Originally Posted by
svtmike
My lying eyes see no strong correlation between power loss through the chain and the big chain ring variable. What I see is one single chainring-cog combination that resulted in a different chain loss. That tells me there is some other variable unaccounted for in the design of the experiment.
My gut tells me that the experiment would have been more conclusive with an electric motor as a power source.
Sure, but we didn't have an electric motor as a power source. What we had were a SRM and a PT. As has been pointed out elsewhere (including by Spicer himself), Spicer's findings were at odds with what had been observed in the mechanical engineering community for about a century: that efficiency increases with sprocket size. We weren't doing something de novo. Spicer's findings were the odd ones.