In the face of so much expertise and folks whose mechanical knowledge dwarfs
my own I hate to jump into this one, but I am thinking of a bike I recently
owned with extremely short stays and horizontal dropouts. It was meant to
use the 18 mm racing tires that were in vogue when it was built. I found
that when using the 23 mm tires I preferred for road usage I had to deflate
the tires to get them into the forward facing dropouts on the bike...a huge
pain if you were on the road and had a flat and your mini pump was what you
had on hand to inflate it with. I finally had a bike builder modify the
drop outs so that I could more easily get a larger tire into place.
Could this rearward facing scheme have been to accommodate the often larger
tires used in things like path racing and still be able to get them into a
bike with extremely short stays?
Tom Sanders
Lansing, Mi USA