What They Didn't Have

From Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

More than three decades ago, Hal Ruzal, the Mercian maven and mechanic par excellence of Bicycle Habitat, rode his bicycle across the United States for the first (!) time.  

A friend who accompanied him had several flats and was down to his last inner tubes when they were in Kansas.   Now, I've never been to Kansas, but I don't imagine that, even today, it's as easy to find some bike items there as it is in, say, Portland, Minneapolis or Boston.  However, in those days, according to Hal, "there wasn't a single Presta valve tube in the entire state of Kansas."

He can tell a good story, but I don't think he was exaggerating. I don't think the very first shop in which I worked--in New Jersey--had Presta valve tubes, either. For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised to know that most shops in the Garden State circa 1975 didn't have them.


If they didn't have Presta valves,  it meant they didn't have sew-up tires, and probably didn't have the high-pressure clinchers (like the Michelin Elan) that were just starting to become available around then--or the new rims Mavic and Rigida were making for use with them.  

If you were in a rural area, it could even be difficult to find things like toe clips and straps. (The only clipless pedal available then was the Cinelli M-71, a.k.a. "The Suicide Pedal.) Around that time, John Rakowski, who rode his bicycle around the world, ordered the Karrimor panniers and handlebar bags he used directly from the manufacturer in England:  Very few shops carried good touring gear, and supplies were sporadic, to put it mildly.

Those times were probably the heyday of mail-order shops.  Sometimes the shops' proprietors (who were almost invariably the buyers, if their wives weren't) didn't even know where to find high-quality bike items.  Or, if they could find a source, the prices would be exorbitant because they were ordering only one, and paying the full shipping costs.

The lightest bike sold in the first shop in which I worked was the Raleigh Super Course.  

Raleigh Super Course, in the 1975 catalogue.

It was a pretty bike, I thought, especially in that shade of candy-apple red. (The green wasn't bad, either.)  But I would soon find myself riding a bike that, in almost every way, exceeded that one.  I didn't get it in that first shop in which I worked.  I couldn't have.

Is This What The Vikings Had In Mind?

Today I am going to create a post that will get lots and lots of views for all of the wrong reasons.  I will express shock and moral indignation. (What other kind of indignation is there, really?)  I will protest some more...and more.  And, well...we all know what happens when the lady doth protest too much.




Sometimes I think a good working definition of the word "model" is "someone who is better--or, at least more attractive--than the product he or she is being employed to sell."   Such is the case with the young woman in the ad for Crescent Bicycles, which appeared in Bicycling! in 1975 or thereabouts.

The bicycles she was trying to entice young men into buying were made in Sweden and bear no relation to velocipedes bearing the same name that were made in the USA at the end of the 19th, and the beginning of the 20th, centuries.  The bikes looked cool in a funky '70's sort of way:  orange paint with checkerboard (that, I think, was supposed to represent a checkered flag) graphics.  That, actually, was fairly surprising for something that came out of the land of Queen Christina.  

Even more surprising was the workmanship--or, should I say, the lack thereof.  This was even true on the higher models made from Reynolds 531 tubing.  I worked on a few of those bikes and found, not only fairly sloppy braze works around the lugs, but globs of molten metal that cooled into unfinished edges of metal at the points where the bottom bracket shell and seat lugs met the frame tubes.  This made it difficult to fit parts such as bottom bracket cups and seat posts accurately.


Perhaps the worst problem of all, though, was the toe clip overlap.  Mind you, I don't mind some toe clip overlap.  But I think that had my shoes been any bigger, I could have flicked the quick-release lever on the front wheel with my toes.  All right, that's an exaggeration.  But I don't recall any other bike--not even the most extreme track machine--that placed a rider's lower digits so close to the front wheel spokes.  As Michael Kone and Sheldon Brown wryly noted, most of these bikes probably "met untimely deaths in commuter hell accidents."


Those young women really should have been wearing helmets and using foot retention!