The constantly changing normal

Giuseppe Martano 1934 Tour de France

Life is a constant change, new ideas, and new technology. People often hate change, they fight against it, but it is futile. Change will come for better or worse. In time we accept change, (Often we have no choice.) and a new “Normal” is established.

In the mid-1970s I wrote a series of articles on frame design for the British “Cycling” magazine. There was no Internet back then, no email, and no comments section where you could debate any ideas put forward. However, one older gentleman took the trouble to write and mail me a long hand-written letter, explaining my theories on “Trail” were wrong, and he enclosed a photocopy of an article from ‘Cycling’ dated 1946 to prove it.

Back in the 1930s, 1940s, and even into the 1950s, there was a thinking that trail was a bad thing.

It was thought that it made the steering of the bike sluggish.

Front forks had a rake (Offset.) of 3 to 3.5 inches. (76mm. to 90mm.) See the photo at the top, from the 1934 Tour de France, and the drawing, left.

I can even see where this idea gained traction.

At first glance it seems logical that the steering axis should reach the ground at the exact point the wheel makes contact and therefore turns at that point. Or it would make sense if a cyclist steered his bike by turning the handlebars, and the frame remained upright.

However, we steer a bicycle by leaning in the direction we wish to turn, and the steering axis ahead of the wheel’s point of contact, is one of the forces causing the wheel to turn in the direction of the lean. (See drawing below right.)

As far back as the late 1950s, early 1960s, I had realized that trail was a good thing, as had almost every other framebuilder. It provides a caster action, and gives the bike stability when going straight, and certain ‘self-steering’ characteristics into the corners.

However, trail goes hand in hand with the head angle. Steeper angles are more sensitive and need less trail to achieve the same self-steering qualities. As many framebuilders in the 1970s were building frames with 75 and even 76-degree head angles, their trail would have been a lot less than mine.

As well as staying with a 73 head angle with less rake, my overall geometry placed the rider’s weight more forward, which also affected the ‘feel’ of the steering. The point I am making, you cannot simply say fork rake should be this much, and trail should be this, without considering the whole frame’s geometry.

Whenever I write one of these type of articles the comments that follow remind me of the old gentleman that took the time to write me in the mid-1970s. He was quoting from an article written 30 years earlier in the mid-1940s.

Information here is just my opinion, if you read another article with a different point of view, it does not mean I am right and they are wrong, or vice-versa, it is simply two differing opinions. One must weigh the qualifications of the writers, and from the information, the reader forms his own opinion.

The problem is today there is an overload of information, couple this with a lot of poor quality and miss-information, and one often searches until they find an article that aligns with their own established viewpoint. This approach leaves little room for growth, instead of keeping an open mind and leaving room for new ideas.

There were more changes made in the 30 years that were the 60s, 70s, and 80s. than there were in the previous 60 or more years. Changes in actual frame geometry that is. Angles, tube lengths, and fork offset, etc. Closer wheel clearances, shorter wheelbases, and higher bottom brackets too.

Some changes brought about by economic factors, others by framebuilders trying to make something better. It once again made me realize how fortunate I was to have been around in that period. Those times will never happen again. There was so much experimentation going on amongst so many individual craftsmen. There will never be that many individual craftsmen at the same time again. 

We have also seen many changes in the last 30 or more years since the end of the 1980s. The whole appearance of the bicycle has changed. We have seen clipless pedals, index shifting, leading to 11 (Or more.) gears. Thread-less headsets. Oversize tubes and carbon fiber have changed to look of the frame, along with sloping top tubes and tee-shirt sizing.

But actual frame geometry has not changed that much, 73/73 angles came out in the 1960s. My road bike fork rake was 35mm. I don’t think other steel framebuilders were too far away from that. Probably around 38mm. was an average. Fork rakes (Offset.) have increased but I feel this has more to do with avoiding toe overlap with the front wheel, than to affect the actual handling. I guess for the time being somewhat of a new norm has been established.  

