Welcome to the Hambini Engineering website. This website started off as my place on the internet for me to detail technical aspects of bikes, cars and my love of engineering. This is largely in conjunction with my YouTube channel where content mainly involves bikes and cars.
Recent posts from the Hambini Blog
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The aerodynamic performance of wheels often grabs the headlines and the marketing budget but the reality is the hubs and the bearings within them will have more of a performance differential for the average cyclist. As an example, the power differential between wheels of an equivalent depth at speeds of less than 35km/h will only be 1-2W, the difference in bearing friction can easily exceed that.
Wheel hubs and freehubs account for around 60% of the rotational friction in a bicycle drivetrain. The remaining friction is from the pedal bearings, bottom bracket and pulley wheels. The total amount of friction is small but a cost effective marginal gain.
The term rotational drag has been used of late to describe the amount of power required to spin a wheel up to speed. This loss is a significant aerodynamic loss of about 25 to 30 percent. Rotational drag is not the same as frictional drag which comes from the mechanical components.
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Update, more wheels added 01 June 2019
Update, more wheels added 06 July 2019
In terms of drag caused by a bicycle rider, the biggest loss is caused by the rider themselves followed by the wheels and frame.
The drag caused by wheels is significant because of two fundamental reasons. The first is they hit the air first as they are the most forward part of the bike and second because they are rotating. The effective air speed at the top of a wheel/tyre is double the indicated speed of the bike.
In the bike industry, wheel aerodynamic testing has generally been conducted by two groups of people - Wheel manufacturers and journalists. Wheel manufacturers will usually adjust tests to make their particular wheels look more favourable than their competitors in testing. This is usually achieved by a combination of adjusting speeds and angles. The reality is this type of test is not impartial.
Journalists on the other hand tend to
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For the past few months I have been working with NTN and one of my racing teams in developing a bottom bracket suitable for SRAM dub cranksets. SRAM's Dub is their current bottom bracket standard which uses a 29mm (28.99mm) axle with a bearing landing spacing of ~90mm. The 29mm bore diameter is non standard and no tier 1 bearing manufacturer makes a bearing with a bore of this size.
In order to accommodate the axle a thin delrin insert was required. This had the advantage of prolonging crank life because the hardened bearing did not come into contact with the relatively soft crank axle. The technical difficulty was manufacturing an insert of only 0.5mm wall thickness at a nominal diameter of 30mm. My competitors were using blow moulded nylon inserts but I found the tolerances on these to be quite poor. Instead I elected to machine the adaptors in delrin. New jigs
