Harvey asked why Italian bottom brackets were a strange mixture of both metric and English treading. One fascinating combination that I found really intriguing was at the Kharkov bicycle factory in Eastern Ukraine near the Russian border. Some might remember I've been involved with a bicycle project there that included getting bikes from this factory. In their advertising brochure, they don't refer to their wheel sizes in metric dimensions like we do (i.e. 700c) but rather in inches, even if the actual size is metric. In addition they use the same abbreviation for inches we do ("). It's the one part of the description I can read out of the Cyrillic letters. Looking at their catalog from 2000, they have 12", 16", 20". 24", 26". 27" and 28" tire sizes on their different models. I don't know of any connection this factory (that used to make most of the bicycles used in the former USSR) had with capitalistic countries much less English ones. Somehow English sizes must have become some kind of standard over there sometime in the history of bicycling. Perhaps my Russian speaking CR list member from Germany, Toni, knows something.
Doug Fattic
Niles, Michigan