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Reflections on this Memorial Day

In the early part of 1944 I lived in rural Hampshire, in the middle-south of England. We were not far from Portsmouth where most of the invasion fleet set out on June 6th. that year. I was eight years old, not old enough to fully understand what was going on, but old enough to have clear memories of the events of that time.

I remember the American soldiers coming over to England in the months prior to D-Day. Suddenly appearing one afternoon as I walked home from school, arriving in what seemed to be an endless convoy of army trucks, each full of young men, smiling, waving to us as we waved back.

In the weeks and months that followed that is how I remember the Americans, always smiling, laughing, goofing off, a lot of horseplay and kidding around with each other. At the time they seemed like adults to me, but I now know that most were only 10 or 15 years older than I was.

They were teens or early twenties, goofing around as teens will do. To get it in perspective, if this were today an eight-year-old would have been born in 2013, many of these young soldiers would have been born since 2000. No age at all, really.

Prior to the arrival of the American Army, roads were pretty much devoid of all motor traffic because of petrol rationing. When the Americans came, there was a constant flow of army trucks, Jeeps, and even Sherman Tanks going up and down the roads.

Soldiers were training, playing war games, in the local fields and woodlands. I saw paratroopers jump from airplanes, and I can still visualize the sky filled with hundreds of descending parachutes. They fired blank rounds during these exercises, and after we would go out colleting brass shell casings. 

There was a large US Army camp close by, and we would go hang out there at the weekends. The soldiers would give us chewing gum and candy. This was a big deal because sugar was rationed during the war, and we had to make do with 2 oz. of candy a month. I had never seen chewing gum until the Americans came.

Just as suddenly as the Americans appeared, they all disappeared. I came home from school one day around the first week in June 1944 and they were all gone. I went to the army camp that weekend and it was completely empty. It was a surreal experience that I did not understand, any more than I understood anything else that went on during that period of my life.

It wasn’t until ten or so years later when I became a young adult myself, I realized what had happened. To an eight-year-old it was all a game, an experience, and those young men with their happy, smiling faces never led me to believe it was anything else. But after they left and things got serious, they died in their thousands on the Beaches of Normandy, and others in the months that followed.

It had a profound effect on me. Because today I still see the happy faces of those young American soldiers. I will never forget the sacrifice they made. A sacrifice not of their choosing. But one they made none the less so I would never have to do the same.

Today is a day for humility, to realize it is no longer about ME. It is not even about the veterans of those wars, it is remembering those who died in those wars, gave the ultimate sacrifice.

WWII was a fight against Fascism, the Korean war and Vietnam were fought against Communism. Both are Dictatorships, or Totalitarian form of government.

Time to reflect and ask, is this where we are headed? Is this what I really want? And if it is, then what did all these young men die for? What was the purpose?

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Is the beauty of a bicycle in the way it rides, or the way it looks?

When I built my first frames in England in the late 1950s, early 1960s, I was trying to build myself a better frame. A typical frame of that era had a very shallow, 71-degree seat angle and a long top tube. This did not suit my small stature of 5’ 6”. (167.64 cm.)

When making a maximum effort, I found myself sliding forward and consequently sitting on the narrow nose of the saddle. The result was it was extremely uncomfortable and had the effect of the saddle being too low.

The answer seemed obvious to me, if this was the natural position my body wanted to adopt, put the saddle where it needed to be to accommodate it. I also looked at the way the bike handled at speed, there was a tendency to wobble on fast descents. Also, the bike tended to feel sluggish when getting out of the saddle sprint, or to climb.

Over the next 10 or 15 years I built several different frames with varying angles, and each frame had extra front forks of various rakes, (Offset.) Some of these experiments improved the bike’s performance, and others made things worse. It was a long, slow learning process.

