thanks Jan, in a way the casings thing is apples and oranges, in that, manufacturing vulcanized tires and hand-glued tires is apples and oranges. The casings that Jan worked out with Panaracer are special, and Panaracer has jumped on it in several new lines of tires. Since Jan brought up Challenge again, the Strada Biancas are noticeably quieter than Compass ELs (in 32mm or 38mm). The energy producing that sound has to come from somewhere. Still not a bad thing, again apples and oranges - I love my Barlows and will be buying more as I wear them out. They are very fast and ridiculously comfortable. Something else that is nice about the Barlows is the confidence that big footprint gives you when cornering.
On Tuesday, March 29, 2016 at 10:17:12 PM UTC-5, Jan Heine wrote: > > Interesting tread... and I am glad so many listmembers enjoy their Compass > tires as much as we do. (We developed them for our own bikes, after all.) > > I'd like to clarify a few things about the TPI (threads per inch) of the > Compass tires. The Extralight models actually use the thinnest casing > fibers that Panaracer makes. If packed tightly and measured the "Italian > way", these would result in 360 TPI casings. However, by using the same > thin fibers, but weaving them a bit looser, you get an even suppler casing, > but of course, the TPI is lower. More on the subject is here: > > https://janheine.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/tpi-and-tire-performance/ > > There is a lot that goes into making supple tires, and like so many > things, it's hard to put that into a single number. It's like "How do you > make a great-riding frame?" In the end, you go by experience - if many > experienced riders tell you that a certain frame is great, it probably is. > The same applies to tires. > > As a final note, if you want to compare the performance of tires, you have > to do it on the same bike. With different bikes, small things like > aerodynamics (if your stem is just 20 mm lower, your wind resistance is > about 5% lower) or the frame flex characteristics of the frame (what we > call "planing") will affect the speeds you can achieve on the road, so even > if your measurements are accurate (you need a lot of repeats to reduce the > noise in the data), you may not be measuring tire performance. That said, > the Challenge tires mentioned by one poster are very nice, too, and in our > performance testing, were about equal to the standard Grand Bois/Compass > casings. > > Jan Heine > Compass Bicycles Ltd. > www.compasscycle.com > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
