A Slice in Time

Recently I was thinking back to 2008, just twelve years ago, a slice in time if you will, as I thought of the things I had done since that date. It seems not too long ago, and yet for someone sixteen years old today, that twelve years would be the entire memory of their life.

2008 came to mind for several reasons. It was the year the housing bubble burst and threw us into a recession. I was 72 years old and had a nice little part-time job, in an engineering design department of a company that built forklift trucks. It was a three-day a week job that paid well and I enjoyed, but being part-time I was one of the first to go when the recession hit. It was the last job I would have.

2008 was an election year, and America elected its first Black President, Barack Obama. This was something I thought I would never see in my lifetime and thought finally there was hope for Racial Equality. Sadly, here we are twelve years later, and we have a “Black Lives Matter” movement, and protests on the streets.

Four years ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, which I am managing quite well with a relatively low dose of medication, exercise, and a plant-based diet. I have not developed any more symptoms apart from a slight tremor in my right hand which I can control for the most part, and it does not stop me from doing anything I want to do.

Last year my wife and I moved from Summerville, near the coast of South Carolina, 200 miles inland to just outside Greenville, South Carolina. Summerville not far from Charleston was a beautiful place to live but was becoming over-crowded and traffic was horrendous. We are now in a rural area more suited for a quiet retirement.

After reflecting on the last twelve years I thought back to the time from 1940 when I was four years old, up until 1952 when I was sixteen. Another twelve-year slice in time, and still in quite vivid living memory for me, with so much happening in the World during that period.

1940 My father somewhere in the Sahara Desert during WWII.1940, WWII had started in September the previous year, and my father had left to go fight.

I remember little of him before he left, and it would be five years before he returned.

The USA had not yet joined in the war, that would happen the following year in 1941, after Pearl Harbor.

In 1940 we were living in the East-end of London where my father worked on the docks as a Stevedore, loading and unloading ships.

I remember the bombing during the Blitz when a bomb landed a couple of streets behind us. All the windows in the back of the house were blow out, and the blast blew open the bedroom door next to my bed, slamming the door against my bed.

I was uninjured, so too was my mother in the next bed and my sister who was a baby less that a year old. My older brother who was eleven years old at the time, slept in a back bedroom and was blown out of bed and cut by flying glass. We went down to a coal seller, under the house. I remember having to hold my baby sister, who was just screaming and would not stop, while my mother tore strips from a bedsheet to dress my brother’s cuts. Luckily, my brother was not seriously injured, but I clearly remember him covered in blood from head to toe.

Me age 4 with my father's brother David who I was named after. The tents in the background are an army camp.Soon after we moved to a rural area in the South of England where we waited out the rest of the war. I never understood the war at that age, I had known nothing else.

There was no actual fighting, but a lot of soldiers camped nearby, training and playing war games. A lot of military vehicles and even tanks on the road, which for a small boy was pretty awesome.

I particularly remember the American troops arriving in 1944 prior to the Normandy invasion. I was now eight years old.

What I remember most was these American soldiers were always laughing and goofing around.

They seemed like adults to me at the time but now I realize they were teenagers, just barely ten years older than me. Laughing and goofing around because that is what teenagers do.

Then one day in early June 1944 they were suddenly gone. They were there one day, camped on every available piece of spare land, then the next day they were gone. It was a surreal experience.

It was years later as an adult I would realize that many of these happy, laughing kids, had left to die on the beaches of Normandy in their thousands. It would have a profound affect on me that would stay with me for the rest of my life.

My father fought the entire North African Campaign against Field Marshal Rommel’s German Army. He came home briefly in 1944, before returning to France just days after the Normandy Invasion, and went right through Europe and into Germany, and did not come home again until the war was over in 1945.

My father spent the entire war as a member of a tank crew, and was completely uninjured, “Not even a scratch,” as he put it. When he first came home, he was my hero because of what he had done, and because my mother had talked continuously about him while he was gone.

