Index Categories:
Carbon Construction – The real cost of building carbon wheels
Wheel Aerodynamics – 0º yaw vs. 0-20º test results – a.ka. designing for the sweet spot
From:
Wells Jan 20, 2006, 9:29 AM
Question:
Are Zipp Wheels that good?Are Zipp wheels really that good? Everybody seems to be using them at time trials and triathlons. Are they really worth $1600.00 for a pair of 404's vs. HED Alps or something like that that is cheaper. Are they durable? I have seen spokes broken out of a couple of pairs of Zipp wheels, like 303's in my LBS and have just hear sligh rumors that they might not be as durable as some other wheels. I don't know, but for that price they should be bombproof, right? I know that all wheels can break, but are Zipp wheels really workth the money over other wheelssets like MAVIC or HED? Are the newer 202's just for road racing as well, they don't look aero, and are also really expensive. Any thoughts?
Josh:
Since I'm biased on the sujbect I won't comment on whether our wheel are 'worth' it or not, but I'll provide some insight as to our costs.
The biggest cost factors in our wheels that nobody else has are related to two factors: 1. continual evolution and 2. US manufacturing and materials.
We are the only company with a continual evolution policy towards our wheels and rims, meaning that we continually research and then change rims or hub or whatever as quikcly as possible. The 404 for instance has now seen 5 shape evolutions and the addition of dimples in 6 years. This is unheard of in the industry where the other popular TT wheels have remained essentially unchanged for as many as 15 years. In 2000 our 404 was competitive with the Hed3 from 0-5 degrees in the wind tunnel and uncompetitive everywhere else.
The next year we evolved the shape to be slightly faster than the H3 from 0-8 degrees, but removed about 60 grams of weight. By 2005, the new dimpled shaped rims are significantly faster than an H3 from 0-22 degrees of yaw in the wind tunnel and lighter still. The problem here is that continued wind tunnel time and evolution of the rim shapes means that we can only ammortize tooling over 1 or maybe 2 years before we update to new tools. The evolution of dimples alone added about $40,000 to the cost of a rim tool, compared to a rim tool in China which will run about $1800 US, but I guarantee that as soon as we have a better 404, we'll be in production on it.
The same can be said for spokes, we were the first company to work with Sapim in Belgium and adopt the CX-Ray spoke, this is the world’s most expensive spoke at about $2.50 each, but is the most aero spoke we've ever seen in testing and, due to a special heat treatment, has more than double the fatigue life. People said we were nuts to use spokes this expensive, but two years later Campagnolo and Reynolds both went to the same spoke, thus rasing their wheel prices as well. Hubs are another example, we design and make our own hubs specifically for each wheel. This allows us to custom tailor the angle of each spoke hole to the depth of rim, and design the hubs into the wheel as a system instead of just buying off the shelf hubs.
We also use the industry's most expensive Swiss bearings, these are more than 2.5 times rounder than any bearing available elsewhere, and are rounder even than the ceramic bearings most companies are selling, but that comes at a price, we pay slightly more for the 6 cartridge bearings in a hubset than we could buy a completely assembled hubset from JoyTech in Taiwan. This is basically because precision and tolerance of parts comes at an exponential cost, so that you can buy 25 millionths balls by the kilo, 10 millionths balls are a few cents each, and the 1 millionths ceramic balls in the Z wheels cost about $6 per ball, so you are paying ever more for smaller and smaller gains, and this is true for an entire wheelset. Every last detail of a Zipp wheel is pushed to the limits of existing technology in terms of aerodynamics, strength, weight, stiffness and durability, but each incremental gain comes at a cost.
The other cost driver is US manufacturing and materials. We are dedicated to manufacturing in the US as we feel that we can evolve faster, and if engineering is 20 ft away from manufacturing we are better able to not only evolve the product, but solve problems when they arise. With Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturing it is very difficult to evolve the product since engineering and design are disconnected from production, not to mention if there are problems with a product you can be stuck waiting weeks for your shipment of parts from Asia to get it fixed where we can now just fix it ourselves very quickly. Being in Speedway, IN most of our people come from auto racing composites and make in 1 hour what a Taiwanese makes in a day or a chinese make in a week, labor cost is high, but our people have a high degree of expertise and most of them have been working with composite materials for years so you definitely get what you pay for.
