At 12:48 PM -0600 1/21/08, <smwillis@verizon.net> wrote:
>I would also say a lot of the frame I see are also MTB frames and
>that would not be fair to compare with the past because I do not
>think there was much of that going on at the time.
10-foot drops, no, I don't know of anybody doing that on aluminum bikes or components. But between cobblestones in the cities and unpaved roads in the mountains, bikes certainly underwent some hard testing under serious riders back then.
When subjected to similar conditions during the Paris-Roubaix race
today, some modern machines don't fare too well. Ask Mr. Hincapie,
whose fork snapped in 2006. (Of course, I don't know how many older
machines broke during earlier editions of the race, but it appears
that Merckx et al. had fewer catastrophic frame failures.)
>Tom Dalton wrote:
>Are you saying that several were ridden in the Tour and a lot of
>THOSE survived intact? My guess is that the surviving Barras were
>typically purchased by the well-to-do, barely ridden, and stuck in a
>closet, just like those well-preserved Herses and Singers. I'd love
>to see a few examples of Barras that were known to have been raced
>for a significant part of a season.
I have seen Jean Robic's Barra, which he used in the Tour de France 1948. It's still in one piece. Of course, a single case doesn't mean much. If you want data on 100 Barra frames used in the Tour de France, and get a rigorous analysis of the failure rate, you will be disappointed. That dataset does not exist, because I doubt more than a dozen Barra frames ever were used in the Tour.
To claim that all these machines weren't ridden hard, otherwise they would have failed, is a bit of a stretch. Yes, some were bought by poseurs, but it's hard to see how a company like Barra could make more than 1000 frames by hand over a 20+ year timespan and remain in business, if the failure rate was exceptionally high. (If you mass-produce frames, you can have a generous warranty policy, but with hand-made products, that gets very expensive.)
I think this is my third or fourth post today, so I sign off from this discussion.
Jan Heine
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