Paris. Then Istanbul...And Brussels. Where Does It End?

Sometimes even I can't talk about bicycles or bicycling.  Some things are bigger, sometimes.

So it was back in November, after the attacks in Paris. They had a personal meaning for me, as I had cycled or walked the streets, and sat at a sidewalk table in the café, that bore the onslaught.  Thankfully, none of my friends were hurt, though I still felt badly for those who were, or who lost loved ones.



Last week, suicide bombers struck on Iskital Caddesi (Iskital Avenue) in Beyoglu, a quaint shopping and tourist area of Istanbul.  I spent nearly two weeks in Istanbul and a month in Turkey ten years ago.  While I don't have quite the same connection to it that I do to Paris or France, I still feel as if a part of me had been attacked.  Even in such a heavily-visited area, the warmth and hospitality of local people--I'm not talking only about store and café owners and workers, though I include them--is unmistakable. 

An attack in such a place is also an attack on those people, and the beautiful people I met in other parts of Turkey.  I do not know the victims, but it is hard not to think that at least some of them, had I ever met them, would remind me of some of those friendly faces and incandescent eyes I saw along the Aegean coast and in the countryside.



Now sudden, random death has struck Belgium--specifically, Brussels.  I have not spent a lot of time in the nation or its capital, but I have deep and pleasant memories of both.  Most important, as in Istanbul and Paris, innocent people who were simply going about their lives and lost them, seemingly out of nowhere.

My heart goes out to all of them. 

The Flash Hub Is Gone--Or Perhaps It Never Came!

What is this?

No, it's not a vintage Campagnolo Record front hub retrofitted for disc brakes. (Oh, perish the thought!)  Instead, it's something I mentioned in an earlier post:

It's none other than the Cinelli Bivalent.  It may be the only hub in history that was designed to be used either on the front (as shown in the first photo) or the rear. 

The toothed wheel served no purpose on the front. On the rear, however, the gear cluster or cassette fit onto it.  This was supposed to make wheel removal and installation easier.  From what accounts I've heard and read, it seems to have fulfilled that purpose.

Being a Cinelli item, the quality was most likely excellent.  (Some have claimed that Campagnolo made the hubs for Cinelli.) When the system was introduced during the early 1960's, the hub had a three-piece shell, like most hubs of that time.  A few years later, Cinelli started to offer hubs with single-piece alloy shells.

Although it seems that those who tried the Bivalent liked it, the system never caught on.  The reason usually given is that racers didn't want to use it because if they had to replace a rear wheel, a support van or truck probably wouldn't have another on hand, and the threaded hubs (like Campagnolo's) almost everybody--including all racers--used at the time wouldn't work with it. 

(That, by the way, is also one of the reasons why Campagnolo Record (as well as Nuovo and Super Record) dominated the peloton for so long:  Everyone wanted equipment that was compatible with everyone else's.)

As I mentioned in my earlier post, during the ensuing two decades between the introduction of Bivalent and Shimano's Freehub system (the prototype of every cassette hub made today), there were other attempts to make something more convenient, versatile or stronger than the traditional threaded hub and screw-on freewheel--especially since manufacturers were adding more gears to bikes.  

One of those attempts was SunTour's UnitHub of 1969.  Like today's cassette hubs, it combined the gear carrier and hub into one unit.  From what few accounts I could find, it worked well and was sturdy. However, the public wasn't ready for it--just as it wasn't able to receive another SunTour debutante from that year, the Five-Speed Click indexed derailleur system.

A decade later, Maillard introduced their "Helicomatic" hub, featuring a bayonet-style mounting onto which a gear cluster mounted.  The idea was great (better, I believe, than the Freehub system or any of its descendants), but it was poorly-executed and thus prone to breakdowns.  Shimano brought out its Freehub around the same time and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

But there was, apparently, an attempt to resurrect the idea of the Bivalent.  A company I had never heard of until I encountered it on Michael Sweatman's Disraeligears site made it--or, at least, made plans for it.  No one seems to know for sure whether any of those hubs were actually made.

The company, EGS, was based in France.  It made one of the most elegant or extravagant, depending on your point of view, and certainly most futuristic derailleurs ever created:  the UpCage.   In essence, it was a classic SunTour derailleur with its pulley cage mounted horizontally and a tensioning arm between the body and the pulley cage.  They weren't in production for very long, even though they were much loved by French downhill racers.

EGS UpCage.  From Disraeligears

Apparently, ESG had big plans:  its website--still up even though the company went belly-up in 2000--shows plans for a "Syncro-Shift" twist-grip control that operated both the front and rear derailleurs.  (Whenever I see any form of the word "Syncro" in a bicycle or component's name, I turn and ride as far and fast as I can from it!)  Also on EGS's drawing board were a brake system and something they called the "Flash Hub."

From the EGS website

ESG's website says the Flash Hub was to consist of a two-part hub, a fixed cassette mount and a moveable wheel mount.  The cassete mount unit was made to stay fixed to the frame's rear fork end.  I can't help but to notice their use of the term "fork end", which just may be a matter of translatation. Still, it leads me to wonder whether it would have worked with vertical dropouts.  No matter:  This system, according to ESG, would make it "child's play" to change the rear wheel.

There is no mention that the hub could be used on the front, so I imagine it wouldn't be possible.  To be fair, when Cinelli came out with the Bivalent hub, many frames made for derailleurs still had 110 mm spacing in the rear, as most freewheels still had no more than four gears.  Most road bikes then, as now, had 100mm spacing in the front fork.  So it probably was easier to make a hub that fit both front and rear than it would be to make such a hub now, when rear spacing is typically 130 or 135mm, and could grow if twelve or more gears and disc brakes become standard equipment.

Still, I have to wonder whether those guys at ESG--who, it seems, were downhill racers or had the attendant mentality-- knew about the Bivalent hub. 

N.B.:  Cinelli Bivalent photos were taken by Al Varick and appear on Classic Rendezvous.
 

A Sugar Or Snow Coating?

Easter will be celebrated next Sunday.

I still remember the candy we used to get as kids:  chocolate bunnies, a rainbow of jellybeans, marshmallow "peeps" and those wonderful diorama eggs made of sugar.  Each of those eggs had a peephole that allowed you to look at scenes of little boys and girls hunting for Easter eggs, fields and flowers and, of course, Easter chicks and bunnies.

Those eggs were my favorite Easter confection.  I wouldn't eat mine right away, or sometimes even for weeks:  Those Easter (or Spring, anyway) scenes were just so pretty that I didn't want to risk ruining them from breaking the egg! 

I think what I loved best, though, was that I felt like I was looking at an Easter scene with a covering of snow, or one inside an Igloo.  It was like getting the best of both seasons.

The dioramas themselves were inedible:  They were usually made of paper.  Those eggs are harder to find today, and the ones that are available have dioramas that aren't nearly as elaborate.  As I understand, the reason is that a government regulation says, in essence, that if a candy is edible on the outside, it has to be edible inside.  So the dioramas are now made of candy, which is more difficult to turn into pretty scenes than paper or plastic are.

Still, I am tempted to get one:  I still think it would be fun to look at a Springtime scene with a coating of snow.

It would be different from the one I saw while pedaling over the RFK Bridge this morning:

That, on the first full day of Spring!