Other than Trek, we are now the only carbon rim/wheel manufacturers in the US right now, so we face an uphill battle on costs, but I think that the quality and speed of evolution are well worth it. We also machine all of our hub parts in the US as we can use higher precision machinery and have more control over tolerancing and fits than is possible currently in Asia. This has allowed us to innovate new processes that would not have previously been possible, like using wire EDM to cut ratchet rings and pawls that are more than 2 times harder and more wear resistant than other technologies can produce, but at the same time more than 10 times more dimensionally accurate. The result is a hubset with a 180 gram rear and 82 gram front hub that spins with about 1 watt less energy input at 30mph than an other hub currently available and as much as 2-3 watts less than some. For many 1 watt is no big deal, but if you're Dave Zabriskie 1 watt was all it took to beat Lance in the Tour prologue last year, so in some instances it can be a very big deal (he also had ceramic bearings which can save another 0.5-0.8 watts).
But that brings up another key point, we do no specials, so a wheel for you or for Peter Reid or CSC or whatever, will be picked from the same production, off of the same hook and shipped without discrimination. Many of the pros use Z series stuff, which is more expensive still, but when a shipment goes to CSC for example, the wheels are simply pulled from inventory if we have it, or put into boxes as the wheels are finished and shipped right along side wheels for your local bike shop, there is no cherry picking or special manufacturing for those guys, as we feel that every single wheel should be pro-level.
Lastly, there is some cost in our event support, but we feel that this is very critical to our business model. We have people working tech support and supporting our product at every single US based Ironman event and many if not most of the other large regional Triathlons such as Wildflower and others, these same guys also work neutral support during these races so it is a pretty grueling schedule they keep. There is a definite cost to have two employess on the road dedicated to servicing racers and athletes as well as visiting bike shops, doing tech clinics and so on, but this keeps us connected to the market and so is very important.
For more information on Rim Shape and the aerodynamic “sweet spot” see our engineering white paper on rim shape:
Rim Shape:
http://www.zipp.com/RimShape/tabid/103/Default.aspxFor more information on hubs check out these two engineering white papers:
A Note on Hubs A Note on Bearing TechnologyIndex Categories:
Carbon Construction – The real price of building carbon wheels
Carbon Construction – Fairings vs. Structural Carbon – What’s the functional difference?
Hub Engineering – Bearing Importance
Machining tollerences and real-world effects
From:
GearGrinder Dec 19, 2006, 7:59 AM
Question:
Is a Zipp twice as fast as a Hed? Why are they double the price? A recent thread got me thinking... considering that Zipp's are almost twice the price of Hed's, why on earth are Hed wheels not more popular? Why is SlowTwitch so Zipp crazy? Surely they're not twice as fast?
Example (prices from trisports.com):
Zipp 808 clincher REAR
Retail: $1180
Hed Jet clincher 60/90 combo (front & rear)
Retail: $1320
Are the Hed wheels in any way slower (or slow enough to justify only being half the price of a Zipp)? Call me Captain Obvious, but it kind of seems like a no brainer - one of these seems like a steal compared to the other...
Josh:
I think most of the pricing pricing debate you see among riders is largely the result of people comparing apples to oranges. The Hed Jet is simply an aluminum wheel with a carbon fairing bonded to the aluminum rim to add an aero component to the wheel. This is a very inexpensive way of making an aero wheel and has been used by numerous manufacturers to build an aero wheel at a very low cost. The Jet is simply a price point aero wheel and if you are going to make a comparison, you need to compare it to the FlashPoint wheels from Zipp, which at the same price point offer a better hub, DT spokes, and a fully structural carbon rim with welded aluminum hoop utilizing two of the patents also used in Zipp wheels. I think that when you put the Jet up against the FP wheels, the FP wheels are the clear choice, but that can be debated.
