Ken Freeman suggested blind testing of bikes that vary only in tube gauge, and Jan Heine has interest in doing this. I think that this would require great care. In fact, I'd only want to do this using the exact same pair of wheels on all the bikes, to avoid any possible differences in air pressure, sidewall stiffness, or spoke tension, even among nominally identical bikes. I think I'd also want to do it with fixed or single-speed, to minimize a load of other possible variables.
In short, I think this is a hard experiment to do. Actually, the first trial would be two bikes of one set of tubing, and another of a different. Just to see if a series of riders can reliably tell which one is different... That could be scary.
harvey sachs letting rigor outrun reality mcLean va
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2006 10:27:42 -0700 From: Jan Heine To: "Ken Freeman" , <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org> Subject: RE: [CR]Was 753, now is energy recovered constructively? Message-ID: <a05210628c0e02666131d@[192.168.1.33]> In-Reply-To: <000a01c6a8f1$b9e5aee0$6501a8c0@maincomputer> References: <000a01c6a8f1$b9e5aee0$6501a8c0@maincomputer> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" MIME-Version: 1.0 Precedence: list Message: 10
At 12:05 PM -0400 7/16/06, Ken Freeman wrote:
>>It would be interesting (danger, danger, potential OT excursion!!!) to use
>>your sensitivity in a blind test, with at least one sample being a very
>>rigid frame. My question would be, how does it feel after you get
>>acclimated?
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Maybe some day we'll be able to get a number of externally identical bikes and do a double-blind test - only the builder would know which bike was 1, 2 and 3, and we'd make our observations and then report back. Ideally, the bikes would be exactly the same component-wise, so we wouldn't even know which one we are riding at any given time. (They would be marked under the BB with the number, and I would give a random bike to Mark, my second tester, and he'd make observations, and vice versa.)
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>From your note, I think I could infer that you did not spend much time with
>>the heavy-guage OS frame, certainly not the 70 to 200 miles you spent with
>>the other bikes.
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I did ride the superstiff frame as far as the other VBQ test bikes, so at least 200 miles. Even upon becoming acclimated, it never exhibited the easy performance of my favorite bikes.
>>I could easily understand this as flagging interest. I'd
>>personally not want to spend time evaluating a Huffy that I could spend
>>evaluating a Masi, Singer, or Woodrup!
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It's one of the benefits and curses of doing in-depth bike tests for magazines. Benefit because I get to ride a lot of interesting bikes. Curse, because I have to ride them all, whether I like them or not. There have been days when I really wanted to take one of my favorite bikes, but the deadline was looming...
-- Jan Heine, Seattle Editor/Publisher Vintage Bicycle Quarterly c/o Il
Vecchio Bicycles 140 Lakeside Ave, Ste. C Seattle WA 98122
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com