Made For Two, Only A Mile Away

This bike was parked at West 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan:

Whoever owns and/or rides it probably doesn't realize that it was made not much more than a mile from where it was parked.

Rollfast bicycles, which I mentioned in a previous post, were manufactured literally steps from where the Liberty Tower now stands--at the site where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood until 11 September 2001.

To my knowledge, Rollfast went out of business--or simply stopped making bicycles--some time during the 1970's or early 1980's.

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.

B.C. (Before Carbon)

In my previous post about my old Land Shark, I mentioned that John Slawta, who builds and paints all LS bikes, is constructing his frames only from carbon fiber.

I am sure he’s still doing the great work he’s always done.  However, in the end any carbon-fiber frame is still plastic.  Yes, it has strands of fiber woven into it, but it’s plastic that holds them together.

To be fair, those bikes are stronger—and probably lighter—than earlier plastic bikes.  I’m not talking only about earlier carbon-fiber bikes, such as the Graf-Tek (Exxon’s only foray into the bicycle industry) during the mid-to-late 1970’s or the first high-production CF bikes made by Trek and other companies a quarter-century ago.  I am talking about bikes made only from the resin.

"The Original Plastic Bike"

A few years before the Graf-Tek came out, a company named The Original Plastic Bike claimed to have built a plastic bike that weighed about half of what racing bikes of the time weighed.  It was offered in primary colors (red, yellow and blue) and black, if I recall correctly.

I don’t know how many people actually bought or rode them.  Apparently, there was some sort of scandal surrounding them and investors lost out.  Also, as it turned out, some parts, such as the chain and spokes were made of steel.  Of course, 99.99 percent of bikes ever made have such parts, if at varying levels of quality.  Even the most technologically advanced of today’s CF bikes will have a steel chain and, most likely, spokes.  

Perhaps the day will come, in my lifetime, when all frames are made from carbon fiber.  I hope it doesn’t.    

Yes, carbon-fiber bikes are light and fast (when they’re designed well).  But I sill have to wonder how long they’ll hold up.  I recently saw an early Trek CF bike.  Its owner admitted that it had been sitting in a garage for about twenty years.  Perhaps they’re stronger than anyone realizes.  And, certainly, rust and other kinds of corrosion are not issues, as they are with steel and other metals.  But one still has to wonder how well they take repeated, prolonged stress.

But the other reason why I hope that we don’t have an all-carbon bike world is that the materials are derived completely from fossil fuels.  Perhaps someone will figure out how to make carbon-fiber tubing from other materials, or another material may supplant it altogether.  Still, I have always felt good that by cycling instead of driving, I have reduced my “carbon footprint,” however incrementally.  

Can you see an ad of the future:  “Carbon without the footprint”?