The reason I thought it might be a possible test followed from something Jan said in the book. Specifically, he had an aluminum framed bike in for review, and it came with 3 different elastomers that could be inserted into the interface between the seatpost and the seatstays (essentially an earlier crude version of an adjustable isospeed coupler), and stated that only the middle of the 3 elastomers gave a favorable planing response. He suggested this might be a way to test the hypothesis, but the bike is no longer manufactured.

Hey, maybe. I just don't know if Jan's "planing response" includes things that he would consider "negatively planed" of if he was being genuinely complimentary.


And it may be that the middle elastomer just did a good job of not interfering with what the metallic portion of the frame wanted to do - much like using a heavier or lighter top tube in a steel frame.


Have you experienced anything plane-like yourself to have a jumping off point for testing?

there is (fairly) big money in bike racing. it’s kind of hard to believe that there’s One Simple trick that would boost power by 12% (or even 6% or 3% to be honest) that the teams would not be all over. whether it’s the 25-year old with carbon fiber stockholm syndrome who would bring it up or anyone else in team management who could say “hey sponsor these other bikes are 12% faster, we’re going to drop you, start riding old steel and win every race unless you give us something similar,” doesn’t really matter. in professional sports every advantage is sought and big money is spent to study it.

It doesn't make bikes 12% faster and it isn't simple. It is also relatively unknown and most closely associated with the kinds of bikes the pros haven't ridden in two generations. And manufacturers would have to admit they have been screwing the public with their bike designs for 30 years, come up with something completely new that they might not understand and then stand by it even though everybody can feel stiff but not everyone can feel planed. So it hardly seems like a conspiracy.

I'm not even confident that I really know or understand what he is talking about, so I cannot say for sure. (Hence the OP.)

My wife's Ti bike feels nice and springy in a positive way when I ride it (as opposed to feeling like a limp noodle), but I can't really say much beyond that, and that my touring bike feels like what he describes for a bike that does not plane. My wife's bike has a fat (stiffer) down-tube relative to the top tube, consistent with what he describes as a good planing bike. My custom steel bike is like that as well.

Come on! You are saying no one would listen to, Tadej Pogačar, Remco Evenepoel, Mathieu van der Poel or any of the other top tier professionals riding today. Again, you don’t address the multitudes of other, extremely competitive individuals in the sport who actually purchase their equipment.

Pro riders are looking for every advantage they can get. Given that these guys live and breath with power meters, such an advantage would be easily detected. It's impossible to believe that no one on the pro tour has tried a flexible frame to see if this miracle exists.

Also, why aren't amateur racers and non-sponsored pros that buy their own bikes flocking to flexible frames?

They still select their own bikes to some extent, badging them to look like whatever the team bike is supposed to be. Same with wheels. They wear their corporate logos. The main thing the logo owners want to see is wins. They don't really care how they're acquired. The brand of bike used toward that goal simply doesn't matter - as long as it looks similar to their bike, not at all hard anymore. Bike magazines love to write and photograph this type of thing. Many times the sponsor will have a bike custom-built for their top rider to get the exact qualities the rider desires. It'll be indistinguishable from the stock bike, easy with carbon. The rider's desire to win is the same as the sponsors. The top riders earn a lot more money and they're not going to ride a loser bike if they can help it - and they can.

I’ve read this thread with interest and noted a lack of discussion about rider comfort, which definitely impacts bike performance. John Morgan of Columbine Cycles has a very interesting piece on the Columbine website.

https://www.columbinecycle.com/pdf/cc-brochure.pdf

The whole piece is a good read, and page 13 lays out some details about wheel builds and points out that suspension is best as close to the road as possible (I.e., within the tires rather than in the frame or actual suspension).

This explains my experience with my Columbine, which is by far the stiffest and fastest bike I’ve spent any time on, yet is an amazingly comfortable ride with the right tires and wheels.

What do Tadej Pogačar, Remco Evenepoel, Mathieu van der Poel say about planing? You seem to think they have an opinion about this. What is it?

No they don't. The current state of pro racing journalism analyzes ever bolt and widget, and someone who is supposed to be riding a Cervelo S5 can't substitute a bike made of Columbus SL but putting the same stickers on it. There is no clear path to turn an S5 or a Tarmac into some suplase super machine since Cervelo and Specialized have never taken any interest in a bike of this kind.


I just can't believe that we are having an argument about why Trek is hiding its response to the obscure musings of Jan Heine.

This is the most tedious, timeworn argument on BF, apart from maybe "Unless you're a pro, speed doesn't matter"

:welcome

My "cycling fora arguments" rubric is expanding.

1. Only the pros need to worry about that, and you're not a pro.
2. The best riders are the best because of what they do so just imitate them.
3. Things I don't care about, can't see, or don't know how to measure aren't important.
4. Things I think are important really are important, so you should agree with me.
5. If I don't know how to do something, it's either unimportant or too complicated for anyone (especially you) to know how to do.
6. The world is simple, and people saying it's complicated are just trying to confuse you.
7. There's a conspiracy by [some group] to prevent us from real improvements in cycling.

