M@DM!KE said:
Well I guess you and Willett are on your own there Johnie boy.
It very much surprises me that someone who claims to have been around bikes so long would be so oblivious to fundamental physical principles.
No, he's not on his own. Yes, weight makes a difference. Yes, weight at the end of a lever (or the rim of a wheel) requires more effort to accelerate than weight in the middle. It's trivial.
How about some maths?
A heavy tyre weighs 1kg, a light tyre weighs 600g. Yes, there's room to move at both ends, but this is *my* example, so shut up!
Moment of inertia is proportional to weight, angular velocity, and the square of the radius. Ground velocity is radius x angular velocity, so for a given speed we only need to worry about mass and radius. This is somewhat simplified, but sufficiently correct for this example. So the energy difference required to accelerate the 1kg tyre is about 1.7 times the energy to accelerate the 600g tyre.
How about case 2 - 100g hub and 1.5kg rim + tyre, vs 600g hub and 1kg rim and tyre. Same overall weight, different distribution. We'll ignore spoke weight, since it's not going to have a huge effect. Hub radius is 3cm, wheel radius is 33cm, and to make it simple everything is concentrated at that point. Let's say we want to accelerate at 5ms-1 to make life easy, which is a reasonable acceleration for a second or so. So with a 100g hub to get it to 5ms-1 we've got 5x(100gx0.03 + 1500gx0.3) =2.265N. With the 600g hub you've got (600gx0.03 + 1000x0.3) = 1.590N. Wow, that's a huge difference of 0.6N, or about 40% more to accelerate the heavy tyre!
Except we've accelerated at 5ms-1 for a second and to do that we'd need to push the bike + rider to that speed. Ignoring the rotation of the front wheel, and assuming a 70kg rider on a 10kg bike, we've put in 5x80 = 400N to accelerate. So that 0.6N actually equates to about 0.15%. You can see that's in the same ballpark as the figures JohnJohn quoted.
There are a lot of physics books out there that'll tell you angular momentum helps keep you upright on a bike as well, which is why it's easier to ride a moving bike than a stationary one. That's wrong as well, because the effect is trivial compared to keeping 80kg balanced on a 5cm tyre. While gyroscopic effects come into play, the main reason is that you're constantly making corrections to the direction of travel so that inertia keeps you upright - if you turn into the fall you'll be pushed back up. We don't notice this because we're so damn good at it that we correct almost before we start falling - just like we do when we're walking.
JohnJohn, can I borrow some more ammo? I seem to have used both barrels..
Edit: Sorry Bodin, the thread *did* say OT!