Advertising to Female Cyclists
The May 15 issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News had an article by Megan Tompkins about advertising to female cyclists and how the industry can do a better job of appealing to them.
The gist of the article was that the industry markets to men. Advertising is peppered with rain, dirt, agony, sweat and misery. Just the kind of stuff that makes men want to buy! And typically the kind of imagery that turns women off.
Elysa Walk from Giant Bicycle noted ,”The visual cues that trigger emotional response in men and women are different. We market to men.”
I flipped through some magazines and picked out a few ads that speak to this issue.
Apparently the only part of this rider not ripped to shreds is his crotch, thanks to his saddle.
Who doesn’t like Spartacus? But will this really attract the newbie rider who thought cycling was going to be about enjoying a jaunt with friends?
Even the sunglass companies have jumped on the pain bandwagon…and the gram bandwagon.
Here are some ads from companies who seem to “get it”. If the bicycle industry is indeed leaving $2 billion on the table by failing to appeal to women, as the article states, then these companies see the payoff.
Norco is a Canadian company. Two women, one man. How daring.
This is one page of a two page ad by Felt. Woman and men feature equally — just enjoying a good ride through some beautiful country.
SRAM’s ad shows their recognition of the fairer sex. Every woman can relate to this cyclist.
Will the bicycle industry ever figure this out? Maybe they fear losing their male audience if they produce ads that appeal to women. I think they can have their cake and eat it, too. It’s just a matter of willpower. Something that seems to be in short supply.
How Important is the Bicycle Standover Height?
The bicycle standover height is really important! If you can’t stand over the top tube without touching it, you run the risk of hurting yourself when you stop quickly.
If the top tube is higher than you are, i.e. you have “negative” clearance, you’re an accident waiting to happen. Landing hard on a piece of steel, aluminum or carbon fiber tubing isn’t going to be a pleasant experience. You won’t “get used to it.”
Even if you just graze the top tube when you stand over the bike, you may still run into problems. The road surface isn’t always smooth. If you stop and put your foot into a divot in the road, you’ll be that much lower and you’ll run into the top tube. I know, you can always “lean the bike over”, but if you’re stopping unexpectedly, will you always remember to do that?
It’s too bad so many manufacturers neglect the petite rider. After all, she’s serious about her sport too and deserves the same good equipment as everyone else. Occasionally, a customer comes to me who is still an inch or so shy of fitting my smallest stock design. Ah, the beauty of a custom bike. Since I build to order, tweaking the geometry to fit that rider isn’t a problem, nor does it cost any more. You can’t put a price on your health and safety, so if you’re in the petite fit boat, consider a custom bike.
Saddle Height — What’s Right?
Finding the correct saddle height for your bike is critical for a good fit and healthy knees. Here are some popular methods. You’ll need to know your barefoot inseam for the first two. To calculate it, put a thin book between your legs with one side of the book against a wall. The book should exert firm pressure on your crotch. Remember to keep the book horizontal. Use a pencil to mark the wall at the top of the book. Measure the distance from the floor to this mark — that’s your inseam.
1). Multiply your barefoot inseam by 0.883. Adjust the saddle until the distance from the top of the saddle to the center of the bottom bracket is this length. This method is a good starting point for setting your saddle at the right height, but it doesn’t take into account the length of the crank arms, the shoes you wear or the pedals you use.
2). Using the same barefoot inseam length, multiply it by 1.09. This should be the distance from the top of the saddle to the pedal platform, when the pedal is at the bottom of its stroke, not when it is in line with the seat tube.
3). Put your bike on a trainer and get into your normal riding position. Put your heels on the pedals and back pedal. Raise the saddle height until you just start to rock side to side on the saddle, then back it down a tad. You can also just go for a ride on your bike to do this. With the sun at your back, you can watch your shadow to see when you start to rock.
I can pretty much guarantee if you try all three of these methods, you’ll come up with three different saddle heights. The third method, though, is the one that will probably get you on the way to a good fit faster than the other two. That’s because it’s addressing the “real” you on the bike. A measurement is just a number; it doesn’t know if your build is slight or your feet are big.
So start with the last method and set the saddle height. To tweak it from here, you’d be well advised to follow Andy Pruitt’s advice. He’s the hands down expert. When your pedal is at the bottom of the stroke he suggests a saddle height that will give your knee a bend of 150 – 155 degrees. Note that the angle of a perfectly straight leg would be 180 degrees. We want a slight bend to the knee. He uses anatomical landmarks to measure the angle, from the hip (greater trochanter) to the knee (lateral condyle) to the ankle (lateral malleolus). It’s tough for a novice to locate the landmarks accurately, so if you go this route, work with someone who can help you.