8. It's all about having the fastest time on the bike, not the best time.

Good one, though times and speeds aren't fast or slow ("Fastest known time"/"FKT" is irksome); but any other way of saying what you're saying would be worse (e.g., "It's not about having a good time, it's about having the best time").

(Preempting the obvious retorts: as George Carlin would have said, "Anyone who cares less about logic than I do is an idiot, anyone who cares more about logic than I do is a maniac.")

But number 7 is being promulgated by the anti-planing crowd. Who simply can't believe that bicycle manufacturers aren't already totally aware and have mastered every nuance of bike design.

Meanwhile, companies like Trek can't figure out how to route a brake cable and Specialized built a headset that destroys carbon steerer tubes. But these companies are otherwise geniuses of bike design.

How about:
9. Bicycle manufacturers know best.

I just had a thought. Imagine that! I've talked about how my 2000 carbon bike was such a revelation to me, accelerating like no bike I'd ever been on. OMG. It must plane! It's also comfortable, no problem on 400ks. My feet got sore on one of them, but nothing else, just tired. Maybe carbon bikes plane the best, which is why they're fastest. Could be, ya know.

I have heard that super-stiff bikes feel "dead".

I've been assuming that (if the phenomenon is real). I don't know where the assumption that the bike has to be metal came from.

Metal is a requirement because planing is nothing more than an attempt to “prove” that steel frames are superior to carbon frames.

I'm not sure this has even been under argument. Steel is the subject of most planing discussion because the base properties are simple to express and understand, it's also relatively cheap to use for experimental purposes. There's nothing that precludes CF from planing and it's obvious the best riding, and therefore best planing, framesets could and are made from CF.

Bicycle Quarterly has tested several CF bikes that planed.

Very nice. What were the magnitudes of the effects that were measured?

(I occasionally read Jan's blog posts, but rarely BQ. Are those articles available online?)

Kool-Aid isn't free.

This is all non-responsive. No, Jan hasn’t provided data that supports planing. Yes, he has provided data, but the data doesn’t show what says it shows. Jan’s musings about how a “longer power stroke” allows you to put more power into the bike because you’re not pushing against a brick wall, aren’t a mechanism. He doesn’t explain why this works, and he can’t because the whole idea doesn’t conform to physical laws. Meanwhile, all you’ve got to say in response is that I’m a big dumdum who just doesn’t understand Jan’s brilliant analysis - classic appeal to authority. I’m done with this.

Just off-the-charts motte-and-bailey argumentation from Team Planing in this thread. Start with the claim that planing is real and works the way Jan Heine says it does: a kind of flex that allows a rider to produce more power on a bike that has this property than on one that doesn’t, all other factors being equal. When challenged on that idea, retreat to a more defensible but less provocative or even straight up banal argument while pretending that’s what you were arguing all along: “Oh, it’s not 12%.” “It means storing energy in frame flex can be beneficial rather than harmful.” “It means that more comfortable bikes are faster bikes.” I’ve already received a lecture upthread about how French frame builders have been designing frames with flex and souplesse for generations, elsewhere it’s been made clear that Jan Heine is literally selling tube sets intended to “plane” for riders of a particular size and weight, and here you are saying this is a new, relatively unknown phenomenon. In the post quoted below, you suggest that planing is too unpredictable for a big manufacturer to risk incorporating into their designs, yet Jan is willing to take that chance, while elsewhere you have said “consider that major manufacturers don’t know everything about frame design,” (I apologize if that was another poster and I am misattributing, but it’s in this thread somewhere).

This is why the drum I have been beating in this thread isn’t that flexy steel frames are slow, but that “planing” isn’t a well-defined concept, its coiner and most ardent defender can’t explain how it’s supposed to work in a coherent way, and no one can bring themselves to muster a defense for the provocative claim at the heart of the idea - that planing bikes make a rider effectively much stronger than non-planing bikes - without falling back on much more banal and well understood ideas about ride quality, suspension effects and the efficient release of energy stored in frame flex, etc. I love the ride of a high-quality, flexible steel frame and I’m happy to wax philosophical about it for hours, but if that’s what “planing” is, it’s just a rephrasing of all the things people knew and liked about nice bike frames already, not anything new.

If an article has the word "supple" you can bet it's not going to be explained properly. Conceptually this is a comfort thing similar to suspension. Instead of the power going straight from your leg through your stiff-as-hell 1995 Cannondale's 20mm 120 psi tires into the road, it's bending the frame some larger amount. The frame gives the energy back when the load is released. You definitely can feel the difference. In an experiment with a power meter, this ought to show up as a difference in the timing of the torque across the power stroke. On a speed basis, the acceleration / deceleration you get during the power stroke and dead phase would be smeared out. Claiming that this results in more power requires that you make more power owing to your increased comfort. All the materials involved are elastic, so TANSTAAFL