It's A Mountain Bike....And A Weight Trainer.

Yesterday, dear reader, I subjected you to another one of my "I remember when" posts.  If I do say so myself, I suspect some of you may have liked it, as the thing I was remembering is the sort of bike that's, sadly, not made anymore.

Today's post will also begin with "I remember when".  What am I recalling from the good ol' days?  Listening to a song with the lyric "all of the colors of black" with rainbows of polyester all around me?  Hearing Bruce Springsteen before the rest of the world would hear of him?  (Yes, I did!)  Seeing Michael Jackson when he was still black?  

No, I'll tell you about something that, if you're not of a certain age, you will find truly incredible.  No, I'm not talking about a time when the Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell were actually worth listening to.  (Believe me:  There was such a time!)   I'm also not talking about the Knicks winning the NBA Championship. (Yo lo vi, I swear!)  Instead, I'm about to tell you something you may find even more unbelievable.  But I swear it's true.

Here goes:  Saturday Night Live was once actually worth watching. In fact, it was the funniest, and simply the best, program on TV for a time.  Really, it was.  In those days, it offered skits like this:



It's a dessert topping.  No, it's a floor wax.  Dan Ackyroyd, Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase were parodying all of those products hawked on late-night TV that try to serve disparate functions.  Can you imagine what the original SNL cast would have done with smart phones when they first came out?

Now, I'm not against products that can perform more than one function or task.   But just about every product has at least one thing it should never, ever be made to do.  As an example, I don't see how any device could be a juicer and a deep fryer at the same time.  At least, I don't think I'd want to eat or drink anything that came from such a device.

I have seen bicycles used to generate power for hair dryers and laptops, or spin grinding stones used to sharpen knives and cut keys.  I have even seen them used as amphibious vehicles.  I don't mind such uses; in fact, I applaud them.

But I don't think I like this:


If the bars and stem can flex enough to double as a gym machine for upper-body workouts, I'm not sure I'd want to ride them. And, really, you have to wonder just how good of a workout someone would get---whether in the upper body or legs--from the Revolution.

Seeing Red In The Gray Before The Neon: 1983 Miyata 310

You know the '80's were, like, totally, about big hair and leg warmers.  Yeah, totally.  And neon.  Neon, totally.  The '80's were just awesome!

All right.  I didn't talk like that in the '80's.  Even though I was, like, young enough.  

That is the '80's everybody seems to remember.  Or, at least, that's the stereotype of the decade.  You had to love it, though.  In what other decade could The Cosby Show and Miami Vice have made their debuts during the same week?

Those '80's really began, I think, around 1984.  Before then, during the early part of the decade, the '70's were hanging on:  Men were wearing ridiculous moustaches and even more ridiculous sport coats and ties, and young women could be seen in butterscotch-colored leather jackets and boots.  But leisure suits were gone--thankfully!--along with men getting perms.  

And--something else for which I'm thankful--some very, very tasteful and functional bikes were being made.  In 1983, while I was working at Highland Park Cyclery (before I embarked on life as a New York City messenger), it seemed that every bike manufacturer--at least the ones whose bikes I assembled and we sold--offered at least one model in charcoal gray with red highlights--whether the decals or transfers, head tube, seat tube panels or bands, or some combination thereof.  The red really was a highlight:  It accented the understated nature of the gray finish rather than called attention to itself, as the red-white-and-black blocks and and bands on every other new bike sold today seem to do.

That year, I assembled bikes from Panasonic, Motobecane, Trek, Miyata, Peugeot and Ross--the latter's "Signature" series as well as their cheaper bikes.  I saw red and gray in every one of those brands' gray bikes.  But I didn't get tired of it:  Those bikes all seemed tastefully finished, especially this one:

The 1983 Miyata 310 was--is-- a very nice bike.  I think they, along with Panasonic, made some of the best mass-market bikes I've ever seen.  Their lugwork was on par with all but the small builders.  Their component choices always seemed to be made with function and value in mind:  lower- and mid-priced alloy parts from Shimano, SunTour, Dia Compe, Sugino, KKT, MKS and the like.  And, of course, SR Laprade seatposts.

It seemed that every bike and component maker had a product or line called "signature".  I know, it was a marketing gimmick, but it was pretty inoffensive, I think, compared to some that I've seen since.

Shmano made derailleurs with the "arrow" you see.  This version, as far as I know, was made only for the Miyata 310 and a couple of other manufacturers' models:  The derailleur was usually finished in silver and the arrow was gold-toned.  Shimano didn't call them "arrow"; they just had some boring numerical designation.  Nobody--not even the Shimano sales rep who came to our shop--seemed to know what, if anything, the arrow meant.

Sarcasm aside, seeing the bike reminded me--in good ways--of what bikes used to be:  nice lugged frames and components that had real functionality.  Today you have to go to small builders like Mercian or Royal H to get new bikes like them.

I wish that Miyata weren't locked up behind a fence:  I would've liked to have taken better photos.  I hope that I still managed to give you a taste of what people could buy off a showroom floor in the moment before reason and taste vacated much of the bike industry.

Note: There's one thing I don't like about the 310:  the shift levers.  But they're forgivable on a bike that has so much else going for it!

What Cycling Can Teach Your Children

I have no children and don't plan on having any.  Still, I sometimes look at one thing or another and wonder what children or young adults might learn from it.  Perhaps that is a consequence of my being an educator.

(By the way, it's also one of the reasons why I find the Trump presidential campaign so abhorrent.  How can you teach your kids about honesty, respect and just plain good behavior, when someone like The Donald is one of the wealthiest people in the world and might become the most powerful?)

Anyway, I would like to think that if I had kids, they would learn a lot of good things from seeing me ride to work, and for pleasure.  I am sure that there are kids who are learning all sorts of great lessons from parents who ride bikes.    One might be simply that you're never "too old" to ride a bike.  Another is that you can have fun while doing (or getting to) the things you have and need to do.

From Kidical Mass Rockville

The author of the Bike to Work Blog once wrote about the "5 Things Your Bike Commute Teaches Your Children".  I might have come up with numbers 1,2, 3 and 5, or things like them.  But I'm not sure that I would have come up with number 4 unless I'd had kids.

Anyway, here they are:

1. Think outside the box. Riding bike to work is powerful because so few others are doing it. When you bike to work, you are teaching your children that there is more than one way to do something–even something as mundane as the daily commute. In a world in which the jobs your kids will have haven’t been created yet, the ability to “Think Different” is a powerful key to success.
2.  Be Frugal. We try to teach our children to understand value, thrift, and priorities but the average American family spends more on transportation than on food. For most of us, that means a car that sits in an expensive garage all night and in an expensive parking spot all day. By not spending a lot of money on a car, I am powerfully teaching my children what I value.
3. Be Active. We tell our children to eat right and be active (“go out and play!”), but we gain five to eight pounds each year. Many of us exercise before the kids get up or after they go to bed and they don’t see it. When you ride a bike your kids see you leave and come home under your own power; they know you value exercise and a healthy, active body.
4. Be Proactive and Self-Reliant. We want our children to anticipate problems and opportunities and we strive to empower them. When my daughter once asked why I was a little late getting home, I told her that that I had a flat tire. She seemed surprised and asked how I got home; I responded that I had “fixed it.” Watching her face as she processed the lesson that such a thing was fixable was priceless.
5. Tread Lightly. Regardless of your views on climate change, the excesses of the 20th century have to be recognized as unsustainable. I don’t consider myself to be a tree-hugger, but I want my children to recognize that we must consume less and think more. By choosing a bicycle over a car, I am demonstrating an awareness of my impact on the planet that I know my children are absorbing.

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.