Phil Brown wrote:
>The "tire saver" is one of the greatest hoaxes in cycling.
And Morgan Fletcher wrote:
>FWIW:
>
>http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/wiping.html
>
>Morgan Fletcher
As you say, "For What It's Worth..."
The greatest hoaxes in cycling are the "theoretical" arguments made for and against things by so-called experts. Like that fork blades don't flex measurably, or that tires run faster at higher pressures, or that tire savers don't work, or that frame stiffness does not matter for a bicycle's performance.
The only way to determine this is by real-road testing. Some of it is hard to do (flats are terribly random), but Bicycle Quarterly is working on it. We've already found that old-style tires run faster than even the latest high-tech tires (another "high tech" tire in the Spring 2007 issue works fine, but not as well as the makers would have you believe). We have devised a way to measure fork blade deflection, and that report will be in the Summer 2007 issue. Frame stiffness and the related issue of "planing" has been discussed in several issues.
The CR timeline bikes incorporated a lot of knowledge, even if most of it wasn't written down anywhere. To dismiss all of it out of hand would be a mistake. In some cases, for example, frame stiffness, the explanations ("753 is stiffer than 531, thus performs better") were wrong, but the conclusions ("Thin-wall 753 tubing performs better than thicker-wall 531") often were right on the money. And of course, neither builders and riders care why a certain design works better, as long as it does work better!
I'll think about testing tire savers... My own experience (see also the archives) is that most of the flats I got in years of racing on tubular tires were when the tire savers had been dislodged and were not brushing the tires correctly. But that is far from the proof required to say that they did work... The biggest problem is that I have so few flats these days that it would take a long time to get a statistically significant number of flats!
It may also depend on the tires. The tiny glass shard that flatted my Vittoria Open Corsa Evo CX test tires might have been flicked off by a tire saver, but it also probably never would have punctured a tire with a thicker tread-cum-casing.
Jan Heine
Editor
Bicycle Quarterly
140 Lakeside Ave #C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.bikequarterly.com