What you’re ultimately trying to achieve is a position that won’t tweak your knees, those precious commodities that put up with a lot from a cyclist. When they aren’t happy about the saddle height, they’ll give you a shout and you’d best heed it. If your knees hurt at the front, try raising the saddle a bit. If the back of your knees hurt, try lowering the saddle a bit.
Dressing for Cold Weather Cycling
Dressing for cold weather cycling is a challenge. Warm weather outfitting is comparatively easy. Shorts, for sure, leaving only the top — will it be a tank or a sleeveless or short sleeved jersey?
But when the temperatures dip, choosing the right garb is much trickier. It’s no longer just a matter of knowing the temperature. Is it a sunny day, a cloudy day; is it calm or windy? And the Big Unknown: will you start out in one set of conditions only to find the weather changes during your ride?
There’s an old adage that says you should start out feeling a little under-dressed because once you warm up, you’ll be fine. I say it’s better to err on the conservative side. Start warm and peel things off if you get too warm. When the weather’s cold, you can always get colder; you can’t necessarily get warmer. If you ride fast to stay warm, you may create your own freezing wind chill in the process. Oh — pay attention to the wind direction. On a cold day, I prefer to ride out against the wind and come back with the wind.
The engineer in me likes to see concepts reduced to nice tidy equations, charts and diagrams. So, for my benefit (and hopefully for yours), here are some guidelines for dressing in a variety of conditions. This image represents wind and sky conditions at four different temperatures. The letters in the image correspond to my suggestions of what to wear.
Condition A (50 degrees, full sun, no wind)
Lightweight tights, short sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, short-fingered gloves.
Condition B (50 degrees, overcast, 20 mph wind)
Lightweight tights, short sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, windbreaker, short-fingered gloves.
Condition C (40 degrees, full sun, no wind)
Heavyweight tights, lightweight long sleeve jersey, short sleeve base layer, windbreaker, long-fingered windblock gloves, wool socks.
Condition D (40 degrees, overcast, 20 mph wind)
Heavyweight tights, lightweight long sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, thermal windbreaker, long-fingered windblock gloves, wool socks.
Condition E (30 degrees, full sun, no wind)
Heavyweight tights, thermal long sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, thermal windbreaker, long-fingered thermal gloves, wool socks, shoe booties.
Condition F (30 degrees, overcast, 20 mph wind)
Heavyweight windblock tights, thermal long sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, thermal windbreaker, helmet beanie, long-fingered thermal gloves, wool socks, shoe booties.
Condition G (20 degrees, full sun, no wind)
Heavyweight windblock tights, thermal long sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, thermal vest, thermal windbreaker, helmet beanie, long-fingered thermal gloves, wool socks, shoe booties.
Condition H (20 degrees, overcast, 20 mph wind)
Heavyweight windblock tights, thermal long sleeve jersey, long sleeve base layer, thermal vest, thermal windbreaker, balaclava, long-fingered thermal gloves, wool socks, shoe booties. (Better yet, stay inside and curl up with a good book!)
Triaxial tension in a lugged steel bicycle frame
It’s an unexpected marvel of nature: the weakest chain in the link can hold its own with the stronger links. But this blog isn’t about chains; it’s about a lugged steel bicycle frame. In an earlier blog, I described the difference between a lugged frame and a TIG welded frame.
When lugs are used as sleeves to join the tubes of a bicycle, everything is joined with a metal filler, usually brass or silver. When I built frames, I used a silver alloy metal. Silver will flow into the very small gap (from 1 to 5 thousandths of an inch) between the lug and the tube and, like glue, hold everything together.
One way of measuring the strength of a material is its tensile strength. Very loosely speaking, tensile strength refers to how much force can be applied to a material before it starts to deform and “break”. All you need to know for this blog is that higher numbers mean stronger materials. An investment cast lug and steel tubing have a tensile strength of about 120,000 psi (pounds per square inch) and the silver alloy (the “glue”) has a tensile strength of about 70,000 psi.
When the tensile strength of steel joints properly brazed with silver were tested, the joint was able to withstand a stress of 120,000 psi … even though the silver “glue” holding the joint together had a tensile strength of only 70,000 psi.[1] How is this possible?
The science behind this still isn’t completely understood, but it’s been hypothesized that the brazing filler material is so constrained by the lug and tubing around it that it can’t “slip” along the tiny, tiny little planes in its atomic structure.
