of water. 

2. You pay a small aerodynamic penalty.  As we found out at the wind tunnel, 4 extra spokes made a 58mm front wheel the exact equivalent of a 50mm wheel with 4 fewer spokes. 

3. The fashion dial is decidedly turned toward fewer spokes looking cooler than more spokes. 

Fewer spokes is often a false economy of weight and aero benefit.  A lot of wheel sets are made with really heavy rims in order to be able to keep the spoke count down, and a lot of wheels also use crazy heavy spokes to get the requisite stiffness.  Not only do these wheels wind up being really heavy overall, they wind up being really bad aerodynamically.  When you see the phrase "versus an industry standard aluminum clincher" in a wind tunnel graph, one of these wheels with fan blade "bladed" spokes is what they're talking about.  Almost all of the time when we are talking about alloy clinchers, we are not starting from a baseline of them being very aerodynamic in any case.  To make a "not that aero" wheel a little more "not that aero" is a much different trade than to make a "very aero" wheel into a "little less aero" wheel.

So if we switch the criteria from a goal of having the fewest spokes to optimizing wheel performance, what are we looking to get:

1. Optimized stiffness.  Your bike accelerates faster and handles better when your wheels aren't noodling all over the place.  You can take more aggressive lines in turns, you feel more confident, the visceral feedback of bike as efficient machine is increased.

2. Increased durability.  Many hands make light work, and when you have more spokes you don't need as much spoke tension, which benefits the hub flange, the rim, and the spoke/rim connection point.  The unsupported rim span between any two spokes is decreased, which defends against bad roads and potholes and curb hops (ever see how many spokes dirt jump bikes have?  and they have small little wheels!) and things like that.

3. Decreased maintenance.  Ride on crappy roads, take the occasional dirt road detour, whatever you want.  With enough spokes, if your wheels do get a bit out of true from the flogging you give them, you're generally 1/8th of a turn from a return to wheel nirvana. 

4. Joy.  I can't think of any $500 discretionary spend that I've made with the mandate of it not causing me any trouble.  If I'm dropping that much money on something that's used for my enjoyment, I want it to put sunshine in my soul when I use it.  It not giving me trouble equates to a lost chance for it to bring me joy.

5. More riding. Most people have "x" amount of time to do all things "bike."  My perspective is unique because I spend so much time working on bike stuff that working on my own bike isn't the outlet it is for some people, but even before this was the case I put a much higher premium on having my own gear work perfectly than in getting it to work perfectly. 

So when we recommend more spokes for you than other places might, realize that "they never gave me any trouble" is a good ways below the bar we're shooting for.  

We've been interviewing frames to be the successor to the Wheelhouse.  The Wheelhouse is a lot to live up to, but we think we've got a good candidate.  I've been riding it for a few weeks, but a bad winter cold cost me some valuable time on it.  Last week made up for that, with 160 miles of riding over 3 days, including about 16,000 feet of climbing.  Mike and I are distinctly complementary riders, which serves us well, and it doesn't hurt that we can ride the same size bikes which makes it easy to compare notes. His turn comes next.

Mile 19 on the Blue Ridge Parkway in VA

The terrain I rode gave a great overview of how the bike responded to different challenges.  From 50 mph winding descents to grinding "why didn't I put a 27 on????" steepness to crit-like turns to power climbs, I saw it all.  I don't want to go too deep into the details but it did a lot of things remarkably well, and there was one thing on which I need a second opinion. 

One thing that jumped out is the frame's comfort.  Using wheels and saddle/post swapped over from my Wheelhouse, and everything else set up as closely as possible, it was easy to notice that I wasn't getting beaten up.  The first and third days of the trip were long days on the mountain bike, 3 hours the first day and just over 2 the other.  Mountain biking really gets to my lower back after a while, and I was sure that by the end of the trip my lower back would be in traction.  This wasn't the case at all.  The back end of the frame I was on is very resilient.  It also generally turns as well as any bike I've been on, but we might need to switch from the lighter fork to the stiffer fork to see everything the bike's capable of.  The whole package is crazy light as is - with Force, alloy cockpit, alloy clincher wheels, pedals, and cages the thing barely cracked 15 pounds - so adding a few grams to stiffen the fork seems worth pursuing almost in any case.  It's a LONG way to the top.