By the early 1970s I had pretty much got my own frame geometry figured out. But now I was being asked to build frames for other local cyclists. By now the trend in Italy and in England was the build road frames with 75 or even 76-degree head angles. I went against this trend as I had experimented with these angles years before and found it did not work too well. The handling was skittish or squirrely.

73-degree head had been established as the ideal head angle as far back as the 1930s, and it still worked. However, the old idea was to have a very long fork off-set, and zero trail. This is what lead to the speed wobbles of those old bikes. I had found that I ¼ inches (32 mm.) fork rake worked better and finally settled at 1 3/8 inches. (35 mm.)

With feedback from other riders, I found that a 73-seat angle worked fine for the taller riders, but I would gradually steepen the seat angle as the frame got smaller. The top tube was lengthened as the frame got taller, but at a lesser amount than the seat tube. This was offset by a longer handlebar stem on the larger frames. The idea was to always have the front part of the handlebars directly over the front hub. This meant the handling was consistent throughout the range of sizes.

Having spent many years designing and building a better bike, it became my main selling point.

Here was a frame that would fit better and handle better. (See the advert (Left.) from the British Cycling Magazine from 1975.)

Strangely, I have seen few framebuilders or manufacturers advertising their product on the premise that it rides and handles better than their competitors.

I feel proof that my frame design is valid, is the fact that I still have a following 28 years after I built my last frame. Many owners are original owners and will not part with their bike. I regularly receive emails from owners saying their FUSO or other bike I built is their favorite ride.

I was recently asked, “What do I think of the current American builders?” I don’t really know enough to answer that. I only know what I see at NAHBS each year. I see beautiful pieces of art, outstanding paint and metal work, but how do they ride? Or does anyone even care? No one will ever go out and race on such a machine anyway. Race bikes are no longer made of steel.

As far as I can see, the corporations who today build the carbon fiber bikes that are raced, are doing little that is innovative as far as geometry. They still build the basic 73-degree parallel frame that dates to the days when it was easier for a builder to build a lugged steel frame that way.

It is difficult to find a CF fork with a 35 mm. rake anymore. Today frames come out of a mold, angles and geometry could be unlimited. Within UCI rules of course, but even within those rules there is room for change. The UCI will also follow what the manufactures want. Disc brakes was an example of that.

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Retro-grouch or just obsolete

I started writing here in 2005 that will be sixteen years by the end of this year. That is a long time and a lot of material, a lot of subjects covered.

The reason I started writing here was simple, I had gathered a lot of knowledge over the years spent building bicycle frames. I felt I needed to share that knowledge. There must be millions of people like me all over the world, doing something or other, and along the way figured out how to do that something a certain way.

This knowledge is often not written down and when these people are gone, that knowledge will be gone also. I felt this was a damn shame because knowledge passed on from one generation to the next is how humankind got from chasing their food with a stick, to where we are today.

However, the thing I find alarming is that our knowledge today is growing at such a rate, that old information becomes outdated at a faster rate. We are producing products that are almost obsolete by the time they are shipped from the factory to the store.

The other thing concerns me is, does anyone really care about what I or anyone else did forty or fifty years ago, when most people are not interested in what was done last year, or even six months ago? I am talking here from a bicycle industry standpoint.

I know my regular readers will say they are interested, and I believe most genuinely are, otherwise they would not keep on coming back. But is the knowledge gathered here only of value from an entertainment standpoint?

Most of those who visit here and learn something about bicycles are no different from bird watchers, people who grow roses, brew beer, or collect stamps. Part of the enjoyment of engaging in a hobby is becoming an expert in that particular subject.

This blog gets around 1,500 to 2,000 hits a day from all over the world, most of these hits come from search engines. Type in any question about bicycles and chances are I have written about it at some time or other, and that article will pop up in a search.

Many hits come from forums where people are discussing some aspect or other of the bicycle, sooner or later someone will post a link to an article I have written. Then the term “Retro-grouch” will pop up, and I wonder, “Is that how people really see me?”

