Crazy YouTubers?

20/07/25 22:35 Filed in: Gear

Recently I watched most (not all) of a video by some engineer who has a channel on YouTube about how things work. This one attracted my attention - and probably slipped into my feed - because it was about bicycle wheels. I've seen so much rubbish about bike wheels, and this was more rubbish. I was really disappointed that an engineer, who should know better, was out there repeating nonsense theories about how wheels "work" as fact.
A spoked bicycle wheel is more like a pneumatic tyre (including the one mounted on the wheel) than it is like a spoked wagon wheel (the kind with big wooden spokes). Why? Because there is tension - lots of tension if built properly - in the bicycle wheel and the air pressure puts tension in the fabric threads of the pneumatic tyre. The tension allows the wheel to stand on the downward spokes (or threads in the tyre) rather than the popular notion of hanging from the top spokes (which is what this engineer put forth). Pre-tensioned structures do not behave like un-tensioned ones, or often, as intuition suggests.
If you really want to understand the system, go rear Jobst Brandt's book "The Bicycle Wheel" where he explains it all in detail, with measurements.

Alternative facts are not a real thing. I can tell you that airplanes fly due to magic and the Earth is flat - I could even believe these things - but that doesn't make either true. People shouldn't put educational content online that is wrong. I'll leave quantum physics to Brian Cox, and explaining spoke tension to Jobst.

Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

Crazy YouTubers?