A HALF-CENTURYS RIDES: A Bicyclist Celebrates Fifty Years in the Saddle

Thank you for this beauty! I have smile and tears on my face at the same time tears for not having or only seeing such bike. Hope one day I will have something like this, but not likely.

Happy ride and keep on with beautiful things you are doing BQ and others! For road riding, how do the Singer and the Rene Herse compare? The only classic Herse I have ridden extensively is a B model. Both handle similarly, but the Herse, with its wider tires, feels more planted. My new Herse is an attempt to combine the best features of both bikes, with the Nivex derailleur and thin fork blades of the Singer, and the B wheels and associated geometry of the Herse, plus a frame that is more flexible than both based on our experiments with frame stiffness. Jan, thanks for the tour of the Singer.

I notice the rear fender has a brace to distribute stress where its attached to the seat stay bridge. Singer simply sandwiched the reinforcement plate between fender and frame. It still distributes the stress. The idea originally came from Herse. In , Lyli Herse and Robert Prestat rode the Poly de Chanteloup hillclimb race at record speed on the tandem, but got disqualified because their fender had broken — apparently, they crashed taking a sharp hairpin at very high speed. Herse devised the reinforcement to prevent this from happening again.

Are the fender edges rolled so that there is a hollow to get an electrical wire through? Most fender edges now are tightly crimped. But you can open the current fenders pretty easily — at least the Honjo aluminum ones we sell. Stainless steel fenders are harder to manipulate. It looks more like four cogs and two chain rings for eight to me. How many teeth on the cogs and chain rings? I am wondering about the gear range and steps. Four cogs and two chainrings, for a total of 8 speeds. I prefer a 5-speed.

The chainrings are By the way, if the original owner would have liked more gears, they could have opted for a triple and five or six cogs on the rear. Triples were common in France starting in the s, and five-speed freewheels gained popularity in the late s. I assume you mean the jumps. Sorry, I meant to say that the gap between gears is a tad larger than I like it. Yes, on my new bike is perfect. In PBP this year, I used every gear except the I used that more than enough in the Pyrenees. On TV, Jacques Pepin was making soup. I enjoyed the simultaneous dose of French culture.

The bike is, obviously, worthy of being in a museum. Thank you for posting the brake cable detail. How many cool things can a single bike have? How difficult is it using the front derailleur on the seat tube? Any chance for a photo of that? Repeating the above comment, thanks for the blog, books and products.

The derailleur on the seat tube is very easy to use. The first front derailleurs of the s were operated with a cable and downtube shift lever. The direct lever on the seat tube was seen as an improvement! I suspect this was because the direct lever a saved weight remember, this was the time of the technical trials when weight was everything and b it offered a more feedback, so there was less risk of overshifting the chain to the outside or the inside. I would be very entertained if you could post a second youtube movie of that front derailleur in action on the repair stand.

I have found that using salmon pads and adjusting the toe-in of the brake shoes helps a little, and that having a fork crown mounted cable stop helps tremendously and usually completely eliminates the judder. Modern cyclocross bikes with cantilever brakes often have problems with judder. Do you commonly encounter this issue on classic bikes equipped with cantilevers? The Singer does not have cantilever brakes in the modern sense. The judder comes mostly from play in the sliding surfaces of the brakes. Singer abandoned that design when centerpull brakes became popular.

It appears to be a problem that occurs especially with modern bikes. In that case, moving to a fork crown-mounted cable hanger is a work-around solution, as the steerer tube flex no longer affects the brakes. A better solution would be to redesign the fork. Jan, always happy to read and see some great pics of the older Singers.. I am the custodian of three of them. Cyclo rear, Simplex JUY 56 front. Maxicar front and rear and a very interesting Mahe seat pin, forward and aft movement.

How do you like that mini front bag, Jan? The lid opens from front to back, opposite of the larger bags, correct? Can you access the contents while riding? Several stores sell the Berthoud Mini 86, which is different, and less elegant, in my opinion. This bag from Grand Bois looks very similar to the one on your Singer: Is it now only available from Grand Bois in Japan? The bikes I usually ride carry a large handlebar bag, so it is obvious what I prefer.

