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Originally Posted by Xyzzy
My first bike was a TCR1. I felt like when I stomped on the pedals, that it reacted like there was a fluid "torque converter" between me and the ground. (I'm using car analogies here.) IOW, it felt like pressing the gas on an automatic car.
On my Six13, when I stomp the pedals, it gets up and goes like a stick drive car, with real low gearing. Instant forward motion.
I assume this is what everyone means by stiffness. Maybe I'm wrong. Or something.
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First off, lemme join the chorus in saying THANKS to Tom and Dave and Obtuse and others for a most interesting, illuminating, and educational set of posts.
Second, lemme just say that this post has mostly been about REAL changes in stiffness, compliance, etc. But I think there's also a PERCEIVED change based more on the length of the stays than anything else. Grant Peterson pushes this view a lot and I fully agree with him on this one. All else being equal (which, of course, all else never is) bikes with shorter stays FEEL quicker, stiffer, more like a manual tranny car. Which I think has more to do with the side to side movement induced by the pedal stroke than with anything else. This lateral movement is so instantaneous it makes it feel like the bike is reacting more quickly. But I don't believe it translates into more or faster forward movement, just the perception changes. Grant had an article about this in an early Riv Reader. He compared a bike with radically short stays (I think there was a split seat tube to allow the rear wheel to actually come forward between the two halves of the seat tube to a bike with real long stays. The bike with long stays could be stomped on with no perception of lateral movement - the bike with the radically short stays felt like you were making a u-turn with every pedal stroke. Didn't make the shorter stay bike any faster, but it sure felt different. Real world differences are smaller and the perception more subtle. ATMO contends that you'd never feel a difference of 1 cm and I can't argue with him. But my old RB-1 and my '97 Riv were just about identical bikes except the Riv had stays that were about 25 mm longer and I could damn-straight feel the difference there.
Anyway, just sayin'
-Ray