Nerd Alert Podcast

The world of carbon fibre composites is continually progressing, and yet, the way most carbon bicycle frames are made today doesn’t differ all that much from how it was done in the 90s.    However, aeronautical and automotive industries are continually investing in improved methods and processes, and the cycling market serves to benefit from just that. One such example is the recent rebirth of thermoplastic composites which have the potential to reduce costs, offer superior impact resistance, and be recyclable.    Our guest in this week’s deep dive episode is Ben Lloyd, a Research and Development specialist at Cygnet Texkimp Ltd, a leading carbon composite manufacturing machinery company. Lloyd is an expert in thermoplastic manufacturing and also in touch with the bicycle industry.

3D-printing is an undeniably cool way to make things, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the best way.

Is a printed titanium hammer better than a welded one? Do $2,000 printed cycling shoes move the bar enough to justify their existence? What’s the point of printing sunglass frames? And was that handlebar that failed so dramatically at the Olympics even 3D-printed at all? 

What is definitely very neat, however, is a new trend whereby companies like Muc-Off are starting to ship products in powder form whereby you add the water at home, instead of the company burning resources to ship mostly water around the globe.

We also chat about Ibis’s move to local frame production, an insane alleged Ponzi scheme involving three well-known Italian cycling brands, and finally, we finish up this week’s episode with a bunch of reader questions for our always-entertaining Ask a Mechanic segment.

Track events at the Tokyo Olympics are set to kick off next week with a full week of exciting racing around the 250-meter Izu velodrome.

Felt is once again the official bike sponsor of the US team, and the company has supplied a brand-new bike — the TK FRD — for mass-start events that features a new aero shape and a new take on the frame geometry. But for the individual events, the American riders are on the same bike as they used in Rio five years ago.

In an event where fractions of a second can have major impacts, and when several other federations have brought radically cutting-edge machines to Tokyo, how is it that the Americans are using bikes that are half a decade old? Then again, maybe all isn’t as it seems.

Oversized rear derailleur pulleys might be good for some marginal gains, but even the terrible watts-per-dollar ratio hasn’t stopped a growing number of brands from launching their own versions — and AbsoluteBlack’s HollowCage is now one of the most expensive ones out there (but also one of the blingiest).

Speaking of looks, is a clean front end enough to justify all high-end road bikes going to fully internal routing in spite of the adjustability and serviceability headaches? And how much bigger are road tires going to get? We discuss all that and more in this week’s episode.

It’s not uncommon for custom frame builders to change direction from time to time: from lugged to TIG, steel to titanium, maybe different bike styles. But it’s far more unusual for an established builder who specializes in metal to make the wholesale switch to carbon fibre — and not just tube-to-tube construction, but moulded frames like the major brands.

Yet that’s just what Carl Strong has done with his new venture, Pursuit Cycles. What’s involved in starting something from scratch? Why embark on something so challenging? And what would those frames offer to people that you couldn’t get already, anyway? Strap in for this deep-dive episode.

Gravel bikes were once the rebels of the drop-bar bike world, but now that they’ve gone increasingly mainstream, it’s perhaps inevitable that they’d adopt features from road racing: aero shapes, hidden cabling, similar claims about weight and stiffness, and so on.

Is this a good thing? Also making a possible comeback are solid molded carbon fiber wheels — and they’re not just for fixies, kids. And what do we think you should bring with you on an unsupported 4,700 km ride? You’ll get all that and more in this week’s round of Ask a Mechanic.

This week’s Nerd Alert episode takes a closer look at two recent events in this year’s Tour de France.

In stage 1, Jumbo-Visma rider Steven Kruijswijk finished the stage missing an entire seatstay from his prototype Cervelo, and in stage 5, EF Education-Nippo riders tackled the stage 5 individual time trial on a new Cannondale TT bike.

We chat with Cervelo to find out how that bike could have possibly survived — and apparently without Kruijswijk even knowing! — and get some tantalizing tech details from Cannondale on that new bike before its official release. Sorry, folks, this one’s pretty long, but we promise it’ll be worth your time.

The full crew is finally reunited for this week’s Nerd Alert podcast! Now that Shimano’s new 12-speed Dura-Ace Di2 groupset has made an appearance in the wild, we dive into what we can confirm (it’s black), what we think (wiredless?), and what we hope to see (a mechanical version in polished silver!!) in the company’s new flagship road components.

We then debate the pros and cons of hookless road wheels, the idea of a flat-proof tube, and finish with an extended Ask a Mechanic segment with questions fielded exclusively from our Veloclub members — and Zach mostly kept his promise to not be too salty this time around.

This week’s CyclingTips Nerd Alert episode is a deep dive into preventing ride or race-ending mechanicals and how to deal with them when things do go wrong.    For this episode, tech editor Dave Rome rang up mechanic to the stars, Brad Copeland. As the personal mechanic for former cross country mountain bike world champion Kate Courtney, Brad is incredibly detailed in ensuring his riders are able to consistently get to the finish line. The lessons here are just as applicable to everyday road and gravel riders as they are to those racing mountain bike world cups.

It seems everything cycling-related is fetching inordinate amounts of money on the used market these days, and so we figured it was a good time to trade in Caley and Zach for a special guest host: Dan Cavallari, former tech editor for Velonews and now freelancer extraordinaire.

Dan covered Unbound Gravel for CyclingTips this year, so it only seemed right for James and Dave to run through all the interesting gravel tech with him.

Wondering about tire inserts? Tire sizes and pressure? Handlebar setups? Gearing? We go through it all, and bookend it with the usual round-up of tech news and Ask a Mechanic questions. And don’t worry, Caley and Zach will be back next week — probably. Maybe.