Originally Posted by
Dan Burkhart
I used to hang out on rec.bicycles.tech when Jobst was a regular contributor. I remember him commenting once that he could not have written the book based on modern materials due to lack of failure data.
Interesting. That dovetails with Wheelsmith founder Ric Hjertberg's point that all studies he's seen attempting to show the value of butted spokes (in a more durable wheel) fail to find a difference. He says most spoke breakage happens from crystal imperfections in the wire structure of a spoke, and as such it's statistically much more difficult to find a "signal" amidst the noise. Not that any such studies of spokes exist in Jobst's younger era, but the general problem of of more noise than signal was probably more widespread back then.