My father turned out to be emotionally distant, and physically abusive to both my mother and me. But war will do that to a man, I was three and a half years old when he left and eight years old when he returned. We never had a chance to bond.

We moved back to the East End of London in 1946 and my father went back to his old job. The kids who had stayed out the war in London were tough and street wise. We evacuees who had spent the war in a rural area, were unsophisticated country bumkins. We even had a different accent and were bullied horribly.

My father who was an amateur boxer would have none of this and taught me the art of self-defense. The result was to be punched by a 36-year-old man, who was a hardened war veteran, hurt far more than any kid at school could hit me. I became unafraid of being hit and fought back. Eventually the bullying stopped.

The East End of London was a high crime area, with an extremely corrupt police force, especially right after WWII. In 1949 when I was thirteen years old, my mother talked my father into moving to Luton, an industrial town just 30 miles north of London.

Me with my first new bike at 13. A Hercules roadster that must have weighed 45 lbs.This move was the one thing that changed the whole course of my life. I got my first bike, and got into cycling as a means of escape from my dysfunctional home.

I passed an entrance exam to a Technical School which lead to an Engineering Apprenticeship at 16 years old.

I got my first lightweight bike at fourteen year old, joined the Luton Arrow Cycling Club at fifteen, but had to wait until I was sixteen to race.

By then I had hundreds, if not thousands of miles in my legs, was super fit and raring to go. I started to win races, and people were telling me I was good at something.

No wonder I lapped it up, even my own father was proud, as long as I won. If I did not, he would say, “You’re fucking useless.” I think more than anything I wanted him to come out and watch me race. But he never did.

Looking back, that first twelve years in memory, seems double the length of the last twelve. But when I consider all that happened in that first slice of time, it is not so much that it is longer, it is just a thicker slice.

     To Share click "Share Article" below

The Mob Mentality

Whenever I am engaged in conversation with people who are not cyclists, on learning of my background in the bike business, and my continued interest in cycing, they will invariably ask me,

“Why do large groups of cyclists take up the whole damn road? If you give even a friendly toot on the horn to let them know you are passing, you will more often than not get the finger. Why are they so hostile and so rude?”

This is how I try to explain it:

First of all in any random group of people you have a cross-section of society. Some are nice people, and some are assholes. It is the assholes in the group that will give you the finger. Rarely would you get the whole group giving the one finger salute in unison. Just as there are assholes who drive cars, there are assholes who ride bikes.

The other thing is the mob mentality. This is a common human trait that we see in any group of people not just cyclists. When people get together in a group, they are less considerate of others outside the group.

Your neighbor is having a party, and as the guests leave late at night, they laugh and talk loudly, slam car doors, and disrupt the sleep of people living several houses away. Usually these people are good neighbors, why would they have such inconsiderate friends we ask ourselves?

How many people have been in a restaurant where there is a large group of say ten or more people? I guarantee that party will be extremely loud, often obnoxious, and will have little regard for anyone else who is unfortunate enough to be seated nearby.  

However, this is what we have come to expect in certain bars and restaurants. There will always be large groups made up of co-workers, family members, celebrating someone’s birthday or something.

Also, an important factor, these are just people you can’t stereotype them.

But get a bunch of cyclists on the road, enjoying each other’s company, and are being no more, or no less considerate of others around them than the party in the restaurant.

The big difference is, now you can stereotype them, they are cyclists. Whenever you see a bunch of cyclists together, they seem to be behaving badly, therefore all cyclists are lumped together as being bad.

The larger the group the worse the behavior. Take sports fans assembled in their thousands and the mob mentality really takes over. The mob could be angry over their team’s loss, or celebrating their victory, the outcome is the same.

In extreme cases store windows are broken, parked cars are overturned, and even set on fire. Most people would not behave that way individually, or even in a smaller group.

