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Very few wheels are foolhardy enough to make the claim to be a do it all wheelset: climbing, flats, 'cross, whatever. Fewer still are able to actually make that claim without falling flat on their faces. With its strength, aerodynamics, and tubular setup, the Reyonlds 46 Aero Carbon Tubular Wheelset manages to do both. Since this is an aerodynamic wheel, you're no doubt primarily interested in how it achieves lower drag, and no feature of the wheel is more responsible for this than what Reynolds calls Dispersive Effect Termination DET, which we think of as an airflow babysitter. DET Begins at the rim bed with a maximum width of 26. 2mm, which brings the rim up to the tire's width and creates a generous cradle to glue it to. There are myriad benefits to this design, included reduced turbulence, which causes drag, and increased lateral rigidity and comfort. The rim's deep dish is shaped in a NACA profiled, tapered V shape that ends with a sharp trailing edge. The Aero's shape smooths airflow over the wheel, and when that air passes the spoke face, it's easily reattached at the rear of the rim. This alleviates the stalled pockets of dead trailing air that create a backward pull on the rim. It's rare to have a real world circumstance of a straight on head wind. In reality, you spend 95% of your riding time between 0 and 20 degrees of yaw with a wind angle anywhere from 0 to 100 degrees in relation to the bearing. A lot of deep rims in this situation act as sails, pulling the bike sideways during sudden changes of direction in windy conditions. While it's impossible to completely cure this ailment, Reynolds' rim shaping DET distributes side forces read: cross wind so that the center of pressure is pushed beyond the center of mass. This means the pulling due to cross wind and the like is much less pronounced. The DET shape prevents stall at angles before 20 degrees of yaw, while most competitor's offerings experienced stall between around 12. 5 and 14 degrees of ...
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