whoops found it on the new bike thread

Big deal or incremental improvement?

http://www.powertap.com/collections/hubs/products/powertap-gs-hub

JESUS CHRIST AND BUDDHA @Marc.

The last breathes of a dying empire... PowerTap is the Blackberry of the power meter industry, great in its day but wholly outdated.

hold on here though.  i am liking the powertap with bluetooth to use with the almighty iphone of many colors.  am about to get ride brooklyn to build up a nice cheap g3 with a solid rim.  what am i not getting with that?  how is powertap outdated?

It's really just tongue-in-cheek piling on for the hub based meter in a crank based world.  Powertaps are very solid.  I had one and the customer service was very good.  They are accurate and durable.  I have three wheel sets and use them all so I went with a Stages power meter this year, which does not look as durable as a power tap.  

McKay Duncan said:

hold on here though.  i am liking the powertap with bluetooth to use with the almighty iphone of many colors.  am about to get ride brooklyn to build up a nice cheap g3 with a solid rim.  what am i not getting with that?  how is powertap outdated?

The main thing you're not getting is the ability to use your power meter with any wheel but the one it's in. That's a deal breaker for me, at this point.

McKay, as my father-in-law is fond of saying, "Don't let the bastards get you down." I think both from a practicality and technical point of view the PowerTap makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. The obvious drawback is that you are locked into one wheel for both racing and training if you want to record and analyze power data.

Personally, I don't mind racing with a 32-spoke wheel in all but long/hard road races. In crits, I don't want to ride cautiously, altering my lines worried that I'm going to break a very expensive wheel. Same for park races, when I ride through the streets of NYC to get to and fro. I'm quite willing to give up the admittedly real aero advantages of a set of go fast wheels, for the peace of mind of not cracking a carbon rim if I hit some irregular pavement just so.

Of course there ARE plenty of ways to try to split the difference each with it's own drawbacks...race with a trick front wheel (Mis-matching wheel set? Ye gads!), build up the rear with fancy aly-lumee-lynum (or however you UK folks say it) rim, 24 bladed spokes.

And as far as the attempted interventions on my behalf by well-meaning clubmates. I appreciate it, but my own PowerTap issues come with a lot of baggage. Most of it real. Fortunately, for me, "Ant+-less," it all becomes moot, and the decision is usually made very easy for me when I do searches for head-units and all of the alle carte accessories required to make modern power meters function as intended, and remind myself that I just don't have anywhere near the coin to drop on any of that stuff. Sticker shock.

And then you say, but "so and so is selling a perfectly good such and such." Well, some of you know that I do actually have and train with Power already. Yaks calls it the power of the Duncan YoYo. And so to drop, again, what is still not insignificant coin (see previous comment about not having an Ant+ head-unit, HR strap, wheel sensors etc) on what feels like an incremental improvement on my current set-up seems like not the right thing to do either.

Of course talk to me in 5 minutes when my borderline functioning zipp/PT wheel jumps over the fence.

stages pm = $700

It is pretty easy to move a power tap from bike to bike but you have to be using the same cassette on each bike. Something like a stages can go from road to cross to track to Mtb as long as u have the same length cranks

Let's hope that, like with all other types of electronics, healthy competition along with the maturity of this technology will lead to more affordable options. Due to the niche nature of what we do and how these devices benefit us, they've been incredibly expensive for too long. I'd like to see what the markup is on these things looks like. I don't think that there's an awful lot that goes into them. Why do they need to be five times the price of my off contract smartphone that has way more computing power and can do so much more? Strain gauges? Nope, not buying it. Volume? I don't think so... especially after being on the market for so long. They need to be cheaper.

Because I have not hit 200 MPH since I started using a Garmin to upload GPS data to Strava, I think Garmin is a more accurate way of generating GPS data for Strava than Strava's own phone app.

vlad said:

The best thing Powertap can do is to make their hubs dirt cheap. Why are people still paying over $2K for an SRM? The answer:  because they are morons. No offense.

says the man with several BMCs.

I guess with Politics & Religion off the table all we have left to squabble over is gear choice :P

I like to think there is a spectrum of Moronity with the guy who let his two year old play with the seam of the moving baggage carousel at the airport on one end, and the people who can't get their milk & sugar into their coffee without clogging the entire shop on the other.

mugwump said:

says the man with several BMCs.

And two powermeters. I got a deal on both as well as the BMC's.

Yeah I buy all my Rapha stuff on eBay or clearance. It's ok.

Regarding PowerTaps, you need two wheel sets with PowerTap hubs to be fully in the game: a set of alloy training clinchers and a set of carbon racing tubulars.

well, when you subtract out the cost of the hub your are replacing, say 350$, then the 790$ ptap looks like 440$, so two ptaps, one for each wheelset, means a total cost of say 900$, which puts it near the stages.  except it is easier to swap between bikes i think. so, i like your perspective, Jeff.  danke.

you could also just not buy carbon racing wheels. instead, use the money to buy extra comfortable pillows on which to cry yourself to sleep every night.

@Marc,

I give you an unshaven, hairy Yak who is grinding his teeth...and bemoaning the fragility of carbon...Oh and he is bemoaning, trust me on this...

OK, as a newbie, I'd like to get the group's input on this. I have the Giant TCR Composite 2 and so far have changed out the saddle and stem (thanks to ACME bike fitting), and tires. I'm thinking about upgrading the Tiagra 12x28 cassette to an Ultegra 11x25, but I should probably be thinking about a set of racing wheels. I'm still kind of bewildered by the variety of types and price points on wheelsets, though.

Anything else I should be looking at here?  (Not really looking for "a new bike", but there's also no getting around the N+1 rule...)

@Tim you won't find a performance difference between cassettes; they'll just have different durability.

Hey Tim.  Congrats on the upgrades - it really will be like getting a new bike.  I swapped out all of my components on my Trek after my Acme fit and am glad I did.

Tim,

Tim, the long and the short of it, when it comes to wheel recommendations, is that the answer is always, "it depends." There is only one easy answer that no one will argue with....

• Should you get a second set of wheels if you are a racing cyclist? YES, YES, a thousand times yes.

As the team's un-official slowest to pull the trigger on any purchase over $25, I empathize. Probably best to figure out your budget and then ask yourself a few questions:

1. What qualities in a wheel do you value most? (weight, speed, durability, wet weather performance)
2. What kind of racing action will these wheels see most? (park racing, hilly out of town road races, crits, time trials, cyclocross)
   

which bibs are better?

http://www.competitivecyclist.com/castelli-leggerezza-2-bib-tight-no-chamois-mens?ti=UExQIFJ1bGUgQmFzZWQ6V2ludGVyIENsZWFyYW5jZVx1MjAxNEJpYiBUaWdodHM6MToxMzpjYXQxMDAyMDQ1NDY

or

http://www.competitivecyclist.com/pearl-izumi-elite-thermal-barrier-bib-tight-mens?ti=UExQIFJ1bGUgQmFzZWQ6V2ludGVyIENsZWFyYW5jZVx1MjAxNEJpYiBUaWdodHM6MTo4OmNhdDEwMDIwNDU0Ng