The Rise And Fall Of Rapid Rise

I forget who told me that there's no idea so bad that nobody will try to revive it.

Here's a case in point:  low-normal rear, and top-normal front, derailleurs. 

On the bikes most of you ride, pushing the right lever forward shifts you to a higher rear gear (top-normal), and pulling the lever brings you to a lower gear.  Conversely, pulling on the left lever shifts your chain to the larger front sprocket, and pushing it drops your chain to the smaller, or lower gear (low-normal).  The derailleurs I'm going to talk about do the exact opposite. 

It seems that every generation or so, someone tries to revive the idea.  Why, I don't know.

This is an early example of the genre:  the Simplex Champion de France, circa 1935.  Believe it or not, it was a technological marvel for its time, even though it couldn't handle much more than a 22 tooth rear cog and a difference of 8 between the largest and smallest cog. 

It is, I think, rather elegant:  In particular, the cage shape makes me think of a part of a piano rather than a bicycle.  However, the shifts of single-pulley derailleurs are inherently imprecise; low-normal operation only exacerbates the problem.

As one might expect, World War II halted derailleur development and all but stopped their manufacture altogether.  The 1950's would see new innovations and experiments, including the pull-chain mechanism (which Shimano briefly revived on its mountain bike derailleurs during the late 1990's) and, most important, a derailleur with a parallelogram mechanism rather than a single arm or cam.  However, Simplex and other companies also revived low-normal rear derailleurs.

To be fair, the first modern rear derailleur (and, some would say, the first that shifted well)--the Sun Tour Gran Prix of 1964--also was low-normal.  But within two years, Sun Tour abandoned that operating principle, realizing that the slant-parallelogram design (which is found on every derailleur of any quality made in the last quarter-century or so) did more to improve shifting than any other idea or innovation.

However, Sun Tour continued to make front derailleurs that were "top normal" well into the 1970's.  I had one such derailleur.  It shifted well enough until the spring started to lose its tension.  With a low-normal front derailleur, you can sometimes adjust the cable tension to make up for the lack of spring tension.  That's not an option with high-normal front derailleurs.

It's also not an option with low-normal rear derailluers.  I briefly rode one on my mountain bike about fifteen years ago:  a Shimano XTR.  Luckily for me, the shop from which I bought it allowed me to trade it in for a more conventional XT rear.  The owner of the shop reasoned that the amount of wear I put on the XTR made it depreciate enough to warrant an XT as a replacement.

I'd say that was an example of addition by subtraction:  I was happy with the XT, as I was with an earlier version of the same derailleur.  On the other hand, I never liked the low-normal XTR, which was one of the most expensive derailleurs made at the time.  It never had the firm, postive feel I like when shifting:  Even when the gear engaged smoothly and silently after a shift, it always felt as if the chain would slip or jump off the gear at any moment. 

Other cyclists with whom I rode--who included hard-core mountain bikers as well as roadies like me who went off-road for a change of pace--felt the same way about that derailleur. And, in looking back at some old magazines and books, it seems that every time low-normal derailleurs come out, the high-mileage and hard-driving riders don't like them.  Even less-experienced riders who thought they were the newest and latest thing soon soured on them.

I see that Shimano has given up on low-normal (or, in their lingo, "rapid rise") rear derailleurs, at least for now.  I wonder whether they, or any other company, will revive them.  Maybe they will in a decade or so, when there's a cohort of cyclists who didn't use rapid-rise and who don't heed this gem of wisdom from Ecclesiastes:  There is nothing new under the sun.

Old-School

Now here's some real old-school lugwork.

There's a "mirror," if you will, of the front fork pattern on the rear stay, near the seat cluster.

I tried to get a better image of it, but it's in a display window.  That window is long past displaying anything, with all of the clutter in it.


The shop behind that window isn't much bigger than my living room, so they have to use every available space.  

Gray's, on Lefferts Boulevard in Kew Gardens, has most likely been in business for longer than I've been in this world. Bernice,the proprietess is a very sweet woman who's probably a decade or two older than I am.  Her husband passed on a few years ago.


One thing that makes the shop interesting--and a reason why I stop in from time to time--is their stock of older parts.  Bernice knows what they are, and what they're supposed to fit, but she's not a cyclist herself and doesn't claim to be any sort of bike enthusiast.


She is one of those old-time shopkeepers who, on slow days, chats with people in the neighborhood.  Today, a woman who seemed to be a couple of decades older than her was there, and they were just talking about family, the passage of time and such.


It's one of those shops that opened when the neighborhood around it was very different.  At one time, Kew Gardens--in which George Gershwin lived and Paul Simon and Jerry Springer were born and raised-- was full of neo-Tudor houses and had an almost-suburban feel.  I suspect the shop opened during that time.  Later, Kew Gardens was nicknamed "Crew Gardens," for all of the airline personnel who lived there.  


Many of the private houses have been torn down and apartment buildings have risen in their place.  Now, Kew Gardens is mainly a community of Orthodox Jews and emigres from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.  Among them, there doesn't seem to be very many cyclists:  Just about everyone I see riding comes, as I do, from other parts of Queens or from Brooklyn.


What seems to keep the shop in business is that it's near Forest Park.  And the shop is one of the few in the city that rents bikes.  A few cyclists I know are familiar with the shop; apparently, they go there for the old parts and the pleasant atmosphere, even if it's in cramped quarters.  


Gray's isn't what some cyclists would consider to be a "pro" shop, and doesn't try to be one.  It's, more than anything, an old-fashioned family business that happens to deal in bikes. In a way, it's fitting to find an old-school Hetchins there.

Pancake Rides

This is the time of year for the "pancake ride."


You've probably been on one:  You ride to someplace where pancakes (and foods that go with them) are served.  And then you spend the rest of your ride burning off what you just ate.


In two of the clubs in which I rode, Pancake rides were hugely popular and, certainly, the winter rides that had the biggest turnouts.


The club to which I belonged when I was in college (Rutgers) held those rides every other Sunday in January and February, if I recall correctly.  The rides took us from the urban confines of New Brunswick, New Jersey into the rural areas of western New Jersey.  Actually, many of the club's rides did, but the Pancake ride had a particular destination:  a firehouse that served pancake breakfasts during the winter. I think the proceeds were used to fund the volunteer fire department located in the firehouse, and that everyone who cooked, served, seated people and did all of the other work were family members or friends of the firefighters.


One of the greatest draws of that ride, apart from the complete lack of traffic outside of New Brunswick on a winter Sunday morning and the bucolic countryside, was what we called The Bottomless Plate.  Yes, it was an all-you-can-eat affair.  In addition to the pancakes, the house served hash browns, sausage, bacon and scrambled eggs, as well as coffee, tea and hot chocolate.  It may not have been the best-quality stuff, but when you're cold and hungry, just about anything edible is delicious and hearty.  


As I recall, that firehouse was very welcoming to us.  That's particularly surprising given how much we ate:  Those of you who are better than I am in math can calculate how much Bis-Quick it took to feed thirty to forty cyclists who'd just cycled twenty  or so miles in twenty-degree weather with a wind-chill of about five or ten degrees.  Also, I should add that some of us were young (i.e., college age) males, who typically had bottomless stomachs and empty wallets.


These days, of course, I'm not a young male.  But all of my changes don't seem to have filled in the bottomless pit in my stomach!  


Anyway, I decided, just for the heck of it, to type "pancake rides" into a Google search box.  It seems that they're going on everywhere, and they're not confined to winter.  Still, I'll probably always think of them as winter rides.   I mean, how many other foods feel warmer and cozier after a ride on a cold day?