At the Nahbs show I was happy to see Roland Della Santa again. Roland's built bikes for my shop since the '70's and every frame has been clean, straight and a jewel to ride. He's got 30 plus years of experience building for top racers and his bikes are a whopping bargain in the $1500-2500 price range. They're not flashy, but really good. I'd rather have a Della Santa custom built to order that really fits than an off the shelf Rivendell with a tall stem and wacky geometry.
Many custom builders are too busy building to take notice of the response by a bike-illiterate generation to the latest fad bikes. Time is an expensive commodity for a dedicated framebuilder who puts the hours into his frames to make them special and has none left over for consumer marketing.
Steel keeps re-emerging again after about a 2year cycle of Carbon, Ti and Aluminum "wonder" frames. Bruce Grodon points to Rivendell as a culprit in the demise of some of his market, but the nature of bicycle magazines to present the "latest" every month, whether it's any good or not to keep advertising, readership, and the mag profitable has a bigger impact than many people realize on shaping trends in the Marketplace.
Many advancements in steel technology: Prestige, Metax, Super Vitus, Excel, Reynolds 753, Dedacchi, hit the back burner in the late '80's when Ti and carbon ruled the magazines. I remember the first Kestrel frame I got in....it's advertized weight was 3.2 lbs. On my Mettler P23 scale it weighed 4.21 lbs. Whoops! The rear dropouts were crooked, the BB also was crooked in the frame so it needed a 119mm axle instead of a 114mm to keep the chain from tingling on the 52 chainring on any cog smaller than a 15 in back...severe "Raleigh-itis" as we used to say. I sent it back. John Schubert at Bicycling confessed in a phone call to me that his Kestrel had the same problems and broke after 6 months and that he'd heard that 60 % of the original batch failed in the first year. If you look back to those mid 80's editions of Bicycling you can see how Kestrel got it's big push.
It's hard to repair that kind of damage to the industry as a whole.
The early index shifting wars also brought a lot of shops with knowledgable help to their knees, then oblivion. From 1984 on, the groups from Shimano, Suntour and Campy changed yearly to keep pace with each other for market share. Your local trustworthy and conscientious bike shop was stuck (and still might be) with repair inventory obsoleted in one model year by the next generation of wonderparts. In the mid 80's the bike industry leaders wised up to the fact that by changing colors and graphics every year they could guarantee new sales from shops trying to keep pace.
It's kind of interesting how the fallout from the bike industry, like readers and posters on this board, LOL! are gaining strength and recognition for their divergence from current marketplace trends.
Rivendell has done a good job through their magazine of articulating the malaise of riders turned off by the soulless fad offerings in many shops and have capitalized pretty well on this phenonema. I'm don't think Grant is getting rich, though. It takes a lot of verbal argument to get people to buy products different than those offered at your local Specialized dealer.
Another unsung builder that didn't attend the NAHSB is Ed Litton. Ed is an amazing and versatile builder and painter. Several of Bruce Gordon's bikes sported Ed's gorgeous paintwork at the show as well as other builders. Ed's done some fantastic repairs and paint for me on a variety of bikes: Alex Singer, Rene Herse, Jack Taylor, Raleigh, Paramount, Witcomb and copied the finish details of the original builder so closely you can't tell it's been worked on. Ed also was a noted racer in his youth and still rides a bike well. He understands what kind of stays and forks (suspension components) the bike needs to have when you're screaming into a bumpy off-camber corner in a descent with your weight off the back, arms locked to hold you back and leaning on the front brake with your life. He's been there, done that. Ed's prices are also reasonable for the time he spends on each frame. He can do fancy lugs if you want them, but that's not what makes him tick. The bikes need to work.
Enough for now, time to tickle my old '72 Paramount...good weather is just around the corner...
Paul Brown
Cycle Dynamics
Santa Rosa, CA
707 322-7208
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Was: Campagnolo mistake like this? Now:
> Price Schedules
> 2. Re: The best road riders in history (Jerome &
> Elizabeth Moos)
> 3. OT Polish typewriter (Was CR Items for sale)
> (Mary Kaminski)
> 4. brake pads for wood rims (Phil Sieg)
> 5. Re: More PX-10+ How accurate are the seatpost
> measurements?
> (John Quigley)
> 6. An inexpensive Campagnolo mistake item (Kevin
> Kruger)
> 7. Kevin Cooke
> 8. Re: Re: 5 figure bikes (brianbaylis@juno.com)
> 9. Re: Re: 5 figure bikes (Don Rogers)
> 10. Re: KOF: Rivendell is the new H.D.
> (brianbaylis@juno.com)
> 11. "Would you pay $15000 for a bicycle?" (Ken
> Wehrenberg)
> 12. Re: KOF: Rivendell is the new H.D.
> 13. Re: Seat post that has an expander bolt like a
> stem
> (brianbaylis@juno.com)
> 14. Re: KOF Marketting (brianbaylis@juno.com)
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 08:38:47 -0500
> From: loudeeter@aol.com
> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Subject: Re: [CR]Was: Campagnolo mistake like this?
