A Conversion That Should Have Been 650B, Perhaps

Today I am going to recall another bike from a respected one-man builder.  Like my LandShark, it didn’t have his name on it. In fact, when I acquired the bike, it didn’t have any name on it at all.

After deciding that my Raleigh Competition was too big for me—and wanting a bike I could ride on paths without getting a mountain bike (At the time, mountain bikes were still clunky.)-- I ended up with an accidental conversion.

Frank, my old boss at Highland Park Cyclery, had a Ross Signature frame.  Now, you might ask, “Since when was Ross a one-man operation?”  Actually, it never was.  However, for a time, they contracted builder Tom Kellogg to build a series of bikes that would rival the best of any other builder.  Like Trek, Ross seemed to have designs on becoming the Great American Bike.

A Tom Kellogg bike.

In spite of its high quality and the sort of clientele to whom HPC catered, the frame gathered dust.  It may have had to do with having been painted a color (grayish-green) nobody wanted.   Also, the bike frame, which was built for touring, didn’t have braze-ons for cantilever brakes, racks or shift levers (or cable guides for bar-end shifters:  STI and Ergo were still a decade or so on the horizon).  It also had only one pair of braze-on mounts for a water bottle cage.

Frank sent the frame back and asked for braze-ons.  By that time, Kellogg was no longer working for Ross.  For all Frank or I knew, the bits may have been brazed by whoever welded Ross kids’ bikes.   The frame came back painted in a pewter color, which I rather liked, and with the requested braze-ons: for a rack, a water bottle cage and cantilever brakes.  The latter were exactly where they should have been on the frame—for a 26” mountain bike wheel.

The only problem was that the frame was built for 700 C wheels. So, the there was more vertical clearance between the seat stay bridge or the front fork crown and the tires than on just about any other bike I’ve ever seen.

That would have been great if it were possible to ride large studded tires.  However, that wasn’t possible because the clearance between the chainstays (at the bottom bracket) and the front fork blades was too narrow for a true off-road tire.  They could have accommodated, at most, a tire 38C (1.5 inches) wide, which was still wider than most touring cyclists (at least here in the US) were riding at the time.

 So I set up the bike with some of the earliest mountain bike “slicks” from, if I recall correctly, Tioga.   Later, when Avocet introduced their slicks with inverted treads, I switched to them:  They may have been the best city/commuter tires ever made.  And I installed fenders.  There was enough space between them and the tire treads to ride a Worksman Cycle through.

I used that bike as a commuter and on a couple of longer trips—including the one I took when I stormed out after an argument I had with Eva.  A lot of people gawked at it:  It was the bicycle equivalent of a platypus.  But I really enjoyed it:  Certainly, it turned out to be one of the more versatile bikes I’ve owned.  But, after about two years, it met its untimely demise at the rear end of a taxi behind Penn Station. (“And lead us not into Penn Station..”)

By now, you may be thinking what I’m thinking:  What if that bike had been a 650B conversion?  Given the state of bicycling and the bike business of that time (ca. 1986-88), I don’t think that whoever brazed on those cantilever brake bosses had even heard of such a size.  Rims and tires of that size were not available in the US at that time and were even, by that time, difficult to find in Europe. 

I tried to find a photo of that bike.  It really was like nothing else you’ve seen or ridden.

After I crashed it, I got the Miyata 912 I mentioned in an earlier post. Both of those bikes were worthy companions to my Colnago Arabesque.

American Style

A few posts ago, I talked about the 1970's  "Bike Boom."  One phenomenon related to it is the rise, for a time, of a sort of cottage industry.  For the first time since the Six-Day Races of the 1930's, a number of American artisans were building frames in the US.  At the same time, a few notable framebuilders emigrated to the US and set up shop here.

Until that time, about the only high-quality custom bike built in the US was the Schwinn Paramount.  Nearly all of the bikes ridden by US Olympians until 1984 were Paramounts; one urban legend of the time said that company founder Ignaz Schwinn and his sons and grandsons built those bikes--on which they never made any money--out of patriotism and their desire to ensure that Schwinn was the Great American Bike Builder.

But by the 1970's, a small but growing number of cyclists wanted high-quality lightweight bicycles.  Most people don't realize how labor-intensive building bicycles, especially those with hand-built frames is. That accounts for their high prices and why Schwinn could not keep up with the demand, as small as it was.  So, a few builders thought it was a good time to enter the frame.

Colin Laing came here from England, Falliero Masi from Italy and Francisco Cuevas from Argentina (He began his career in Spain) and set up shop.  Around the same time, Albert Eisentraut, Tom Kellogg, McLean Fonvielle and other US-born framebuilders began practicing their craft.  

