Here’s a really nice visual for showing how mechanical advantage in cantilever brakes changes with their configuration.

Cantilever Geometry Visual Calculator

via Harris Cyclery Blog

Ok I lied, I do have some useful information. I was recently contacted by Rob of Brightspoke about their stem calculator. They say “Our mission is to put more people on bikes by educating consumers.” Sounds good to me.

Instead of providing any helpful content I’ve changed the theme on the site. It’s one I developed for a few other sites. I’m considering rewriting the spoke calculator in PHP since I’ve had trouble with it’s current incarnation as a Rails application. Perhaps I’ll try out the CakePHP framework I’ve heard so much about.

I came across this essay today while searching for something else.

Held Up By Downward Pull

Here’s a couple of sites that will help you if you’re looking to compare weights on bike parts

• Weight Weenies – Allow visitors to submit data.
• Wheelbuilder.com – I wish this data could be incorporated into my spoke length calculator but this is a good way to spec out wheels by weight. Mainly high-end stuff.

Alex Whetmore is a smart guy and bicycle geek. He’s written up a nice article on his experiences building his own generator powered lights. It’s worth filing away if only for his standlight schematic.

I’ve been thinking about writing one of these for this site but this one’s pretty nice.

I finally got back around to working on the spoke calculator some more and now it’s ready for release. It’s got most of the data from the latest version of Spocalc. I had to clean up the Spocalc databases because there was some questionable/confusing information in them. This web application uses the same math as Spocalc and I’ve used them both to build wheels so I feel comfortable sharing it with other people.

Please send any feedback to james @ this domain.

I just posted a bottom bracket cheat sheet in the Resources section. It comes courtesy of Michael Webber. Hopefully I’ll have some more of these cheatsheets in the coming months.

Alex Wetmore’s new stem visualizer he posted this morning prompted me to create a new section for online tools.