Comment by marktangotango
9 years ago
Building bicycle wheels is incredibly satisfying, I built a set a friend used to win the local state cyclocross championship one year. There's a lot of technique in tightening the spokes, when I see the 'bad ride' simulation of the wheel in the video, it occurs to me you get the same types of visible behavoir if the spokes aren't tightened correctly. I wonder how spoke tension is modelled here?
My guess is that it's not.
From earlier discussion on this article, the wheel was modeled as an infinitely stiff rim, rather than the more mechanically accurate beam on an elastic foundation. For a first level linear elastic approximation, the spoke tension doesn't matter. The spoke tension is really going to only be an issue once you get into the non-linear effects associated with rim stability, which is strongly dependent on the rim stiffness.