At 8:29 PM -0700 10/16/08, Jan Heine wrote:
>At 6:20 PM -0700 10/16/08, Bob Freitas wrote:
>> This bike has 700c wheels. Racks are certainly light
>>weight and I suspect the rear rack was probably used as a front on
>>heavier touring models.
>
>The bike is a "U.S. special" model. Fenders and horizontal
>Campagnolo dropouts don't go together well, but in the U.S., Campy
>dropouts were seen as a sign of quality. The rear rack is a
>bag-support, and was made for that location.
Well, it shows what happens when you draw conclusions too quickly! The Herse bike in fact came from France... so it cannot be a "U.S. special" model, even though its spec resembles the Singers that came through Cupertino in the 1970s.
Looking through my archives more, I did find a few French RH bikes from the 1970s with horizontal Campy dropouts. The rear rack on the Wooljersey bike resembles that of a superlight 1985 Alex Singer we once featured in Bicycle Quarterly. Obviously, these bikes were very custom-built machines, and some riders specified their own ideas. Depending on how many orders the builders had on the books, they either rejected, modified or built these bikes as desired.
Does that make it a Sportif or a Randonneur? I'd say the categories are less than firm, so it is what you want it to be. Every Herse was custom, and the categories were just used as names for their catalogue. In any case, the Herse looks like a superb machine.
Jan Heine
Editor
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