Design flaw on La Sportiva Solutions explained

La Sportiva Solutions are very famous for being a high performance shoes, but sadly they also carry a negative reputation for their dreaded lacing system. Very often those laces break before the shoe needs its first resole.

In this video I debunk a few myths regarding the cause of this problem, and then I make a small Finite Element Analysis to show that the highest bending stress is indeed in the outermost part of the lace. Since the laces are breaking through those bending stresses that means that the grommet forces the lace to have a very small radius of curvature, and there are 3 fixes for this:

1. Thicker grommets, increasing the radius of curvature
2. Wider laces. The radius would be the same, but distributed over a wider element
3. Thicker laces. The extra material would help decrease the maximum stress at the outer layer.

In my previous video I demonstrated how to implement the 3rd solution, so please do check it out if you have a Solution. It is important to fortify your laces before they break, and you can climb with those shoes through many resoles.