Sunday 10 April 2011

It's all too damn' rigid ...

I've decided I'm going to start a campaign to get us back to the days when we had some choice in the matter of "rigidity"!

What has sparked this off? Well, I am doing a Mondiale bike build for a very small, petite young lady. We can get around the problems caused by her low body mass by using a small-diameter tubed frame to some extent, but it's at the frame and forks level that the problems start ...

Virtually all the forks available in carbon use a 1 1/8" diameter steerer - there is only one half-way decent fork made in 1", the Columbus Minimal, and that only seems to exist because of the current interest in "retro" and pseudo-retro, so once these go out of production, we'll be stuffed - we'll have to go 1 1/8", or perhaps by then the powers-that-be will have decreed that we all need integrated headsets (why?) and 1 1/4 or 1 1/22 lower head races ... in the name of rigidity.

Actually this has nothing whatever to do with what we need in bicycles, and everything to do with marketing and the need to keep re-inventing the wheel to keep all of those factories in China churning out tat.

On a small frame like the one that we are building, for a light rider, 1" is fine ... she's no Thor Hushovd, she'll not be putting huge torsional loads on the frame, so building something with even a 1 1/8" head is just uneccesary, it is heavier, it uses more material and it's out of proportion to the rest of the frame ...

Then, bars and stem - can I find a decent short reach, shallow bar with a 26mm ferrule? Can I hell. Apparently we need 31.8mm ferrules now - heavier, but giving greater rigidity - lousy idea if you view a bike as a suspension system with the rider as the damping. Again, rigid front ends designed for top-end competitive use are of no flaming relevance at all to the majority of riders.

Seatpost - well, thank goodness there are still some 27.2 posts about and hopefully that may continue as Cervelo, one of the more enlightened designers around with sway in the industry have realised that oversize in this department is probably not such a good idea.

Then we get to the real headache area - bottom brackets. BB30, BBright (a misnomer if ever there was one) and all the rest - great for OEs and bike builders who want to flop bikes together in no time flat, lousy for the end user. No standardisation yet, no concencus - all so that we can have stiffer frames and crank bb interface (which most users neither notice nor need), higher rates of wear and tear, and actually we get less choice, not more, as making the tooling for complex systems (in manufacturing terms) like these means that we loose things like 165mm cranks, 177.5 & 180mm cranks, triple chainsets - this has nothing to do with what bicycle riders might actually want, everything to do with what we are told that we want (and we believe it ...)!

I know I am in danger of becoming a cross between a grumpy old man and a luddite, but we have to start asking fundamental questions about what is needed, not about what we think we can write a clever marketing spiel for - before our choices are limited to bikes designed for 6 foot male racing cyclists or nothing ... OK for me (though I don't actually like the feel of the bike I have with oversize bars and stem), not so good if you are a small, light rider looking for comfort ...

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