Re: [CR]Origins of cable routing below BB

(Example: History)

Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 17:43:31 +0100
Subject: Re: [CR]Origins of cable routing below BB
From: "Hilary Stone" <hilary.stone@blueyonder.co.uk>
To: Jan Heine <heine@mindspring.com>, <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>
In-Reply-To: <a05010405b92a7ff00799@[165.121.40.15]>


I think that both under bracket rear derailleur cable routing and internal rear brake cable routing was both earlier and more common than Jan Heine supposes. Chuck mentioned that his 1950s Hetchins had under bracket cable routing - it was pretty much standard on all Hetchins with derailleur gears with bare wire cable routing from about 1950 onwards and I would guess was one of Jack Denny's ideas. Hetchins with Cyclo Standard gears (a rare but not completely unknown sight) of course had enclosed cables. As to internal rear brake cable routing this was not uncommon on French tourers or racers in the 1940s/50s and certainly Armstrong in England for one used it on a road bike model in 1949. And I am pretty certain I have seen Italian road bikes from the 40s/50s with internal rear brake cable routing.

Hilary Stone in sunny Bristol, England

Jan Heine wrote:
> The 1952 René Herse featured in Rivendell Reader No. 26 (shameless
> plug - I wrote the story) has under BB cable routing. So Sheldon is
> right - it's an mtb thing (the Herse has 650B wheels), but not an
> American mtb thing.
>
> How about this postulation: Clamp-on guides usually were above the BB
> - whether because it was easier to make them that way, or whether
> because nobody thought about it differently, or whether there was
> some long-forgotten (by me, at least) derailleur that needed above-BB
> routing. So when the braze-ons came along for ITALIAN/AMERICAN (the
> two really were more or less the same at the time) bikes in the
> 1970s, they copied the clamps. That could be all there is to it.
>
> Whether the below BB routing came about because somebody finally saw
> a René Herse (or Singer, they used the same arrangement), whether it
> was U.S. mtbs (as Sheldon postulates), or simply that somebody's
> clamp broke and they had to cobble together something and figured
> that the cable could run on the BB shell just fine to get them home...
>
> Now, who invented that stupid idea of having a piece of cable housing
> for the front derailleur cable near the BB, where the water collects,
> rust develops and the front derailleur stops shifting? My 1965
> Cinelli Supercorsa has that one, without the rust, fortunately.
>
> P.S.: Somebody please explain to me how the brake cable routing
> inside the top tube came about in the early 1980s (?). Hint: The 1952
> Herse has that feature as well.