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Jobst Brandt:
Frequently Asked Questions about Bicycles and Bicycling

Jobst Brandt is a mechanical engineer (Stanford) with extensive experience, having worked for Porsche automobiles, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Hewlett-Packard and Avocet bicycle products.

He is best known in the bike industry as the author of The Bicycle Wheel , the definitive text on the theory and practice of building spoked bicycle wheels.

Brandt is a regular contributor to the rec.bicycles.tech Newsgroup. Most of the material below originally appeared in the rec.bicycles FAQ. The material is reproduced here in an HTML format by permission.

[Comments below are by John Allen]

Brandt is well-known for trenchant and to-the-point comments on mechanical issues, based on a deep reservoir of engineering knowledge. He is not always right -- but almost always. He does not suffer fools gladly -- thin-skinned people, buckle up take what's coming!

Sheldon has interspersed comments into some of the messages linked below, in a different color of type. When Brandt's opinion is open to question -- or a message has gone out of date -- Sheldon generally has a response well worth reading.

There is also a different -- and larger -- selection of Brandt's messages, nicely indexed like this one, on another site, Norman Yarvin's yarchive.net. Thanks, Norman!