munga wrote:ironhanglider wrote:
Biopace is unlikely, 10mm pitch on the other hand...
Cheers,
Cameron
...until you try and buy some, and your eyes water at the selling prices.
i bet shimano's competitors watched 10-pitch sales very closely, as it could have been a game-changer if it took off.
i wonder why it didn't. i don't see anything inherently wrong with converting to metric measurements.
I suspect that it was partly because 10-pitch came out at a time when pretty much everything was compatible and people were in the habit of mixing and matching, for both road and track equipment. To suddenly have to limit yourself to one groupset, would mean buying a complete set, rather than replacing one cog at a time etc. It was also likely to be expensive to start with as well, on the basis that the tooling costs would have been considerable.
Cashed up performance hungry riders would still have bought the stuff if it delivered better performance, but some testing was carried out early on that showed that the mechanical losses were greater than standard equipment and that more than offset the weight savings from smaller cogs. Nowadays I'd want to see whether there is an aero advantage to smaller cogs because that would outweigh everything.
Of course now that we are all familiar with the concept of buying complete group sets, the startup cost is less of a hurdle. Maybe instead of having smaller rings Shimano can produce a road groupset with more teeth at the same weight which offers more closely spaced gears, e.g. a 60-42 chainset with a 14-40 12spd cassette. But of course Shelbroco came up with
Nanodrive 13 years ago.
Cheers,
Cameron