Another theory has to do with the area of the filler material. Think about pulling on either end of a metal rod. As you pull with more force, the rod stretches before it finally breaks. If you measured the area of the rod before and after stretching, you’ll find it becomes smaller. Perhaps a drawing will help:
Because the brazing material is constrained by the lug and tube around it and has nowhere to go, its area can’t change. Materials engineers refer to it as being in a state of “triaxial tension”. Simply put, the effect of this state is to make the brazing material stronger.
This is one of the many things that makes engineering and bicycles so fascinating.
1 Handy and Harman Brazing Technical Bulletin No. T-3, “Strength of Silver Brazed Alloy Joints”, pp. 1- 2.
Steel Bike Weighing 9.6 lbs More Than Titanium BIke Climbs Just As Well!
Did I get your attention with that headline? It was inspired by an article I read in the most recent issue of Bicycle Quarterly, a fantastic, niche magazine published by Jan Heine.
In this issue, Jan tested a titanium bike against a steel randonneur bike. It was a real world test: two guys racing each other up the same hill, one on the ti bike, one on the steel. They swapped out the bikes several times. Both were evenly matched in terms of strength, endurance and weight.
The weight of a steel bike is always of interest. This steel bike was 9.6 lbs heavier than the ti bike, but it climbed as well. It sounds implausible, but as Jan explained, when the weight of the riders was taken into account, the steel bike plus rider was only 5% heavier than the ti bike plus rider, but the steel bike “planed”, helping the rider generate the extra power needed to overcome the weight difference.
Fans of Jan’s bike testing will know there is an advantage to a bike that “planes”. This is a bike that is in synch with the rider and flexes in a way that “gives back” some of the rider’s energy to the drivetrain.
Just for fun, I backed through Jan’s math to calculate that he weighs about 175 lbs. I used my own 100 lb. weight in his calculations and found that the difference in weight plus rider for me is about 8%. Ah, we smaller riders have a rougher road to ride, do we not? A bike that planes is a must!
The important point is that weight is not a big deal. Choice of tires and construction of the frame is though.
Take the road less traveled — not only on your bike, but in your reading as well.
Worn Bicycle Chain and Cassette
Question of the week: “This past May I bought a hybrid bike. Now, at 2300 miles, I already need a new cassette. The bike shop said it’s all the miles I put in. How many miles can a cassette take?”
A cassette can take a lot of miles. But how many depends on how much care you give your chain. There’s this myth that when you replace your chain, you should also replace your cassette. That’s only true if you’ve really worn your chain out. The pins that connect the chain links wear over time, causing your chain to get longer. After a while, the shifting gets sloppy and inefficient and the chain starts to deform the cassette cogs and the chainrings.
The trick is to replace the chain before it gets too worn. You can purchase an inexpensive chain gauge which lets you check the wear of the chain. By replacing the chain before it reaches the “replace” point, you can continue to use the same cassette. Everything is expensive these days, but replacing just the chain is a lot less expensive than replacing the chain and the cassette.
So, the name of the game is to keep that chain going for as long as you can. That means cleaning it and lubricating it properly. The rider who sent in this question admitted to riding in the rain a lot and not paying much attention to her chain. Both the worn bicycle chain and the worn cassette died an early death. I’ve ridden the same cassette over 10,000 miles by caring for the chain and replacing it twice.
Note: The chain gauge shown here is no longer made. But check out Park Tool’s CC-3.2 Chain Wear Indicator. It’s inexpensive and works well.
Lugged Frame or TIG-ed frame?
By default, the bicycles shown on my site are TIG welded. Even though you may see this kind of construction almost exclusively these days on both steel and aluminum frames, you may not have know what it’s called. Here’s a photo of a Coto Doñana Vagabond showing a TIG joint — seat tube, top tube and seat stays.
But another way of “putting the tubes together” is with lugs. Lugs are sleeves that hold the tubes in place. Brazing rod is melted into the sleeve and becomes a very strong “glue” that holds everything together.
Is one method better than the other? It just depends on your preferences. Aesthetically, a lugged frame looks classy and elegant. With some creative filing and cut outs, lugs can become works of art. If you’re thinking about purchasing one of my bikes and want lugs, I’ll be glad to oblige. They are well worth the extra cost.
Structurally, either method is fine. Typically, a TIG-ed frame will weigh a little less because it has no lugs. In theory, the “butts” (more wall thickness at the end than the middle of the tube) can be a little bit shorter since heat from TIG welding is more localized. With a brazed, lugged frame, the heat spreads over a greater length of the tubing, so the butts may be longer. Longer butts add weight.
Lugs typically come in set angles, so this may an issue if the frame design calls for something unusual. Since TIG-ed frames don’t use lugs, any frame angles will work.
In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about the “miracle” of lugs, tubing and brazing rod.