The small bag can hold a raincoat, spare tube, wallet and small camera, but it gets overwhelmed when you need a spot to put a long-sleeve jersey as the day warms up. You cannot access the content, because the bag sits too low and opens the wrong way. The bag in the link from Grand Bois is the same bag as that on my bike. I believe it is available in the U.

Off The Beaten Path. This year, the bike is a half-century old. To celebrate, I took it on a ride with my friend Sam. Here it is click on the photo for a bigger image: Email Facebook Print Reddit Twitter. Bicycle Quarterly magazine and its sister company, Compass Cycles, that turns our research into the high-performance components we need for our adventures. Guidebooks encouraged women to get out on their bikes, such as Lady Cycling: Others, however, were less keen on this development.

No girl over the age of 39 should be allowed to wheel. Unfortunately, it is older girls who are ardent wheelers. They love to cavort and careen above the spokes, twirling and twisting in a manner that must remind them of long-dead dancing days.

Has cycling finally become a natural part of British city life?

In particular, the act of straddling the bicycle was viewed as unseemly for women, with widespread concern that it might cause sexual arousal. A bicycle with both pedals on the same side was developed to allow ladies to ride side-saddle; others had the centre cut out of the saddle to prevent any rubbing that might cause unwanted excitement. Medical objections were also raised.

Doctors were creative with their diagnoses — one writing in claimed cases of women suffering chronic dysentery as a result of cycling — but one of the more common concerns was that women might exhaust themselves with too much exercise. To the extent that over-exertion was a risk, it was caused in large part by the ludicrous clothing women were expected to wear while riding. You consider the possibility of doors opening on parked cars. You try to decipher the inscrutable instructions of cycle lanes. In recent years, there has been a palpable change in the balance of power. Cycling has more than doubled in London in 10 years and through sheer weight of numbers bikes oblige cars to take more notice of them, to proceed gingerly, to give more room, to adjust their pace.

The uncertain skills of some cyclists are also a factor, as wobblers make drivers more wary. The cumulative effect, on a summer evening's rush hour, is a swarming of two-wheeled traffic. There is some tension and aggression, as there always is in the competition for road space, but the atmosphere can be almost festive and mildly exhilarating. There is a variety of behaviour too, from fast, long-distance journeys from outer suburbs to the intricate negotiations of different users in small central streets. The London swarms are one symptom of the way that, patchily but distinctively, British cities are growing a new culture of bikes.

This culture is individualistic and entrepreneurial, occupying many niches.

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• Has cycling finally become a natural part of British city life? | World news | The Guardian!

It includes cafes that embrace both cycling and some more-or-less well-defined social purpose, esoteric magazines, specialised crafts and industries, festivals, tours, clubs and rallies. Its manifestations include such things as the Dunwich Dynamo , in which hundreds turn up, on the Saturday in July nearest to a full moon, to ride through the night a mile route from east London to the Suffolk coast.

About Jan Heine, Editor, Bicycle Quarterly

There is a society for watching films with bicycle-related themes. There is the still unreal fact that Britain cannot only scoop armfuls of Olympic cycling medals, but also provide two different winners, in successive years, of the Tour de France. This year the race will start in the Yorkshire Dales. Cycling supports manufacturing industry of a kind often thought to have disappeared in Britain. In Brentford, Middlesex, there is a factory reached by a ride under a concrete flyover, scented with diesel and spring flowers, in which skilled people make Bromptons , casting parts, brazing the elements together, smoothing their surfaces with rumbling machines and checking their alignment with measuring devices.

The frames then go to Wales to be painted and back again. Then, passed around an informal-looking loop of standing people, the elements become in the space of 38 minutes bikes, each worker adding gears, brakes, wheels and other parts according to an individual specification requested by each purchaser.

