Making Our Heads Spin

I try not to repeat what other bloggers have already written.  But I simply can’t help myself (Well, I could, but it’s easier and more fun not to!) from talking about something The Retrogrouch noted: leather hairnets are coming back.

 

If you’re of a certain age, you remember them.  You may have even ridden one.  They are lattices, usually black, that look like pie toppings made out of leather (at least they were back in the day).  And they offer just about as much protection in a crash. 

 

For years, I owned one but never used it.  When I first became a dedicated cyclist—during the ‘70’s Bike Boom—it was pretty much the only kind of headgear, aside from caps, available for cyclists.  A few riders wore other kinds of helmets designed for ice hockey (which professional hockey players weren’t wearing) and other sports, or for construction.  But most of us didn’t wear any head protection (except for a cap) because those helmets were bulky, cumbersome or poorly ventilated and, even though many of us had “leather hairnets”, most of us didn’t think they would protect us in any meaningful way.

The original Bell Biker ("turtle shell") helmet, 1975

Not long after Bell introduced its “turtle shell” helmet, another company began to market something called the “Skid Lid”.  It looked like someone constructed a “leather hairnet" out of foam-lined plastic and removed the lid.  It may still be the best-ventilated hardshell helmet ever made, but as Retrogrouch notes, it probably wouldn’t protect you from anything more intense than a skid.

Skid Lid helmet, circa 1978

The first hardshell helmet I used regularly was the Bell V-1 Pro, which came out during the mid-80’s.  It tried to mimic the styling of the “leather hairnet”, but nobody was fooled.  At least it offered meaningful protection and was lighter and better-ventilated than Bell’s (and other companies’) earlier offerings.

Bell V1 Pro helmet, circa 1985: the first helmet I wore regularly (yes, in this color--don't you just love it?)

Now, it seems that some company in Taiwan is offering "leather hairnets", not only in classic black, but in a variety of neon hues and patterns as well as the tricolore and tricolori of the French and Italian flags. They're listed as "SPIN--Foldable Vintage crash hat", which may be just a very bad translation of something. It seems that someone’s idea of “retro” means combining the worst of two earlier eras:  the pre-Bike Boom days and the ‘80’s.  I fully expect they’ll be a hit with the wannabe hipsters!  Maybe those who have taste, or simply money or pretention, will buy the “authentic reproductions” Brooks will be offering.

"SPIN Foldable Vintage Crash Hat"

 Note:  “Leather hairnets” are very similar to headgear worn by American football players before World War II.  Some of us thought that Gerald Ford was, well, Gerald Ford because he wore one when he played college football during the 1930’s.

Pre-war American football helmet

 

This Liberia Might Help Liberia

If you've been following this blog, you know that I'm interested in (and ride a few) vintage bikes, parts and accessories---in part because some of the stuff I rode in my youth (and even later!) is considered "vintage" now!

Anyway, if you pay attention to really vintage bikes (i.e., ones made before I was born!), you know that some bike-makers got creative with their parts, some of which they manufactured themselves.  Among them are the chainrings on cottered steel cranksets, which sometimes had interesting designs or the name of the bike manufacturer.

Here's one that's on eBay now:

 

Turns out, Liberia was a brand of bicycles made by Grenoble-based Manufacture Francaise Cycles (MFC), starting in 1918.  In MFC's early days, they also made motorcycles that bore the same name as the velos.

MFC founder Antoine Biboud was a keen cyclist (Why wouldn't he be in that part of the world?  Trust me:  I've ridden there!) who insisted on strict quality control.  Even his lowest-priced models had carefully-mitered tubes and carefully filed lugs.  His insistence on quality might be one reasons neither he nor his kids (who inherited the company and ran it for the rest of its history) ever tried to sell his bikes much beyond the Rhone-Alpes region of southeastern France. 

Biboud's motto translated roughly to "Don't follow the peloton, lead it!"  He passed it on to the teams his company sponsored during the two decades after World War II.  One of its riders, Henri Anglade, was the French national champion in 1959; other Libera riders took various honors in the Tour de France and other races.