The other thing I wanted to give a good look into was spoke type and tension on mountain bike wheels.  My wheels for last season were 28/28 with Laser spokes, and did well through about 50 hours of riding and racing.  They performed great and held up well, but weren't fully zero maintenance (I gave them a midseason touchup).  At 165, I'm just north of middle-weight, and a touch harsher on wheels than the average bear.  I wanted to see how a 32/32 build with Lasers would do, and while I only got about 5 hours in on them, they were 5 hard hours of wheel torture - the video understates both steepness and rockiness.  Rocks, rocks, and more rocks.  This isn't a buffed-out, bermed IMBA roller coaster track.  The wheels are as true as when they left the stand after what beating I was able to give them, and gave me a better read on when to recommend which lacing.  The other thing on my mind is that wheels used with tubeless setups definitely want a bit more spoke tension - going tubeless drops the spoke tension noticeably, which can lead to bad things.  Of course too much spoke tension has its own problems, that's why wheelbuilders make the huge dollars, right?

Recalling what I discussed last time, when reading the AOA curves we need to remember that the wider AOAs (10 degrees and up) are more common at slow speeds, while the narrower AOAs (7.5 degrees and down) are more prevalent at higher speeds. A mnemonic device to use when looking at AOA charts is to think fo them as the bike path you reluctantly admit you ride on once in a while - ride slowly on the right, pass quickly on the left.

Here then are the curves for our full range of RFSC wheels - 38mm, 50mm, 58mm and 85mm depths:

A couple of immediate observations:

- The wheels show a remarkably similar performance at very narrow and very wide AOAs, suggesting that adding depth isn't necessarily adding unqualified speed
- There is almost no measurable difference at all between the 50s and 58s (as evidenced by the 40K TT graphic here, showing that if you ride balls to the wall for a full hour the time difference between the wheels is 0 seconds)
- All of the wheels show an increase in drag in the middle AOAs experienced at all speeds. The wheels are faster than the FSWs, but these are still far from ideal curve shapes. These wheels are all at their best when there is zero wind, or when you're riding so fast that the AOA becomes very very narrow.

Our RFSCs were likely designed to be aerodynamic, but it is pretty clear they were never optimized for any particular application, and maybe never even saw the inside of a windtunnel until we sent them. Our philosophy is that you don't need an array of supercomputers running CFD in parallel to design an aerodynamically sound rim that performs exceptionally well, but we learned from this trip to the tunnel that you can't just pluck a shape out of thin air and call it fast either. Dave and I chewed through a lot of fingernails waiting for the tests of the Rail to come back, knowing that we were fully prepared to scrap the design and start again if it didn't produce the results we expected from the design we chose. Fortunately it did exactly what we were after, which is why we were able to greenlight it for production.

So how did the Rail perform across a range of AOAs? Like this, plotted alongside the curve for the Zipp 404 FC as a reference:

The curve shapes, you'll notice, are pretty similar. They start and end in almost exactly the same place and both have troughs in the mid-low AOAs. The gap between the two widens at about 7.5 degrees and continues all the way through 17.5 degrees, making it appear as though the 404 enjoys an enormous aerodynamic advantage over the Rail. The Rail performs better at narrow AOAs, but the difference does not appear as prounounced from the curves. The reality though is because of the distribution of AOAs at different speeds, the 404 is only 2 seconds faster than the Rail over a 40K TT at 30mph; the small advantage the Rail has at narrow AOAs goes a very long way towards mitigating the 404's edge in the wider AOAs, which occur far less frequently at racing speeds. (Or in other words, right slowly on the right, pass quickly on the left.)

We never expected to be faster than the 404 FC, and even when we get to the production version with 4 fewer spokes than our prototype, the Rail will still have 4 more spokes in each wheel than the Zipp and a 6mm shallower depth. But at 18mm of inside width and the added stiffness of the extra spokes, we think it's going to be about the fastest around for the whole race course. And yes, we are looking at some ways to quantify that position as well as the windtunnel measures aerodynamics.

Here's the whole collection of wheels so you can see how they all plot against each other:

I realize that the engineers and aero geeks in our audience are cringing at what they see as a rather hamfisted interpretation of exceedingly complex aerodynamic data. There is a ton of nuance that influences an analysis like this, most of which I've glossed over in order to explain what we found at the windtunnel and the conclusions we draw. What we do on the blog here is no white paper, but it isn't a marketing slick either. We're just sharing what we observe and learn as candidly as we know how. Even if the Rail isn't for you, we hope what we're doing here helps you better evaluate what other wheel makers are saying (and not saying) about their products.

We still owe you data we promised on our tests of different spoke counts, which I'll get to within the week.