Arielle Is Ten; Tomorrow Tosca Turns Nine

Today marks an anniversary for me.

No, I am not secretly married in some other state or country.  And I am not talking about the beginning of some business venture, sobriety or any other milestone people mark in their lives.  

Actually, today is a milestone, for me anyway.  You see, ten years ago on this date, I got my first.  And you know what they say:  There's nothing like the first.

If you've been following this blog, you may have guessed what I am talking about:  my Mercians.

Yes, on 22 October 2006, I picked up Arielle--my custom Mercian Audax--from Bicycle Habitat in Soho.  My first ride with her took me through streets in the neighborhood, in the East and West Villages and other parts of lower Manhattan.  

You could say I fell in love.  Actually, that happened before I got the bike:  Hal Ruzal, the Mercian Maven at Habitat, let me ride one of his bikes.  And he seemed to understand what I wanted:  something responsive, but not necessarily a racing bike.  Something comfortable, but definitely not a fully-loaded touring bike, let alone a mountain bike or hybrid.  

Also, I wanted something beautiful.

He recommended getting a custom (my top tube is shorter than is typically found on bikes of my size) version of the Audax, a bike made, as he said, "for centuries and day rides."  And, as he pointed out, the horizontal dropouts with adjustment screws would allow me to shorten or elongate the wheelbase a bit, allowing a faster or cushier bike.

On that first ride, I could see that I had the best of both worlds.  I felt as if I were on a magic carpet that could dodge and outrun the taxis (yes, even New York taxis!) or anything else on the road.  The couple of times I stopped for traffic lights, strangers complimented my new steed.

I knew then, to paraphrase one of the most famous movies of all time, that my ride that day was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Today, ten years later, I've owned and ridden Arielle for longer than all except one bike I've ever owned.  And she's been in my life for longer than any lover (or my former spouse) and all except a handful of friends (and two cats) were.  She's also been with me for longer than I've stayed on any job or lived in any one place.  

Plus, she's led to some other beautiful relationships.  One year and one day later, I wheeled Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear out of Habitat.  Helene, my first Miss Mercian followed almost three years later.  Another year later, I found Vera, my green Mercian mixte, on eBay.  

I've enjoyed many rides with them.  Some of them are on this blog.  They've all been great, beginning with the first, ten years ago--already!--today.

HP-Turbo: A "Lost" Brake From Weinmann?

If you bought a new ten-speed bike of better-than-marginal quality during the '70's Bike Boom, there's a good chance that it came with Weinmann brakes and/or rims.

Most made-in-Chicago Schwinn bikes had one or both until about the mid-1980s.  So did many European bikes, if they didn't have Mafac brakes or Rigida rims.

Nobody ever got really excited about most Weinmann products:  They weren't flashy, but they usually did their jobs and their prices were reasonable.  The best example of this was their "Vainqueur" center-pull brake, which came on everything from the Schwinn Paramount (the touring model) and Raleigh International to the Schwinn Continental and Raleigh Grand Prix.  It was even found on some bikes from French constructeurs and English bespoke builders, who would attach the brakes to brazed-on bosses.

Probably the one product the company produced that was noticeably different from its competitors was their concave rim.  Its unique shape was said to give it superior strength to other rims.  I don't know whether the shape had anything to do with it, but I know (because I used to commute on a pair) it was strong--and noticeably heavier than other alloy rims.

In the late 1970s, Weinmann tried to modernize its offerings.  That is when they brought out the concave rim.  Around that time, they also introduced their "Carrera" brake, meant to compete with Campagnolo.  The quality was excellent and the finish beautiful.  However, it lacked the flats on the center bolt that allowed the brakes to be centered with a hub cone wrench (a nice Campy feature adopted by other brake-makers). Their quick-release device, apart from its finish, was no different from the one on the less expensive models. It had only "open" and "closed" position, while Campy's could be opened or closed partway to allow for wheels that developed wobbles.  

Another attempt to appeal to appeal to the ultra-high-performance (or simply rich and fashionable) market resulted in their version of the "Delta" brake--which, as "Retrogrouch" and others have suggested, may have been made for them by Modolo.  I never used Weinmann's or Campagnolo's Delta brakes, so I won't argue about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, some users claimed. There is no denying, however, that Campy's version may well be the most beautiful brake ever made.  Weinmann's had a more high-tech (for the time, anyway) look, and was available in black as well as silver.

A few years later, Weinmann came up with another interesting and unique brake:

The HP-Turbo was introduced in 1984.   I could find little information about it (I discovered it in an eBay listing), so I don't know how long it was produced.  I also couldn't find testimony from users, so I have no idea of how effective, or not, it may have been.

From what I can see, it's a centerpull brake with the straddle wire coiled around cams to which the brake shoes are attached.  I am guessing that the cams push those shoes into the rims, and that the arrangement is intended to somehow magnify braking power or modulation by increasing the mechanical advantage.

As I said, I am only guessing:  I may have been a mechanic, but I have never been a mechanical engineer.  For all I know, the brake might have been a revolutionary idea for which the cycling public wasn't ready.  Or, perhaps, some people tried it and found that it was complicated and, perhaps, the cams or other parts of the mechanism clogged with dirt or gunked up with grease. (They don't look very well-protected.)  Maybe it cost as much as a good sidepull brake, which came on about 90 percent of new bikes at that time, or cantilevers, which came on most of the rest of new bikes.   Or people thought it was just too ugly to put on their nice bikes.