This is how I try to explain why some cyclists behave badly. I don’t condone it. It is one of the reasons I no longer ride with large groups, even though it can be fun. So I ask that people don’t condemn me for riding a bike, just because a few cyclists behave badly.

What is needed is a little more tolerance and understanding on both sides. Cyclists need to be a little more considerate of other road users. Remember our cycling kit and helmet is what sets us apart so we will be stereotyped and others like us will be judged by our behavior.

And the general public needs to realize that these are just a group of friends enjoying each other’s company and getting some fresh air and exercise while doing so.  And if it is a Sunday, where are you going in such a big hurry anyway?

What are your views, and how do you handle the conversation with non-cyclists?

     To Share click "Share Article" below

Marketing Nothing

I remember having a conversation with someone in the 1980s. I think the conversation arose out of the fact that I was producing a handmade product, which was becoming increasingly rare.

I can’t even remember who the person was, but I clearly remember while referring to The United States, he said:

“We will eventually become a Nation of People producing nothing, just selling insurance to each other.”

It seems to me this prediction looms ever closer to coming true, but by now the terminology has changed. No one is “Selling” anything anymore, it is now called “Marketing.”

The problem is whether you are selling or marketing, it only works if people are buying, and in today’s economic climate people do not have loads of spare cash lying around to buy much of anything.

Now the world is full of “Marketing Gurus.” These are people who can no longer make a living by selling stuff, because no one is buying. So now they are selling nothing more than an idea, that you can make a ton of money selling or marketing on the Internet.

I ask myself this: If I found a way to make a lot of money, would I need to sell that idea to other people? No, I would be too busy making money.

There is an old story about a man in his neighbor’s garage when he notices a large number of boxes containing cleaning products. He remarked, “You must sell a lot of cleaning supplies.”

The neighbor replied, “No, but the man who sells me this stuff, he sells a lot of cleaning supplies.” It is the Internet Marketing Gurus who are making money, not the poor suckers who buy their idea.

Over the years I attended my share of sales seminars and read many books on the subject. What always troubled me was the messing with people’s minds, to convince them they needed what it was I were selling

Often it was borderline trickery to convince them that having whatever it was I was selling would make them happier, and their lives better than holding on to their hard-earned cash. Although not illegal, it somehow seemed to me to be morally wrong.

Companies and corporations need to start thinking about the people who work for them as well as their bottom line. Is it really necessary to lay people off and send jobs overseas?

Okay, so your product may cost a little more, and you sell a little less. But there are always people who will pay the extra for a quality product, and some because of the fact it is home produced. Downsizing and cutting back on some employees is better than firing everyone and sending the entire production offshore.

When I had my bike business, I was competing head on with the large Italian bike builders, who would send over in one container shipment more than my entire year’s production. But I was able to compete because I did not have the shipping and wholesale costs that they had.

I did not have their advertising costs of my large competitors either, because I only needed to sell a fraction of what they did.

I think the good thing that will come out of this recession is that people will become used to getting by on a little less. They will live simpler lives, less dependent on all this material stuff.

And the people listening to these Internet Marketing Gurus because it seems the only avenue open to them. Think again, they are selling nothing but an idea. False hope, or worse, a scam that will take what little you have, rather than make you money.

One cannot produce nothing and sell it indefinitely. What is needed is people producing worthwhile products or providing worthwhile services that other people need. Provide that and the marketing will take care of itself.

     To Share click "Share Article" below

Restored Memories

Just this last week I received an email from Jim Taylor, owner of a bike store called “Grindin’ Gears Bikes n’ Boards, in Lloydminster, Alberta, Canada. Jim had come into possession of a “project” bike as he referred to it. A custom ‘dave moulton’ frame, that he intends to restore, and ride himself. 

I reached for my frame numbers record book, a little hardcover notebook where I recorded frame numbers of custom frames built from 1982 to 1986. When I moved my shop from San Marcos to Temecula, California, the book got misplaced during the move, and it is a small miracle that it survived and I still have it today.