A more fair comparison would be between the Zipps and Stingers, although the Stinger uses the same hub as the Jet, which is not quite as nice as the hubset used in FlashPoint. The Zipp wheels use a hub which is made in the USA and to a level of precision higher even than Chris King, and actually costs slightly more than the King hubs due to the ABEC5/grade10 swiss bearings, these bearings alone cost more than a good hubset made in Asia and are higher grade than most ceramic bearing upgrades that people are offering. Combined with the Sapim CS-ray spoke, the world's most expensive and most fatigue resistant spoke, and the lightest handmade rims available and you end up with a very expensive wheelset. Every component is manufactured entirely in the USA from US materials except for the spokes from Belgium and Bearings from Switzerland, we use absolutely no Chinese labor or components, in fact two of the carbon fiber grades we use are considered 'defense critical' and only available in the US. This does make for a higher cost, but allows us to innovate continually and revise and improve much faster than using overseas manufacturing. For example, we made more than 10 laminate revisions this year as we found new materials, or new layup concepts, we can continually improve and innovate as our engineers are located 20 feet from the production floor, compared to working in Asia where you innovate only every 3-5 years.
In the last 5 years we have seen 4 rim shape revisions to the 404, the development of the 808, 5 generations of 303, the creation of dimpled composite technology (and with it the tooling manufacturing technology necessary to manufacture this), the first use of ceramic bearings in the bicycle industry in 2001. And we were the first company to push for the development and then adopt butted/bladed spokes plus numerous others inovations resulting in more than a dozen patents issued and pending.
The hubs are another example, we made over 20 improvements to the hub in 2006 alone including the bicycle industry's first use of wire EDM for manufacturing of the drive components making the highest precision hardened components ever to be used on a bicycle in components that are rated at 60-62 Rockwell C with precision greater than 0.000002"...3 years ago this was technology so expensive is was only being used for surgical implants and missile guidance hardware manufacturing… but the result is that the rear is now only 176 grams and the front 80 grams and roll with the lowest rolling friction of any hub ever made, and in their stock form beat out every currently available ceramic hub upgrade.
So in defending our price point I think that you have to realize that we are doing something completely different from anybody else. We are creating, designing, and manufacturing our own product from scratch in our own facility, with an eye on absolute refinement, highest possible precision and greatest efficiency… and not focusing on hitting some specific price point where we say we want to make the fastest possible wheel for X dollars… that is what FlashPoint is for, with Zipp we go as hard as possible to create and develop technologies to be the best available without a primary consideration on cost, so when you buy Zipp you know that what you are paying for is the absolute height of technology available at the time you spend your money and nothing less.
There’s a few different tech articles on our website that go into more detail on some of these topics:
Rim Shape:
http://www.zipp.com/RimShape/tabid/103/Default.aspxA Note on Hubs A Note on Bearing TechnologyIndex Categories:
Carbon Construction – The real cost of building carbon wheels
From:
JohnA Dec 12, 2004, 10:05 AM
Question:
Zipp 404 price hike $1600 list for the 2005 Zipp 404's! Damn! All for the dimples? If I recall they were $1350 last season...
Josh:
There are a million reasons that the prices have gone up, not the least of which are carbon shortages due to the aerospace boom and wage rates in this country added to skyrocketing insurance and other costs. Plus, our factory is located in Speedway, IN, surrounded by a half dozen autoracing composite shops, so all of our people are incredibly experienced, and are paid very well in order to keep them from moving accross the street to another job, the quality is worth it, but the cost is a multiple of what it would be elsewhere in the US. Here are some other factors:
The costs of raw carbon and aluminum materials are darn near spiraling out of control right now, with carbon nearly increasing 50% and aluminum practically doubling since last year, plus lead times nearly tripling for both materials, put us in a position where we have to pay significantly more for a material that we have to better forecast the usage of, and order and wait for months to receive. The result is the carrying of 2-3 times the inventory, of something that is already more expensive, and it snowballs from there. And while we have worked hard to cut our delivery times to dealers we’re still shooting to cut them even further. But our raw material vendors are pushing lead times further, so this means much higher internal costs for us. Also, we only utilize US made raw materials which are already between 50 and 100% more costly than their foreign counterparts, so these increases have really hit our company quite hard.