It once tried to shift production to Taiwan, but it didn't work. British bike culture runs a social gamut. There is, for example, the Bristol Bike Project , a charity that aims to help disadvantaged people, including refugees, the homeless and recovering substance abusers, by acquiring unwanted bikes: It is hard to think of a more admirable set of objectives.

Its stylish website artfully combines nostalgic images of the weatherbeaten faces of old racers with new technology and claims of "superb functionality".

Freewheeling to equality: how cycling helped women on the road to rights

Rapha's shop in Soho and it has others in Osaka, Sydney, New York and San Francisco presents its products like objects in an art gallery, or at least a fashion store. It is not just a place to buy things, but also a club that organises festivals and tours. The shop includes a cafe of calibrated chillness, where you can watch non-stop cycling television over your yimu oolong tea and cardamom bun.

Bikes come with calibrations of status, captured by the BBC's comedy series about itself, W1A , in which the haplessness of Hugh Bonneville's head of values is signalled by the fact that he can't fold his Brompton and that his high-visibility jacket is in traffic warden's yellow-green. The effortless superiority of his nemesis, the director of strategic governance, is apparent in his classier red jacket, the deft flicks with which he manipulates his folding bike and the fact that it is a raw lacquer version of Bonneville's: As cars get more like one another, and more boring, bikes are acquiring nuances and variations, of which the ultimate example is the personalised, made-to-measure, handmade frame.

Half a Century Old and Still Going Strong | Off The Beaten Path

Finding this concept mysterious but intriguing — how much difference can it really make to have a machine's dimensions exactly tailored to yours? I am taken into a world of craft, of precise choices of stiffness, of the diameters of tubes and the thickness of steel, of material added or taken away to match the degree of stress, of specially treated stainless steel, invented a few years ago, which overcomes that material's usual lack of tensile strength.

Silver is used in soldering because, melting at a low temperature, it flows better and does a neater job. Polishing is done in seven stages, using different grades of sandpaper. Everything is directed to matching your measurements, taken by visiting a fitment specialist, and your desires, established in preliminary consultations.

Sowter was formerly a chef, as well as a graphic designer and a racing cyclist, and you can see something of all these vocations in the job he does now. Saffron's clients are not all people with money to burn, but also those who have yearned for something handbuilt for years and now want "a bike for life".

And "the really nice thing" about these steel frames, says Sowter, is that they last for 60 or 70 years. He says the attraction is not only acquiring a machine that fits you and suits you, but also "getting involved in the process", that your life and the life of your bike intertwine from the latter's conception. The Saffron workshop offers a glimpse into the attractions of the cults of cycling to its devotees.

It is about a close relationship between the human and the physical, or material, of a kind that in a world of disposable products is rare. It is about rhythms — if riding a bike involves speed, and often the more the better, making one by hand is slow. Saffron produces about four a month and has a six-month waiting list. There seems to be a peacefulness that comes from this close attention to a specific range of skills, and seclusion in this esoteric knowledge.

At the same time, these skills and knowledge form the basis of a community with others of the same mind. Sowter knows the very few others in the same business and they are supportive of one another, sharing knowledge, not rivalrous. He is working on establishing a frame-builders' guild. Cyclophilia offers a particular way of connecting with the world and I encounter a similar range when I meet Mike White, a co-founder with James Lucas, who also created the Bristol Bike Project of the quarterly Boneshaker magazine.

A man with a pointed beard and inseparable beanie, it is important to him that his perfect-bound, matt-paper publication is printed rather than online. In a car, you're compartmentalised. On a bike, you feel it all — smell, humidity, temperature. Boneshaker started because Lucas "kept hearing great stories that no cycling magazine would take". It prides itself on having "no training tips, race diets or adverts". It is, says White, "very collaborative. We do it for the love. We get stories from people all over the world. We might publish some crazy, overenthusiastic workshop guy from Berlin or Bratislava just pouring out the words.

He is telling me this in Roll for the Soul , a not-for-profit cafe in Bristol that is also a cycle shop and workshop which, having collected a puncture on my way to Paddington, and then pushed my bike from Bristol Temple Meads to the cafe, I get the opportunity to use.