Whatever its fate, I am curious about it.  

A Beast Of Burden

For one more day, one more post, I am going to keep up the silly "theme association" I started the other day.

My post on Monday mentioned, in passing, Jean Paul Sartre.  Tuesday's post featured a photo of him on Le Petit Bi, a French folding bicycle developed just as Europe was going to war.  Yesterday, I wrote about another folding bicycle (actually a sort-of folding bike), the Donkey Bike.

So now I'm going to show a bicycle--or its rider, depending on your point of view--serving as a donkey:

From Top At World

Perhaps he is employed by a certain Presidential candidate.  If that's the case, he might not get paid.  Worse, he might need to build a wall around himself if he presses said candidate for what's due, or anything else!

When I was a messenger, I might've built such a wall, or protected myself in some other way, when I went to some of the locales I serviced--especially when I knew what was in some of those packages I carried.  Let's just say that the contents of some of those packets were, um, plant-based and others were chemical.

In other words, although we were employed by a legitimate courier service, my fellow and messengers and I became, at times, offspring of donkeys and horses, if you know what I mean.  I don't think most of us signed on for that.  I know I hadn't.

In Polka Dots, On A Donkey

You're probably familiar with "word association", as a game or a technique for sparking creativity--or as part of therapy.  For example, "dog" can lead to "cat", "walk", "shoe", "sole", "survivor", "guilt" and so on.  

Well, my blog is lapsing into a kind of "theme association".  The other day, I happened to mention Jean-Paul Sartre.  Yesterday I showed him on a folding bicycle.  So today I am going to--you guessed it--talk about a folding bike.

The bike in question first saw the light of day fifty years ago.  I don't know how long it was in production.  In fact, I could find almost no information about it.  But I did find this neat promotional video:




I just love the polka-dot pantsuit the woman is wearing.  I think that no matter what she was wearing, she would have had trouble mounting that high-wheel bicycle.  Of course, nobody would have been riding such a bike in 1966, but I guess the makers of the video had to find something that would have been difficult for just about anybody to ride.

I also love seeing folk singer Pete Newby looking more like an Oxford professor than any folk singer I've ever seen.  Can you imagine him (or anyone) going to the Tweed Ride with the Donkey Bike?

Now, I admit, the Donkey isn't a folding bike, strictly speaking.  It probably doesn't even qualify as a collapsible bicycle.  With such a small front wheel and wheelbase, it needed only a way to quickly remove the handlebars in order to fit it in a car trunk.




The handlebar is probably the strangest, and most interesting part of the bike.  I've flipped handlebars on my bikes, but I don't think doing so changed the look--or, I imagine, the ride quality--as radically as bars that can be ridden as far forward as most racing handlebars, then be shifted to a position under the seat so that the bike is ridden with the rider's hands grasping at their sides, rather like riding a sled.

I can just imagine a bunch of "mods" cruising up and down London streets on their Donkey bikes.  Really groovy!

Into The Fold On Being And Nothingness

Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.

That insight came from none other than Jean-Paul Sartre.  Yesterday, I made a reference to him.  Well, wouldn't you know it?:  Today I came across the above quote, and this photo:


Here he is riding "Le Petit Bi":

This bike has been all but lost to the mists of time or, more precisely, the ashes of World War II.  Andre Jules Marcelin, a French Nobel Laureate (1926) physicist, invented it and received his first patent for it in Luxembourg in October 1939.  The following year, he received patents for it in France and Switzerland.

No one seems to know who manufactured the bike or how many were made.  All that is certain is that only a few exist.  Did the war severely curtail their production?  Or were many destroyed in bombing raids and such?

Professor Marcelin did his research at the Laboratoire de Chimie Physique (Chemical Physics Lab) of the Sorbonne-University of Paris.  He and other Sorbonne scientists held seminars on Monday nights where writers, poets, painters and other artists to speak.  It's possible that Marcelin met Sartre there, as well as Francois Picabia, seen here on a Bi:

Interestingly, that photo and the one of Sartre ended up in a Nazi propaganda magazine called Signal, which tried to show that life was normal for the French people under the German occupation.  

That Marcelin went to the trouble of filing for patents in multiple countries shows that he saw some sort of commercial potential in the Bi.  He even had plans for a foldable tandem and a motorized Bi:

Perhaps most intriguing of Marcelin's designs is the one he patented in 1935, four years before the Bi, for what looks like a foldable recumbent bicycle.

Whatever its history, the Bi did have something of a legacy.  One of the first lightweight folding bicycles, the Bickerton, came out during the 1970s.  The first prototype of it borrowed heavily from Le Petit Bi:

The Bickerton that finally came to market had a significantly different design, most likely because Harry Bickerton (who was an engineer) saw that he couldn't make the bike out of aluminum (as he did to achieve his bike's light weight) if he were to use the Petit Bi design.

So, although Andre Jules Marcelin patented Le Petit Bi, perhaps no one will realize its possession--or, more precisely, it.