After a two-decade absence from the peloton, Liberia teamed up with Mavic in 1988 to co-sponsor the RMO team, which featured such riders as Richard Virenque and the Madiot brothers.  Unfortunately, the successes of these cyclists weren't enough to buoy the company's fortunes. So, by the mid-1990's, Liberia, like many other mainly-regional French bike makers (and some national and international ones like Mercier) fell victim to the rising tide of Taiwanese bikes.

Even though I've seen a few Liberia bikes, I can't help but to think about the African country with that name.  And, someone who doesn't know much about cycling history might, at this point, be put off by the name, what with the Ebola virus.  

At least the seller, Reperagevelo, is a part of Repareges, a French non-profit that sends bicycles to Burkina Faso and Mali to provide much-needed transportation, as well as jobs and other help for disabled people.

Rainy Saturday

Rain.  It would have to fall on a Saturday.  A driving, heavy rain.  I'm thinking of something Wallace Stevens wrote:  "the sort of man who prefers a drizzle in Venice to a hard rain in Hartford".  I guess it describes most people.

 Even though it’s fairly warm, seeing such heavy rain didn’t get me into the mood to ride.  Plus, more of same has been forecast for the rest of today.  Then the temperature is expected to drop from about 22 to 8C (72 to 45F) by early tomorrow.  If the rain stops, it could be a nice, crisp fall morning:  one of my favorite riding conditions.

For today: bike maintenance, reading, non-blog writing, quality time with Max and Marley and, possibly, cooking.

The Man Who Made--And Broke-- SunTour

Writing about SunTour yesterday got me, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Breakfast of Champions, "woozy with deja vu".  (How can you not love that phrase?)

You see, I started to take long rides as the '70's Bike Boom was gaining force.  That was also almost the exact time that American cyclists began to glom onto SunTour derailleurs.  

Although SunTour's wares would have dominated the North American (and other) cycling markets on their own merits, the fact that, around 1980, more bikes were equipped with the Japanese company's derailleurs, shifters and freewheels--and more of those parts were sold as replacements--than all of the other component manufacturers combined, is the result, at least in part, of the work of one person.

 


I'm talking about Frank Berto.  If you're a bit younger than I am, you probably think of him as the author of The Dancing Chain, a book for gear geeks if there ever was one. (It's an engaging read nonetheless.)  But for those of us who were around in the prehistoric days of cycling, when all bike manuals were written in Latin (OK, Italian and sometimes French and English), he will be forever known as the technical editor of Bicycling magazine.

Now, I know some of you (again, who weren't around in those times) might be scratching your heads and saying, "Bicycling had a technical editor"?  Those of you who are a bit younger might not believe that magazines had technical editors.  And, if you're younger still, you might not believe that magazines existed.

Trust me, they did.  And Bicycling--as much as I and others complained about it--was actually something more than the advertising vehicle or lifestyle tab it's been for at least two decades. 

As he tells it on his website,  Frank Berto bought a secondhand Schwinn Varsity in 1971, when he became involved with his sons' Boy Scout troop.  He was then a 42-year-old mechanical engineer who, until that time, hadn't been on a bike in more than two decades.  On his first ride with his son's troop, all of the young whippersnappers blew past him on a long and winding hill that would be his Road to Damascus."If I had a bigger sprocket in the back, I could pedal up this lousy hill," he thought.  Shortly thereafter, he rode to his local bike shop and bought a SunTour 14-34 freewheel (Varsities came with 14-28) and a SunTour VGT rear derailleur.  

He tried to install them himself, but realized he had no clue as to what to do.  Nor, as it turned out, did the shop that sold him the parts.  None of the bicycle-related books (remember those?) in his local library were of any help.

His yearlong odyssey to lower the gears on that tank called the Varsity ended with him writing, first for Bike World and, not long afterward, for Bicycling.  After mining his own experiences, he conducted a series of tests and published his ratings of derailleurs that were available at the time.  The message of much of his work from that time can be more or less summed up with this sentence: "If you are unhappy with your shifting, the SunTour VGT is your best prescription".