One such builder was Brian Baylis, who built this bike:

I am sorry that this isn't a higher-resolution photo.  The details of this frame are just amazing.  And, of course, the color scheme is something I might have ordered.  But it's not a "fade"; even though this frame was built in the '80's, Baylis--or whoever ordered this frame--didn't get sucked into that unfortunate trend.

He just recently retired from framebuilding.  Others from his generation stopped building or were hired by larger bike manufacturers to build "custom" bikes for them.  The reasons why they did so were mainly economic:  In spite of their high cost to the consumer, most custom-built frames make very little money for those who build them.  It's also hard on the body:  that is one reason why Baylis has retired and Peter White, renowned for his wheelbuilding and his eponymous shop in New Hampshire, stopped building frames.  
 

Ross: The Ramones' Lament?

If there is a cycling Nirvana, would all of the ugly places be airbrushed out of it?


A fact of life, at least in this part of the world, is that to ride to a beautiful place, you sometimes have to pass through some blighted spots.


Here is one I sometimes pass on my way to or from the Rockaways (as I did today) or Point Lookout:

In any industrialized country, you can find thousands (or even more) places like this. It's hard in the shadow, literally, of the MTA's Rockaway trestle, on which the A train rumbles and clatters.  Yes, that A train:  Duke Ellington's A train.  (I chose the link I included because on it, Ella Fitzgerald sings.  The slide show, ironically, shows pretty much every kind  of train except for the titular one.  It doesn't even show a NYC subway train!) This is nearly the opposite end of the line, literally and figuratively, of the subway route Ellington made famous.  Stay on the train for about an hour and a half and you'll be in Harlem, just a couple of stops from the line's terminus at the very northern end of Manhattan.


On the other side of that trestle are bungalows in various states of disrepair and the beach.


That beach is one you've heard of if you have even the most basic knowledge of 70's popular music:  It's the Rockaway Beach of the Ramones' eponymous song.  It sounds like a Beach Boys song as Brian Wilson might have played it while in withdrawal from something.


So, why should you care about any of this if you're a cyclist?


Well, not so long ago, the site in the photo was a rather important part of American cycling:  It was the home of the Chain Bicycle Corporation.


Now, if we'd had bicycle companies called Sprocket, Derailleur, Crank, Wheel or Frame, American cycling history might have been different.  How, I don't know.  But I digress.


You've probably seen, and you may have ridden,a bike that CBC made or sold.  CBC was the parent company of Ross bicycles.  Those bikes were sold in the first two bike shops in which I worked.  While I was working in my first shop, Ross bikes were at the lower end of the market:  sturdy bikes, mainly for kids, but also a few utility bikes.  They didn't have the cachet of Schwinn although many of their bikes were similar, and were aimed at similar audiences.

   If you're of my generation, you might remember a show called "Wonderama."  It was an extravaganza, marathon or ordeal, depending on your point of view, that aired all day Sunday, or so it seemed.  The show featured, among other things, games and competitions involving kids from the studio audience.  Ross Apollo bicycles were often given as prizes.

Anyway, after the vogue for "chopper" or "muscle" bikes passed, Ross started to aim for the more dedicated (and affluent) adult cyclists.  So, by the time I was working in my second shop, Ross was offering its "Signature" series of bicycles and frames, which seemed to be designed to compete with Schwinn's Paramount line.  The very best signature bikes were actually very nice.  They were built by Tom Kellogg, considered one of the best American custom builders of that time.  Most of those frames were constructed from Reynolds 531 tubing, though he occasionally made frames from Columbus and Ishiwata tubings.


I actually had one of those frames for a time.  It had been built as a kind of sport-touring frame.  But it, like the other "signature" bikes, was even more expensive than other premium bikes from top builders.  And people who were buying high-end touring bikes usually wanted cantilever brakes.  The frame did not have bosses for them.  So the owner of the shop sent the frame to Ross to have the bosses brazed on.  By that time, Tom Kellogg was no longer working for Ross.


The frame had been made for 700C wheels.  Ross, in its infinite wisdom, brazed on bosses for 26 inch wheels.  So it was even less salable than it had been; as a result, the shop's owner was willing to let me take it as pay for a couple of days' work, if I recall correctly.  I proceeded to build it up into a sort of cross between an audax/randonneuring bike and a mountain bike with slick tires.  


I rode that bike whenever I wasn't riding my racing bike.  It was a lot of fun:  I took it on trails, on the streets and in lots of other places.  Unfortunately, the fun didn't last very long:  About two years after I got it, I crashed it into the back of a taxi by the backside of Madison Square Garden/Penn Station.


By then, most, if not all, Rosses were being made in Taiwan.   I'm not sure whether they're still being made at all.  And, these days, it seems that anyone who's cycling through the Rockaways doesn't live there.