> Now: Price Schedules
> Message-ID:
> <8C81716160F6BEB-13DC-7874@FWM-R13.sysops.aol.com>
> In-Reply-To:
> <20060316064846.77402.qmail@web60420.mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Precedence: list
> Message: 1
>
> Ray, your experience is the same as mine. I
> visited Italy in spring 1989. I was departing that
> summer for the U.S. after a three year tour in
> Germany and thought I would stock up on stuff and
> bring it home in my household goods--no customs, let
> you tax payers pay for my shipping costs!! Got to
> Italy and whoa, was that a shocker. The prices were
> more than what I would pay through the catalogs in
> the U.S.! I did find some nice used bicycles, but
> got squeamish when I started worrying about whether
> they might have been heavily raced bicycles. I'm
> not sure whether my fear was justified, but at the
> time, my belief was that a heavily raced bicycle
> might have hairline stress fractures at the joints
> that might not be obvious to the eye. One thing I
> do remember is a new Colnago model that had Super
> Record rear derailleur and cheaper Campagnolo parts
> elsewhere that was selling very cheap (in
> Germany)--something like $800 for a new bike.
> Several Americans bought them. They had fade paint
> with spiderweb criss-cross. Lou Deeter, Orlando FL
>
>
> "Five second fuses only last three seconds." -
> Infantry Journal
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Raymond Dobbins <raydobbins2003@yahoo.com>
>
>
> When I was in northern Italy in 1989, I noticed that
> Campagnolo component prices
> at the local Italian bike shops was comparable to
> those at US bike shops, and of
> course both were higher than those of catalog
> outfits like Nashbar and
> Performance. Based on that, I'm guessing that, at
> least starting in the late
> 80's, the the price schedules were applied depending
> on volume purchased rather
> than country of destination. Was it different
> before that, i.e, were prices
> really higher for the USA?
>
> Ray Dobbins
> Miami Florida
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 05:43:42 -0800 (PST)
> From: Jerome & Elizabeth Moos
> <jerrymoos@sbcglobal.net>
> To: greenjersey@ntlworld.com,
> classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Subject: Re: [CR]The best road riders in history
> Message-ID:
>
<20060316134342.8918.qmail@web82205.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
> In-Reply-To:
>
<20060316103921.YZGV28606.aamtaout02-winn.ispmail.ntl.com@smtp.ntlworld.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> Precedence: list
> Message: 2
>
> I don't think you can prove who was the best, except
> maybe in extraordinary cases like Merckx and Beryl
> Burton. But comparing athletes from different eras
> is one of the most basic attractions of being a fan
> of any sport. Why do baseball fans all know the
> lifetime batting average of the long-dead Ty Cobb?
> Or how many home runs Babe Rith hit? It is exactly
> the difficulty of comparison that makes the
> comparisons compelling. How many Grand Slams would
> Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzales and even Rod Laver have
> won if pros had then be allowed to play the Grand
> Slams? How many TdF would Coppi and Bartali have
> won had their careers not be interrupted by the war?
> (Or had Bartali not had to withdraw when winning a
> TdF just before the war because of French fans
> attaching the Italian riders?)
>
> Regards,
>
> Jerry Moos
> Big Spring, TX
>
>
>
> greenjersey@ntlworld.com wrote:
> Ray green wrote:
> Incidentally in Daniel Marszalek's "THE Best Road
> Riders IN History" Moser comes fifth and first
> Italian. Before you ask Coppi is ninth. This
> excellent list does, reasonably, reward a long
> career and Coppi didn't earn any points while a POW.
> Chuck Schmidt wrote:
> Perfect example of why these lists are always
> flawed. You just can't compare riders of different
> eras in my opinion. To me it is enough to show the
> dominate rider of the different eras, but to try to
> pick one rider as the best rider in history? Compare
> the top rider from one era
> to the top rider from another? Silly...
> Ray Green replies:
> I think that the only thing wrong with Daniel
> Marszalek's list is the title. If it was called "The
> Winningest Road Rider in History" any objections
> would be removed. Like most lists it gives points
> for wins. Daniel has a really comprehensive and
> sensible scheme. It awards points that relate to the
> value of the race at the time. So Paris-Brussels for
> instance earns big points for the period when it was
> a Classic but less now that it is a fish and
> chipper.
> Conversely the San Sebastian Classic gets less
> points during the period when it was a Basque
> domestic race and more when it was a World Cup race.
> For me it is an objective assessment of the worth of
> riders' palmares.
> Finally I cannot agree that it is impossible to say
> who is the best. Whoever your favourite is, from
> whatever era, there are other possibilities as the
> best. If you choose Coppi an arguement can be made
> for Bartali. If you choose Hinault you must consider
> Kelly and Lemond but if you choose Eddy Merckx there
> is no nobody as a possible contender. The Special
> One is unique, he is simply the Best Cyclist Ever.
>
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