Originally Posted by
bigtea
You didn't read page 4 of this thread...I stated it...
Now my motive and bias....bike weight has become a somewhat silly specification that's not unlike "RMS watts per channel" for an audio system. In the end a bike should be measured by how it feels, not how much the manufacturers claims it weighs.
Next time, state your motives up front.
First, your premise is wrong. If you race, part of how your bike is measured is by how much it weighs. For everyone else, better quality and performance generally means lighter weight.
Second, weight is weight; the question of auxiliary weight is irrelevant to the point you are trying to make. Five extra pounds somewhere in the system still means five extra pounds you need to haul up a hill. If the bike is five pounds lighter, it doesn't matter what else you carry, it's still five pounds off the system. You don't get to use a "percentage of total weight" argument because there are no economies of scale that come into play when hauling weight up a hill. Pounds are pounds and each and every pound takes exactly the same amount of energy to move up the hill.
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Cat 2 Track, Cat 3 Road.
"If you’re new enough [to racing] that you would ask such question, then i would hazard a guess that if you just made up a workout that sounded hard to do, and did it, you’d probably get faster." --
the tiniest sprinter