The only imported parts we do use are spokes and bearings, both of which are the most expensive in the industry by far. The CX-Ray spokes are nearly 4 times the cost of the next most expensive spoke, and our bearings cost between 8 and 12 times the industry average, meaning that a single bearing cartridge costs more than the 6 cartridges used in a traditional hubset, so when the dollar falls another 20% against the Euro, it really hits our company hard.
The bigger factor is development and tooling. Many people look at the dimples and say 'that added how much cost!?!' but it isn't that simple. We expect our products to be the highest technology, finest manufactured products in the world bar none, and to acheive that we continually develop and tweak the designs using wind tunnel testing, lab testing, pro racing, etc. From a business growth standpoint, our goal from 2000-2005 was to build a hands-down, no-doubt-about-it (in the customers mind, not just the tunnel) answer to the 3-spoke wheel. It’s hard as an analytical engineer to understand why, but peple view the 3 or 4 spoke wheels (now 15-year old designs in some cases) as super high technology – the appearance just seems tso racical, even if the results against the latest designes aren’t.
By 2001 we had developed the 404 to be nearly equal aerodynamically to these wheels. Each of the next few years saw new rim shapes and continued testing and now we have a 404 which is nearly 0.1lb less drag between 0 and 20 degrees of yaw over the venerable old trispoke, and makes roughly 1/2 the side force in a cross wind for better handling. The improvements with time are rather phenomenal, but take unbelievable time, money and resources to acheive (and then we went and developed the 808 to beat that…call us obsesive). In 4 years, we had spent a fortune, but realized our goal, and had developed a product that was really gaining an amazing following. The 303 and 404 each had 4 major rim shape revisions in the last 4 years, meaning that the entire company has retooled 4 times before this year, whereas many companies have designs which have remained the same for more than 10 years, which is a very excellent way to help manage costs, but is not the intent of our company.
The true story of the dimpled rims is not so much in the concept of the dimples themselves (which took a few dozen prototypes and some 50 hours of wind tunnel time), but in the tooling required to actually make the product. It took us 2 years to develop the dimpled disc tooling, and that is relatively simple as the disc is flat. It has taken us another 2 years to dimple rim tooling, and the actual processing is done by an aerospace tooling firm at prices which would truly shock you, but the result is something very radical and effective.
At the same time we’ve developed the dimples, we’ve also created the world's lightest crankset, added the 808 wheelset to the line, added an entire line of bars and stems, developed the most technologically advanced traditionally flanged hubset available and changed the face of track racing with the highest tech track hubset ever produced, all of which comes at considerable design and manufacturing costs.
Lastly, with the exception of the bars and stems, all our other product, wheels and hubs, are made in the USA, making us the only wheel company manufacturing it's own hubsets right here. This often overlooked part of the wheel has proven to be the lightest, most reliable, and smoothest spinning hub on the market, machined from only US made Alcoa materials (and certified materials at that) and machined to tolerances never before used in cycling components. The result when combined with the ultra-precision swiss bearings is a set of hubs which can save 1-2 watts of energy over any other hub available, and that single component has undergone more than 40 revisions in the last 12 months to make it smoother, lighter, etc. (not to mention a warranty/complaint rate nearly 40 times less than our previous Swiss made hubs)
In the end, there is more material cost and labor in a wheelset than in most frames, so in a way, they are still a relative bargain. I know that our company's philosophy and products won't appeal to everybody, but for us, the goal is to continually reinvent the medium, and push the product to places never before imagined. We have a pretty good history of this with the industry's first 3 spoke composite wheel, the Zipp 2001 frame, and now aerodynamically textured surfaces, which are already being used in clothing, frames, and elsewhere. I think that we have been successful in our desire to innovate, and hope that even if you don't purchase our products, that you will understand and respect our mission in the industry.
I think the mention of how well the products hold resale value is telling of not only the quality and durability of the products themselves, but also of how advanced the technologies are for their time, with 10 year old wheelsets still competitive in weight and aerodynamics to many currently available products today, if you download the technical white papers from our internet site, you will see that the thing we are most proud of is the dramatic improvements we've made not over our competitors, but over ourselves these last 4 years.