In another thread, on some wheelbuilding articles by Eric Hjertberg that Dan posted at
http://www.thorncycles.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=9043.0, Anto says:
very interesting stuff Dan if only i had the brain to study it focus gone after 10 seconds
Ha! I found an error in an obscure corner of the math in
Jobst Brandt's The Bicycle Wheel. Now, Jobst is undoubtedly a great engineer. Just one of the fabled things he did is design the brakes for grand prix cars when he worked at Porsche; for cyclists he's the originator of the slick road tyre when he was connected with Avocet in California, and many other clever ideas. But, like most great engineers (me included -- compare, for instance, my grand universal transfer function for thermionic tubes, which is too perfect to discuss with mere mortals, at
http://www.audio-talk.co.uk/fiultra/KISS%20141%20by%20Andre%20Jute.htm), as a human being Jobst is, to put it politely, apt to mistake correction for questioning his godhead. I finally got him admit the glitch and then discovered that he'd known about it for three editions, but hadn't corrected it
because nobody had spotted it! Of course it isn't an important error, because Jobst doesn't make important mistakes; in fact, it is so trivial that I'd need to look up the correspondence, which was public, to remember what precisely it was. What I remember is that I got a migraine from not believing Jobst could make an error, and trying to make the math come out like he said it should, over and over, and of course it wouldn't.
So, Anto, if the technicalities outstay the welcome of your attention span, just say that in a spirit of goodwill you searched for the error you're sure couldn't possibly lurk in such a respected man's work, and it gave you a headache, so you went off for a ride instead.
