Has the formation of braking bumps been studied then?
I mean its obvious its caused by bicycles and there is a correlation with braking area, but other than that what do we actually know?
there’s quite a few phd’s / papers written on the subject.
science for the win!
most the geeks looking at it call the effect ‘washboarding’ – it affacts gravel roads all over the world (lots of roads affected in NZ), and everyone hates it. i couldn’t find any papers focusing on mountain bikes.
a quick read suggests it’s multi-factoral, and mathematically speaking, not unlike the mechanics of a stone skipping on water.
for a given setup, there is a threshold speed, above which bumps appear, below which they don’t – it’s not a gradual thing.
(ie, if the threshold speed is 20kph, travelling at 19kph won’t make any bumps at all)
i would hypothesise that a bike braking would have a lower threshold speed than a bike not-braking.
(simply because the energy transferred into the ground would be higher if the brakes are on, and it takes energy to move the soil into the waves, but, like i say, this is just my hypothesis)
i ****ing love science.