This frame number is 1835, it is a 62 cm. frame. Custom frame numbers represent the date it was built.

This one was built in January 1983 and it was the 5th frame built that month.

It was ordered through Two-Wheel Transit Authority, a bike store in Huntington Beach, California. (Orange County, South of LA.)

A huge bike store that was housed in a building that was formerly a Bowling Alley.

Jim tells me that the original customer’s name is on the frame, Paul Johnson. The bike was picked up in Palm Springs, California, and brought to Alberta by a customer of “Grindin’ Gears. Sadly, the bike has been neglected for many years, probably stored in an outside barn, or shed.

Looking at my frame numbers book (Above.) brought back a lot of memories. In early 1983 I was still working out of the Masi shop in San Marcos. Previously working for Masi until the end of 1981 when I was laid off because of an overstock of Masi frames and a downturn in the economy.

In a bad economy there are always people who have money, and believe it or not one can survive making a high end product, where the issue is not the price but the quality, and even more important is delivering the product in a timely manner. I would build and deliver a custom frame in as little as two weeks.

Last frame built 1982. (See book page above.) Owner David Ball

I sold my frames through a network of bike dealers across the US. Dealers originally contacted by cold calling on the phone. The bike dealers loved it because they not only made a markup on the frame, the made money on the components, and labor to build wheels, and assemble the bike.

Frame #1834Selling though dealers gave me the quantity of orders that I could not have achieved by selling direct to individuals.

By January 1983 I had so many orders to fill, I was working 18 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week.

The pages in my book shows, I built 10 custom frames that month. February (A short month.) I built 7 more frames, and March another 11.

It had become obvious that I needed to get out of the Masi shop, and into my own facility. I did this by July 1983. Altogether in 1983, I built 96 custom frames, plus by the end of the year another 200 John Howard frames.

Frame #1839Looking back, it was a lot of work, but the repartition of building so many frames made me a better framebuilder.

It also made me faster so I could build even more, at the height of production I built 500 Fuso frames a year.

By then I did have employees doing much of the prep and finish work, plus I had a full-time painter. In the eary years I also did my own painting. Everything shown on this page, I painted.

The only problem was, when the demand for road frames dropped, it was no longer viable to keep going. By then I was burned out anyway.

Frame #2831Was it all worth it? You bet it was. There is a whole legacy of frames still out there, still being enjoyed by their owners. I still put in a lot of hours, writing this blog and maintaining my Bike Registry. However, I am a firm believer that a person should have a purpose in life.

Nearly every email I get starts something like this: “To be honest I had never heard of you or the Fuso, until I found this bike and looked it up online.” So, without all the time I spend promoting the brand now, all the hours I worked back then would be wasted, and many of these frames I sweated over would be in landfills.

#2832 Original owner Chuck Schmidt. Used regularly and still in mint condition. Also shown below.Throughout this article I have shown other bikes built around January/February 1983. Below is a track frame #2833 built for Jim Zimmerman and raced on the Trexlertown track in PA. Later it was bought and used as a "Work bike" by the late "Fast Eddie Williams, renowned bike messenger in New York City. (Below.) (Read articles here.)

     To Share click "Share Article" below

The day the bicycle lost its heart and soul

When some one sent me a picture of a Fuso bike, (Above.) I knew at first glance that I did not build it. This one was built by Russ Denny, my former apprentice who took over my business when I retired in 1993. The frame had a sloping top tube, and while this is normal today, back prior to 1993 it was not.

I never built any frame with anything but a level top tube, with the exception of a few drop top ladies model, and the occasional twin tube “Mixtie” frame, which is a whole different frame design. I m talking of the standard road frame.

It made me think, what a run this simple design had. From the early 1900s until the mid to late 1990s, almost made it a hundred years without any major changes. Apart from basic geometry, tube angles, etc., once the standards were established, they remained the same, a level top tube was one of them, and any deviation from that was not acceptable, to either the framebuilder or the customer.

