Ken Sanford asks: Having seen these, I agree that they are very 'neat'...still from a practical optic, they seem to be a solution searching for a problem.
Ken Sanford Kensington, MD
and Joe Bender-Zanoni further speaks "heresy" in the engineer's time-honored way:
>I wonder how many Cinelli bivalent wheels EVER got changed in a race such that the orientation mattered! For starters you needed a pair of them, some sort of mechanical failure and a third wheel! Anyone know of an actual example of a Cinelli wheel changout in a race? <snip>
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I wasn't around in the high-powered world of professional racing, but
I'm not sure that the empirical answer will help us here. The Cinelli
BiValents were expensive, much more so than Campagnolo. They would have
appealed to well-heeled teams, for whom support mattered. The first
advantage was that each team member could have the freewheel of his
choice, since it stayed with the bike when the wheels were changed.
Second, wheel changes were quick, particularly in back. Third, in
theory it would cut back a great deal on how many spares went on top of
the chase car, since any wheel could be used by any team member, on the
front or the back. Finally, when you took off the wheel, the gear
remained where you set it; none of this business of moving to the small
cog to get the wheel out. So, why did they remain so unloved? Well, if
you're gonna try to displace the market leader, and have a very limited
set of customers for whom reliability matters, don't release it until it
works. Of the 4 Cinelli wheels that my friend Jim Papadopoulos got with
his (no my) '65 Paramount, 3 shed their splines. This does not add to
marketing allure. Apparently the racers had a few situations with poor
optics, too... I think that the second generation, with full aluminum
body, worked better, but that may be hope's triumph over data. I've
never broken one, but I've never put them to test with a really low
gear, and they tend to be ridden by has-beens like me.
I would predict that we'll see a NEW! revival of a system that leaves the cogs with the frame this decade, because it does work so nicely for transport, tire changes, etc.
harvey sachs
mcLean va