While helping my son with is project on Wheel efficiency, I started following blogs from Hambini
Not sure whether anyone else is familiar with his work. Clearly a very bright guy who knows his stuff, but I find it very difficult to follow due to the petty name calling and personal attacks on companies / people who he disagrees with. I think that it is a matter of time before a company feels enough is enough and takes legal action.
It is a shame because a lot of his stuff does make sense and should be in the public domain. However, he should focus on his results and refrain from direct criticism, the readers can do that for themselves
Yeah he had a couple of bits of wood on top of a drift and hit it a couple of times and stuff went all over the bench. I also get distracted because he talks about very aero/science/techy things but all i can focus on is his skanky lawn mower in the background.
I have a feeling that he over-plays the wind tunnel use a bit, a lot is implied, without being explicit how much testing is done in the wind tunnel. however, from people I know he is an aerodynamisist in Airbus, and does know his stuff. I suspect that he gets some access to the wind tunnel.
An awful lot of what he says is consistent with JP Ballard at Swiss Side, who certainly does know his stuff… also Swiss Side wheels come out top in his test (even if he criticises the DT Swiss hubs)
Obviously Slowtwitch is well know for its impartiality and zero product bias.
The Flow saga is painful, I suspect that letter was sent by an ST member or pissed off Flow customer, it really doesn’t appear to be genuine
There are a number of things in Hambini’s test that do coincide with my own tests
Firstly I have a Mavic Cosmic 45mm, which I use on my commuter bike… they are considerably slower than my Roval CLX 32 wheels, around 10W more effort to maintain 40kph… I always knew that they were slower so I tested them using my own protocol. In Hambini’s test the Mavic Cosmic 45mm come out near the bottom
Secondly a 23mm front tyre is faster than a 25mm front. I went in for the 25mm - 28mm tyres, and still use wider tyres on rear, but narrower front seems to be quicker
Disc wheel, my own test show that a rear disc is significantly more efficient than all my other wheels, while manufacturers would like you to believe that the benefits are marginal, Hambini seem to support this view
The ST thread makes a lot about lack of transparency of his protocal, which I agree is true… however, I have been helping my son with his project, and I have not found anyone else who are transparent about their protocols either, look at Flow, Swsisside, Specialized etc, you will not find any more data or any better description of protocol
Agreed, as with most things the truth probably lies between the two extremes. He is neither the saviour of all things aero he might have you believe nor the fraud the pitchfork wielding ST pack think.
I would say he’s done some tunnel time and is clearly a bright guy to be in the industry he is. That combined with some CFD analysis and filling in the blanks from other tests or just educated intuition could produce the results he shows.
The front tyre thing is a bit of a red herring, narrower has always been faster for aero, it was only when combined with CRR there was ever any debate. (Assuming paired with an appropriate rim of course)
The bearings on my Commuter are Aksium disc (a ÂŁ100 wheel) and are still butter smooth after 1000s of kms and about 4 years. The bearings on my Reynolds Assaults were wrecked after 18 months, and they were on my best bike FFS.
