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Comment by smallmancontrov | Hacker News Reader

> The wheels move exactly as the driver wants

If I try to turn the front wheel of my bike too far left or right it does not let me. Further, this is accomplished by a rubber bumper that continues to push for a short time after I let up, but it would be absurd to call this "lag." Normal operation of the bicycle never gets close to those limits.

The question is whether this video is showing typical system lag -- in which case, yeah, I agree, it's a problem -- or whether it is showing limiting behavior in which case getting upset about it makes as much sense as getting upset over the rubber bumpers on my bike.

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>If I try to turn the front wheel of my bike too far left or right it does not let me.

Not sure what you're referring to here - I've got multiple bicycles and the headset bearing allows them to spin around 360 degrees, the only thing preventing them from going further is the cables and hydraulic hoses.

>Further, this is accomplished by a rubber bumper that continues to push for a short time after I let up

What bumper do you mean? Your handlebars, stem, and fork should be moving as a solid unit, with minimal deformation under any reasonable conditions. There's very little elasticity in the system, perhaps the biggest source is just the spokes (or the grips if they're quite thick). The behavior exhibited in the video is way more than any properly operating bicycle.

If you ditch the cables altogether it's a blast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqCyTM1bF6Q

Your bike is different than mine. Shrug. It is not beyond my imagination to imagine the free-spinning mechanism you have described, so I cannot imagine that it is beyond yours to imagine a bumper. Try, and you will succeed.

I seriously have no idea where such a bumper would even go, let alone what it would look like. And it's not my bike, it's dozens of ones that I have owned or seen. It's also far easier to imagine the lack of something rather than the existence of something you've never even heard of. A simple link to a photo would be quite helpful.

I am not upset by a bike behavior because I know exactly what my wheels are doing just by holding the bars. Same in a mechanical steering rack. This here seems more like a guessing game

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