you only have so much traction available, and once the radial forces push it beyond its breaking limit then there goes your wheel.

guess where those forces come from? mass*velocity (enginerds will say acceleration I guess)

it is better to spread that force between two contact patches.

your evidence that most normal riding is unevenly on the back wheel is in your tire wear, so any movement to the front is not going to unweight the rear, but make the bike closer to evenly distributed.

It depends.

Thanks! That makes sense to me.

I already have all the evidence I need, it just seems counter-intuitive to me. My new frame has shorter chainstays than I'm used to, and the rear wheel starts to lose contact when I corner. Lowing my bars helped with this somewhat. At first I thought I must be smoking crack, but it sounds like I should move the bars down a little more.

But guess where does the traction come from? Mass times the coefficient of traction. So it's not quite that simple.

Don't know about you, but I had to learn how to do things properly. Running, swimming, cornerin, reading. What came "naturaly" just wasn't as good as it became after learning how to do things properly and then practicing. Theory AND practice do the trick for me.

It's always been my understanding that body steering is used not so much as an actual technique for steering, but rather as an exercise to teach proper body positioning on the bike. As in, if you tell someone to imagine they are steering with their body, they are more likely to find their way to a natural position while cornering. Kind of like looking through the corner, or telling someone "the bike will go where you look."

Oh, and I can steer my motorbike quite well with no hands. But I still agree with you about body steering.

apples/oranges.

one of those is radial force. the other one is downforce. fail.

besides, the context in this case has to do with providing more equal mass distribution between two contact patches and not some arbitrary global overall mass amount.

besides besides, the context requires one to pay attention to the original question asked, which you left out.

besides besides besides, you haven't answered jack squat.

besides besides besides besides.

besides.

Speaking theoretically as a nerd, force, not mass, normal to the surface (down) times coefficient of static friction. So weighting the front wheel increases traction. It can also increase the centrepital force necessary to pull the tire around in the surface plane, ie, opposing friction and momentum. Which is all I'll say as a nerd because I'm sure of that much.

In the cyclist sense you just say lean forward and in, hopefully without sliding. And whatever else you aficionados do, point the knee push the bar dip the shoulder, push the bike one way or another or whatever it is. Carry on, I just had a geek moment.

I've wondered about that. There's at least one other reason why the back tire would wear more quickly: it applies the forward motion. While the front tire can simply roll, without significant forces along the direction of movement, the back tire is applying a backwards force to the road surface at any time power is applied to the drive train. Ideally, it's just a contact force applied through the elastic material of the tire. But if there's any slippage (and I would expect there to be, on a microscopic level, even ignoring the instances of loss of traction where the whole tire is obviously slipping), then that adds friction as a mechanism of wear. I would expect friction to be worse than downward force. Front tires experience significant friction only during front-wheel braking and in turns; rear tires whenever the bike is powered forward (as well as during rear-wheel braking and in turns).

Dunno why so much talk about the wheels because if the frame sucks in handling no matter what wheels u have it will corner like cr@p.

A lot of medium range non racing geometry bikes in the market that are super expensive and have the best stuff but sincerely they corner really bad.

Have 2 steel bikes that corner 1000 times better than many new stuff and old wheels that arent even close stiff to the carbon ones and the bikes can cut corners like crazy and dont miss a bit of the pavement. The rider has always some factor too, but IMO wheels are only a detail because if the bike is not designed right wont corner right ever.

there is a real-world test case for this.

try driving a rear-wheel drive front-engine car for 60k miles without tire rotation and see how they wear.

I dont race but when I take a turn I press down on my outside pedal big time.

I looked up some data and found it hard to find anything conclusive (especially from auto tire wear sources, half of which relate it to weight distribution and the other half to powered losses), but one rider of front-wheel drive recumbents mentioned getting flat spots on his front, so I will admit that I could be wrong on the tire wear issue, although my 2002 GMC truck belies that (especially since the wear is even and not just edges.) However, I have no problem admitting when I am wrong about something.

The rest of it stands. It's the onus of those who contradict it to prove me wrong.

a side note that jives with this technique...when you press down on the outside pedal before a turn, you are putting your body in a perfect state to create a clean and strong countersteering input, since the same force that you are using to hold your outside foot down aligns your body to leverage more force through the opposite hand (think of a diagonal line of force through one foot/leg, and out through the opposite hand). again, this is far more noticeable and useful on a motorcycle, but the same principle applies with bicycles.

this is a minor point, admittedly, but personally, i know that the more i understand exactly how these things happen gives me more confidence, which allows me to enter turns more quickly and get through them with less drama.

Re steering - whether you steer with hips or hands, the bars need to turn, however minutely. That's why that motorcycle works, why "bodysteering" works etc.

Reason why weighting the rear doesn't help much is the front does the steering. You need weight on the steering wheel.

Actually, wrong.

Traction increases with increased mass. No ifs, ors, buts.

Depending on the surface, the increase in traction from increase in mass is larger than the increase in radial forces to a point. More specifically, riding with good tires on dry pavement, one is more likely to lose traction on the wheel with less weight on it (see carpediemracing's posts, for example). Even more specifically, in such conditions, it is better to have more weight on the front wheel, thus making sure it won't slip, because it's easier to recover from a rear wheel wipeout.

On subject and relevant to the context at hand.