The thing is, he was right.  The VGT, which cost about $10 at the time, could handle the freewheel he installed on the Varsity--and more.  And, because of its design, it shifted more easily and accurately on smaller racing freewheels than even the derailleurs supposedly designed for them.  Those derailleurs from Campagnolo and Huret cost four times as much.  Even the SunTour Cyclone, which came out a year or two after Berto made his pronouncement, cost less than half as much as those European derailleurs--and was lighter (and prettier) than any except the Huret Jubilee.

Ironically, for all that he did to build SunTour's reputation, he may have unwittingly contributed to its undoing.  When Huret came out with the Duopar touring derailleur in the late 1970's, he enthused about it. Up to that time, SunTour's shifting--especially on wide-range touring gears--was light-years ahead of everyone else's.  That anyone could make something better, even if only marginally so, seemed inconceivable.   And for Frank Berto to say so was like the CEO of the Bank of America endorsing socialism.

By that time, the folks working for SunTour were paying as much attention to Berto's articles as Anna Wintour does to fashion shows.  They panicked and made some ill-advised changes to some of their products.  

A few years after that, Berto praised one of the results of SunTour's changes:  the Superbe Tech derailleur.  He praised it even more lavishly than he did any previous SunTour product--or the Duopar.  It shifted as well as he said, and was beautiful.  But it also had some fatal design flaws--as did the Duopar--that truncated its lifespan to about 3000 km.  By that time, SunTour's patents had expired, and Shimano had adopted SunTour's most salient feature--the slant parallelogram--even faster than President Bush signed the Patriot Act after 9/11.  

Oh, how I miss SunTour.  And Bicycling magazine, when it had a technical editor.

50 Years Ago This Month: The Dawn Of SunTour

What is the most influential and important development in the history of the bicycle?

Some would say, well, duh, it's the invention of the bicycle. I might agree, except that it's hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the bicycle was "invented".  Is Leonardo da Vinci responsible for it?   Or, do you consider the "celerifere" the first in the line of two-wheeled vehicles we love to ride to day?  Some might say Karl von Drais de Sauerbrun, who attached a steering device to his two-wheeler, is the progenitor of our pleasures.  Then again, others would have us believe that it wasn't really a bicycle until Kirkpatrick MacMillan attached foot pedals to it.

After the invention of the bicycle, however you define it, probably the most important development--and certainly the one most influential beyond the world of cycling--is that of the pneumatic tire.  Without it, not only bicycles, but also motor vehicles, would give slower and bumpier rides than wooden- or metal-wheeled horse-drawn carriages.  And modern passenger aircraft could not take off or land.

Possibly the next-most important development is the invention of the "safety" bicycle.  It's what we (well, most of us, anyway) ride today:  two wheels the same size (or close to it), foot pedals and a front chain that drives a rear cog via a chain.  This type of bicycle replaced the high-wheeler or "penny farthing" bikes, on which the pedals and cranks were attached to the front wheel axle.  The gear ratio was, therefore, dependent on the size of the front wheel:  Common diameters were 60 and 72 inches.  On the "safety" bicycle, variable gears were possible.

Variable gears led to inventors coming up with various ways to use them, the most common of which are variable-gear internal hubs (e.g., the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hubs found on classic English bikes) and derailleurs.

About the latter:  The patent for what is, arguably, the most important innovation in derailleur design was filed fifty years ago this month in Japan, and a month later in the US.

Here we can see it advertised in the December 1964 edition of New Cycling magazine:

It's the SunTour Gran-Prix derailleur, the progenitor of every single derailleur with even the slightest pretense of quality made during the past few decades.


This brainchild of Nobuo Ozaki, SunTour's chief engineer at the time, the SunTour Gran-Prix introduced the "slant parallelogram" design to the world.  The derailleur's main parallelogram is more or less parallel to the chainstay, in contrast to those of Campagnolo and Simplex derailleurs, which dropped straight down from the frame mount and were almost perpendicular to the ground--or those of Huret derailleurs, which consisted of flat steel plates that pivoted on the mounting plate.