What I find amazing is that everything else changed so dramatically over the same period, I think of automobiles, aircraft, and just about any other manufactured item. They have all been though many changes over the same period.

It all started with the invention of the chain drive. The first was the British model “Rover” Safety Bicycle.So-called because its fore-runner was the Ordinary or High-wheeler model, (Below right,)

Although this was the first “Enthusiasts” bike, one had to be young, athletic, and have nerves of steel to even mount such a machine.

The Rover design pretty much established that the chain would drive the rear wheel, while the front wheel would provide a means of steering. The chainwheel, cranks and pedals would be just ahead of the rear wheel, and below the rider’s saddle.

The rider’s position was copied from the ordinary, and lead to those early frames having laid back “Slack” frame angles that would prevail into the 1950s.

Early frames were a hodge-podge of tubes of various shapes and sizes. The bicycle soon became mass-produced, which lead to it becoming an affordable means of transport for the working classes. Prior to that the only personal form of transport was a horse,

Mass production also lead to standard-ization and simplification of design. The chain itself is still half an inch pitch today the whole world over, even though most countries use the metric system.

Wheel sizes became standardized, and the frame design became the simple straight tube, diamond design, that we are all so familiar with.

Most of these standardizations came within the first ten years into the early 1900s. Tube sizes, 1 ¼ Head tube, 1 1/8th. Down and seat tube, 1-inch top tube. Most countries in the world including Italy, use these same Imperial size tubes. Hand brazed, lugged steel frames were, for the most part, the norm throughout this period.

It soon became obvious that frames would have to be different sizes to accommodate different size people, and the level top tube being parallel to the wheel centers, made it a point of reference, for the framebuilder to easily design and build a frame of any size.

The front fork being the same height for any frame, the position of the bottom head lug, and the length of the head tube is easy to arrive at, and head and seat angles are measured from horizontal top tube.

The advantage for the customer was, once he had established a size of frame that suited him, he could buy another of any make in that size, and it would fit.

Plus, the handlebars would be the correct height in relation to the saddle. No one spoke of handlebar drop.

When I left England in the late 1970s, my customers were almost exclusively amateur racing cyclists, their bikes all had the same componentry. Campagnolo Group, Cinelli handlebars and stem. Christophe toe clips, Binda laminated toe-straps. Tubular tires, and usually Mavic rims. Frames were either by a local builder like me, and therefore varied from one area to another.

If the frame was not by a local builder, it was by one of the larger English builders. Holdsworth, Mercian, Jack Taylor. Italian frames were not big in England at the time.  They were expensive compared to the UK built frames.

When the US Bike Boom happened in the 1970s English framebuilders, even the larger ones could not supply the demand, and they lost out to the Italian companies that  were larger, as they had been supplying most of the continent of Europe for years.

By moving to America, I was able to compete for a small niche of the market, but when the second bike boom hit, namely the Mountain Bike craze. Only a few high-end established mountain bike specialists were able to take advantage of their particular niche. The rest was taken over by companies like Giant, who found by building frames with sloping top tubes, they were able to build less sizes.

Above illusrates the evolution from the "One size fits all" BMX Bike, to the limited size MTB and Road Bike.

When this look became the norm, it made its way to road bikes, and by then carbon fiber was taking over from steel. Lugged steel had a good run, and I am proud to have been around at the end of that era.

The only other products I can think of that are made by craftsmen and remain the same year after year, are musical instruments. Everything else, including bicycles are now the same as any other consumer product that can become obsolete at the whim of the manufacturer.  

The bicycle, and in particular the lugged steel racing bike, took about ten years to establish standard designs and practices that would last for another 90 years. Towards the end changes in componentry came at a fast pace, (Index shifting, clipless pedals, etc.) culminating in the demise of the frame itself, which is fitting because after all the frame is the heart and soul of the bicycle.

     To Share click "Share Article" below