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Comment by rienbdj | Hacker News Reader

weight is a big factor between cheap and expensive groupsets

Overheard at a popular stop for bikers near me: "Yeah, I could have gotten the model above it which is 500g lighter, but it would have cost me another $3500."

It should be noted that the guy who said it could have easily lost 500g by a minuscule adjustment to his daily snack intake...

No, it should not have been noted.

Maybe it's a local thing, but a considerable number of the guys stopping there (it's pretty much the midpoint on a quite nice and highly popular round trip) are middle-aged, and clearly quite well off. So they eat well and ride expensive bikes...

I'll just leave it at this: this particular guy's eating habits, whether you're privy to the details of them or not (and I suspect you aren't), were totally not germane to the discussion. The first sentence was legit, and the second was entirely unnecessary.

To be fair, this is in fact a very common observation among cyclists, with no snark intended. Obviously, mass is mass, it matters not one whit if it's meat or space-age metal.

It's just funny how many wannabee Eddy Merckxs seem immune to that truth, and we who grok it like to snicker when we hear discussions like the one cited.

Not quite. rotating mass (e.g. tyres) is more important to bike handling and efficiency.

I said snack intake because most people do eat some snack, and it's the easiest area to cut calories. Of course, he could alternatively have cut down his dinner portion by a slight amount for the same effect.

500 grams is ~10 calories per day for a year, and 10 calories is 1/25th of a Snickers bar or about one eight of a potato.

Either way, he'd get the same effect has the extra $3500 would have, which was what I found amusing and why I mentioned it.

As the cycling component equivalent of the CAP theorem goes: light, cheap, strong - pick any 2.

How light, how cheap, and how strong, though? Seems like an incomplete theorem.

I had a similar experience: I could buy a steel water bottle cage for $12, or a nearly identical model made of titanium for a savings of a few dozen grams at the cost of an extra $60 or so.

This seems like an exceptionally silly expense for a device which is designed to carry two pounds of water around!

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