Such a difference is not merely stylistic:  It allowed the top pulley of the Grand-Prix to run as close to the smallest cog as it did to the largest, or any in between.  Shifting thus became easier and more precise, especially on wide-range touring gears.  People were amazed at the difference when they replaced their malfunctioning or broken Huret Luxes,  Campagnolo Gran Turismos or Simplex Prestiges with something from SunTour.  I know I was.

Without a way of keeping a constant distance between the derailleur pulley and the rear cogs, it's all but impossible to make any sort of indexed derailleur system work reliably.  Ironically, this fact would lead  Shimano and Campagnolo (and, later, SRAM) to claim supremacy over the market SunTour would dominate from the mid-1970's until the mid-1980s--and, ultimately, to SunTour's demise.

Practically the second SunTour's patent expired in 1984, Campy and Shimano (and Sachs-Huret, which would become part of SRAM) seized upon it.  The following year, Shimano introduced SIS, the first commercially successful indexed derailleur shifting system.  The rear derailleur from that system combined SunTour's slant parallelogram with the spring-loaded top pivot Shimano (as well as Simplex) had already been using in their derailleurs.

Notice that I said SIS was the first commercially-successful indexed derailleur system.  It wasn't the first indexed system:  The idea was tried as far back as the 1930's (the "Funiculo" derailleur on Jacques Schulz bicycles), and in 1969 SunTour introduced an indexed system that, by all accounts, worked well. 

Had SunTour waited a couple more years to market that system, they might have dominated the bicycle components industry even more they did in the 1970s, and they still might be in business today.  However, the "Honor" and GT derailleurs-- refinements of the Grand-Prix--and the "V" series were introduced just as the '70's Bike Boom was starting in North America.  New cyclists (like yours truly) in the New World had no previous brand loyalty, if you will, to any of the established European derailleur makers and were more willing to try something that looked (and, more important, worked) differently.

Interestingly, this led to a reversal of an old dynamic:  A few years later, European cyclists (some, anyway) would take the lead of their American counterparts and start using SunTour (and, later, Shimano) derailleurs and other parts. 

Anyway...After Shimano introduced their indexed system in 1985, other companies--including SunTour and Campagnolo-- panicked and introduced their own systems. Some of us referred to Campy's "Syncros" system as "Stinkros".  SunTour's system shifted a little better, but not as well as Shimano's, which consisted of a more closely-integrated set of components.  Essentially, Shimano designed a whole new system, while SunTour and Campagnolo simply created new indexed shift levers that were supposed to work with derailleurs and freewheels those companies were already making.

What made matters worse was that bike manufacturers, like Schwinn, equipped some of their models with SunTour's indexed shifters but used them with freewheels, chains and cables--some of which weren't even made by SunTour--they already had on hand.  It almost goes without saying that the results ranged from underwhelming to disastrous.

(Also, the fact that Schwinn's reputation was already slipping didn't help to bolster confidence in the components they used on their bikes.  That's my opinion, anyway.)

SunTour finally redesigned their indexed systems, but it was too late.  The company managed to hang on until 1995.  By then, nearly all bikes of any quality had Shimano derailleurs--which had the same geometry as the SunTour derailleurs Nobuo Ozaki created three decades earlier!

(He was, apparently,  much better at industrial design and engineering than anyone in the company was at translating.  One of their early manuals, useful as it is, tells us "How To Use Honor Rightly".)

Sorry I Haven't Been Along For The Ride

One great thing about being middle-aged is that you can be excused, for a moment anyway, of un-hipness.  (Is that a word?)

One symptom of un-hipness is not knowing about some band or another.  Back in the day, one could be excommunicated from some of the circles in which I traveled for such a "crime".

(Back in the day, one also could have been excommunicated from said circles for using the third person and passive tense as I used them in this sentence and the previous one!)

So...Ring your loudest bell as you blow by me as I am pushing my aging bones along the bike path.  I am now going to confess that I didn't know about The Bicycles, a Toronto-based "indie" rock group.

