Supple?

A couple of quick shots of three tires hanging from my garage door opener track.

Lots of folks talk about tires being supple, and how this "supple-ness" can be a good indicator of tires with low rolling resistance.

Based on this supple-ness deal, which one of the tires above, would have the _worst_ rolling resistance?

Well, I dorked around in the garage this morning with my new toy (an IR, fixed emissivity non-contact temperature sensor) and measured those tires for rolling resistance and also how much they heated up during the testing.

Turns out that the caveman approach of flexing/bending the tire in your hands is a pretty good indicator of suppleness and rolling resistance - at least at a macro-scale!

Here's a link to some #'s for those inclined:

linky-link

Rolling Resistance

What's the potential rolling resistance of this sucker when executed well on bi-cycle:

http://www.gizmag.com/go/3603/

that's pretty cool, if you ask me - why? cuz it seems to be demonstrating concepts that strike at the core of reducing "rolling resistance" in an outside the box approach.

Then again, y'all must remember that I think decoding SRM binary power meter files is prety cool too, so yeah, YMMV!