Who wants to say that? When the bike sits next to Colnago’s and Pinarello’s at the coffee shop.

At the higher end of the bike market, it’s a lot easier to do things right and convince they buyer it’s worth it than to do things half way and try to get your buyer to care about value. Zipp’s ill fated Flashpoint experiment makes the perfect example. They made the mistake of saying that a less than optimal, and slightly heavier, carbon layup allowed them to cut the price in half without compromising strength or aerodynamics. I have never actually seen a pair on the road, while the 404 is almost coming to be seen as a training wheel.

didn’t he make clear, the seat stays are where they are because he want’s to keep production costs low ?
if i was in his position and this solution would add 20grams and in the same moment reduce my production costs by 100 bucks per unit … i would be totally in. especially if sales department demanded do keep it low this time … ! (or if i am designing for small scale productions and tooling costs need to be kept low, or, or )

tl:dr – there is no damn “optimal” solution as such, just the approximation of needs by very different sides (design, marketing, construction, customer, addsomemoar)

I have been riding in the ‘this is what I do’ sense since I was 14, so that makes it close to 30 years. I have spent over a decade in and around the industry and the past 4 of those years were spent running, designing and project managing for a MTB company. It never ceases to amaze me how the internet increasingly brings out people that just want to argue endlessly about stuff, and it seems cyclists are prime suspects in this.

Maybe it’s because cyclists are a little self obsessed (nature of the activity) or maybe it’s just a reflection of society on the whole these days. Either way it becomes tedious and drull and spoils what could be interesting discourse across the internet. If one thinks they can do, or know better, then go do it and put everyone in their place, otherwise just smile and wave…

But engineering is not some mystical voodoo process full of unknowables that are not blindingly apparent to anyone who’s spent more than a decade studying it. You don’t make carbon do and be almost anything by laying it up arbitrarily and wishing really hard. You optimize it by lining the fibers up with tensile loads. That’s why a braided lay-up is great for something under torsional load (like a drive shaft), but is absolutely known to be sub-optimal for something that’s mostly in bending (like a bike frame).

The problem is people, or should I say, marketing departments, want more than that as it’s easier to convince many that something other than this is better and this is where the troubles begin and designers have to come up with the ‘new’. And there begins an argument about how the current capitalist market is headed for disaster…!

In regards to your comments re. the design. You may be right, you may not be. We are all sitting from afar passing comment but the reality is, there’s always more at work than is evident in a few pics. For example, I agree with you that an outward curve in the DT is odd but I am not sure if it is there or is an optical illusion caused by the graphics and the ‘hump’. Also, while you may be right re. the braid, the truth of carbon is, when engineered well, you can make it do and be almost anything. The assumption that it’s heavier than uni-d might be right… then again may not be. Without talking to the engineers at to how they’ve done this makes all this guess work.

And Ted, I suggest you re-read what I wrote, you have missed a few things…