I left the bike business in 1993 so naturally stuff I write about pre-dates that, but does that make me a retro-grouch? To me a retro-grouch is someone stuck in the past that will not move forward. When I was in the bike business, I always questioned the status quo, and often went against what everyone else was doing.

The robots that drive the search engines will only pick up my blog if I keep writing new stuff. At some point I will become too old, too tired, or simply run out of stuff to write about.

When I stop writing, within a year this blog will disappear from the search engines. Publishing in book form is no better, there are so many books published each year that most only reach a limited audience, and who remembers a book that was published last year?

I think the point I am trying to make is that when I started writing here I did so because I thought what I had to offer had some value. I still believe that is true, it is just my reasons for thinking so has changed.

What do you think? Does the speed of advancement in today’s technological environment make knowledge obsolete at a faster rate?

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Remembering my Mother

This Mother’s Day what better time to remember and pay tribute to my own mother. Born in 1897 she was 39 years old when I was born in 1936.

I never knew her without grey hair, although I was told it had been black when she was younger. She had a tough life, smashed her kneecap as a 10-year-old child, when a pile of lumber fell on her while playing on a construction site.

As a result, her left leg was set straight, and she could not bend it. Her handicap never slowed her walking, although of course she had a severe limp, and even climbing and descending stairs did not seem a challenge.

However, whenever she sat, especially in a theater or other public place, people would run into her extended leg. They would expect her to move it, and of course she could not, and she would have to stand to let then pass.

My mother was widowed in the 1930s and left with two children, when her first husband died of a heart attack at age 40. She married my father in 1935, a year before my birth. My stepbrother was 7 years older than me and lived with us, my older stepsister moved away when she was 18-years-old to work in an Aircraft Factory as part of the war effort.

I was three and a half years old when WWII started in September 1939, and my father was one of the first to be called into the army. It was five years before I saw him again. I have only fleeting memories of my father before then, and my younger sister was born two weeks after my father left.

Once more my mother was left to raise small children on her own. She was an expert at sewing and made all our clothes as we grew up. She would take a man’s suit or overcoat, and painstakingly take it apart by cutting the stiches at the seams with a razorblade.

She would then measure us, make a paper pattern, from which she would cut the material salvaged from the old garments and make us a suit or overcoat. She had a small hand-cranked Singer sewing machine. She also made clothes for neighbors and was often compensated with old suits and coats to make even more clothes.

She also knitted and crocheted, made sweaters, scarves, hats and even gloves and socks. Mostly from wool unraveled from old sweaters. She also taught my stepbrother and me to sew, knit and crochet. Our mother always encouraged us to draw, paint, and engage in craft projects.

Above: 1943 at the height of WWII. (Left to Right.) My Mother aged 46, my sister aged 3 1/2. my stepsister aged 18, and me aged 7.

The greatest thing my mother ever did for me was to boast about my achievements to other people while I was present. She would always say things like, "David is so good at drawing," or "He is so good with his hands, he is always making things." She would show people my creative endeavors.

I would make her laugh by the silly little things I said, and she would repeat this to other people, which made me make more stuff up, or I would remember jokes I heard on the radio and tell her.

I don't think she was even conscious of what she was doing. I believe she was genuinely proud of what I could do, this turned out to be a tremendous boost to my self-esteem.

I remember starting school at aged five, full of confidence. In the years that followed much of my self-esteem had been eroded away, I hated book learning and teachers were always putting me down and telling me I was stupid.

But, when I left school at 16, and started and engineering apprenticeship, my education really started. No more book learning, this was hands-on learning, figuring stuff out with my mind, and making things with my hands, which I knew I could do.  I was good at it; my mother had always told me so.

My Mother died peacefully in her sleep in 1982 a few months short of her 85th. birthday. I remember it well when my sister called me. I had just started my own business but was still working in the Masi shop.

She never got to see my later success, and I never thanked her for her part.

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