At 10:48 PM -0400 9/20/01, Wdgadd@aol.com wrote:
> I'm reminded of a man I met in about 1975 at a shop called the Broken
>Spoke in Dover Point, NH, named James Farnsworth. He advocated what he called
>"full throw cycling" which essentially meant using extremely long cranks,
>huge rings, and a lowish cadence. He had a custom chrome Schwinn Paramount
>with a very high bracket to suit the long cranks, which were T.A. 180's with
>machined bolt on block extensions giving perhaps 4 or 5 cm. more length. The
>largest of the triple T.A. rings was at least a 65 or 70. The bike had some
>rather weird and rather crude modified components, like the SunTour GT rear
>changer that had it's cage lengthened by cutting and brazing in a Mafac
>wrench! He let me try the bike (with my wheels) and any impressions I had are
>lost in time, even if they had not been hopelessly colored by teenage
>enthusiasm. I wonder how he talked Schwinn into building this for him? Does
>anyone else remember this guy? By the way, I use 170's and one set of 172.5's
>on 60 cm c to c frames. I'm thinking of going shorter for fixed gear, say
>165's(don't think 167.5's would make much difference).
>
>Best Regards,
>Wes Gadd
Oh, I remember him well, he was an original, and a monomaniac! When I first knew him he didn't have the Paramount, he had a modified frame, I think it was a Hercules. he had cut out a section of the seat tube, jacked up an automobile, then lowered the car onto the frame to "adjust" the geometry, then brazed the now shorter seat tube back together.
His theory was that the crank length should be half the length of the rider's femur, and he had lots of drawings and formulae to support it.
His bike was the first I ever saw with a 6-speed freehweel. It was on a modified Campagnolo hub, which he had machined on a lathe so that the freewheel could screw on farther. His wheel was laced half-radial, with the radial spokes heads out on the _right_ side...this was for the sake of derailer clearance. (I think Mavic is now doing the same on some of their wheels with fat aluminum spokes.)
He also liked (and, for all I know, invented) the 3-leading/3-trailing spoke pattern, which I think I'll probably use on at least one of the wheels I'm going to build for my Hetchins.
Sheldon "Yankee Ingenuity" Brown
Newtonville, Massachusetts
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