Then again, I have a really good excuse for not knowing: "Indie" rock is like, you know, soooo '90's.

Nice Old Cranks

Some of my favorite vintage components are Stronglight cranksets.

You might thing I'm being sentimental about the days when I was young, carefree and riding my PX-10.  Well, there are some things I miss about those days, though I have no wish to repeat them.  But more to the point, I have good memories of the Stronglight 93 crankset that came with that bike because it really was very nice.

I loved the shape and mirror polish of it.  Even more important, though, was its practicality:  Chainrings from 37 to 58 teeth were available for it. In a way, it was a precursor to today's "compact" road double cranksets.  So, they were commonly ridden, not only by racers, but by tourists with relatively light loads or who simply didn't want to deal with the finicky shifting and other issues that came with triple cranksets.

What was probably an even nicer--and, to my eye, even prettier--crankset was the "99" model.

 


It wasn't readily found here in the US, and not many bikes came equipped with it.  But it offered an even wider range of chainrings than the 93:  from 28 to 54 teeth.  In the late '70's and early '80's, six was the maximum number of freewheel cogs; seven would be introduced in the middle of the '80's.  That meant the steps between cogs were wider than on today's 8, 9, 10, 11 or 13-cog cassettes.  Consequently, most in-the-know touring cyclists rode with a "half-step plus granny" chainring setup.  That meant, in brief, a relatively small gap between the two larger chainrings and using the smallest available chainring for the "granny" gear.

A common "half-step plus granny" setup included chainrings of 28, 45 and 50 teeth.  The Stronglight "99" was ideally suited for it.  It had a larger bolt circle (86BCD) than the company's "49" model. the Specialites TA Cyclotouriste or the Nervar touring cranksets, all of which used a 50.4 BCD.  Smaller bolt circles mean, at least in theory, more chainring flex.  The 49, Cyclotouriste and Nervar crankset compensated with an extra ring of bolts to hold the two outer chainrings together.  On the other hand, the "99" had only one set of five bolts holding the chainrings onto the crank.

No one seemed to notice any undue flexing on the "99"--or a near-copy of it made by Sakae Ringyo (SR) in Japan.  The SR model was, functionally, the same and a good deal less expensive.  But the Stronglight cranks seemed to be of higher quality and were more beautiful.

So what happened to the "93" and "99"?  Well, the former crankset became the "105" and "106"--the same cranset with an anodised finish and "drillium" chainrings.  There was also a "drillium" version of the "99".  But the real reason why we don't see more modern versions of those cranks is that they had proprietary bolt circles:  122 mm for the "93" and, as I mentioned, 86 mm for the "99".  In contrast, Campagnolo racing cranks, and their clones, had a 144 mm diameter, while Dura-Ace had the now-ubiquitous 130 mm.  Meanwhile, Sugino's touring cranksets came with the now-familiar 110 mm for the outer two chainrings and 74 mm for the "granny" gear.

That means replacement chainrings for the "93" and "99" can be found only on eBay and at swap meets.  The good news is those chainrings tended to be long-wearing, more so than TA's rings. 

Waiting For The Trails Ahead

Is this what awaits me this Fall

if, indeed, the Fall comes?  It was 29C (85F) this afternoon!

Believe It Or Not, It's Almost Tweed Season

Even though the temperature has reached 28C (82F), it's officially Fall, and has been for five days.

Even so, it's hard not to notice a change in the light surrounding the still-green trees.  It's especially noticeable at dawn and dusk:  The red, orange and yellow hues of the sky are starting to take on their autumnal tones more like the ones we will see on the leaves in a few weeks.

It's not quite time for tweed yet, but it will be soon enough. The folks in the Alpena (MI) Tweed And Bike Club certainly seemed to be embracing the change in the seasons when they announced an upcoming tweed ride a few years ago:

You can't get much more autumnal than that, can you?  But a black-and-white image that accompanied this one also conveys the spirit of the season nicely, I think: