Re: [CR]Cotterless crank history questions

> Thanks, Jan. I've also wondered why no other maker did a square taper
> cotte
> rless set in the 40' or early 50's. I'd forgotten about Rene Herse. Also,
> t
> he Gnutti was a very different design,with an expanding splined spindle
> spl
> it longitudinally at 120 degrees, so Campagnolo is the third unless there
> were others.
> Does anyone know what the intro date of the Williams AB77 was?
>
> Best regards,
> Wes Gadd
> Unionville,CT
>
> --- On Sun, 11/2/08, Jan Heine <heine94@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> From: Jan Heine <heine94@earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: [CR]Cotterless crank history questions
> To: wesleygadd@sbcglobal.net, classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Date: Sunday, November 2, 2008, 9:59 PM
>
> At 3:35 PM -0800 11/2/08, Wesley Gadd wrote:
>>Now that we seem to be entering the twilight of the reign of the taper squ
> a
>>re cotterless crank, I've been wondering about a couple of historical
> quest
>>ions.
>>First, did Stronglight originate the concept, and, if so, when? I'm
> guess
>>ing late '30's?
>
> Stronglight introduced square-taper aluminum cranks 1933. There was
> an article in La Pedale Touristique in May 1933 on the new cranks.
> They were used on many bikes in the 1934 Technical Trials - see
> Vintage Bicycle Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 4.
>
> I am sure there were others before, but they were not very
> successful. The Stronglight set the standard, and it fits on modern
> bottom brackets. It was made almost unchanged through the 1970s -
> more than 40 years. The TA is a direct copy, and still is available
> new.
>
>>Did they hold a patent that kept other manufacturers from u
>>sing this design?
>
> Herse used the same design around 1938/39. Remember that Herse
> started as a component maker, and his cranks were used by many
> constructeurs, such as Singer, Hurtu and others. In 1940, Herse
> started making bikes, and reserved his parts for his own bikes, with
> a few exceptions.
>
> I don't know about patents, but I do know that Herse never advertised
> his cranks as "Stronglight Patent" or something the like.
>
>>As far as I know, the first company to make a taper squar
>>e crank after Stronglight was Campagnolo in 1958.
>
> See above, Herse came before. Gnutti advertised "cotterless" cranks
> in Le Cycliste 10/1950 ("the great novelty of the show") - I assume
> this was the cotterless model.
>
> So Campagnolo was fourth, unless we are missing somebody.
>
> I have often wondered why nobody else introduced cottered cranks in
> the 1940s and early 1950s. I think Stronglight had the market
> cornered in France, and it was off the radar in other countries.
> Campagnolo really was the first in the racing world to look beyond
> established practice and take inspirations from elsewhere. When
> everybody worried about straight chain runs, he looked at
> cyclotouring derailleurs and came up with his Gran Sport, which
> completely ignored conventional wisdom of what made a good racing
> derailleur. However, he managed to get professionals to ride this
> components (paying Fausto Coppi millions of lire to switch from
> Simplex), and thus was able to prove their worth.
>
>>Others used different met
>>hods (Gnutti, T.A. "Criterium", Williams AB77 come to mind) but
> did the alm
>>ost universal adoption of the taper square method have somthing to do with
>>the expiration of a patent?
>
> Cottered interfaces (basically, two straight holes) are much easier
> to make than square tapers. That may have more to do with the lack of
> makers. In any case, racers continued to ride cottered cranks, mostly
> because they offered a narrower tread (Q factor), for more than 20
> years after Stronglight's cranks had proven themselves. See the
> archives for the discussion about why professional racers stuck to
> cottered cranks... So for companies focusing on racing, there was no
> need to make other cranks until the 1950s.
>
> The writing was on the wall for cottered cranks in the mid-1950s, as
> one professional after another switched to Stronglight aluminum
> cranks. So it made sense that one maker after another came up with
> racing-specific models to replace Stronglight's cyclotouring cranks.
>
>
> Jan Heine
> Editor
> Bicycle Quarterly
> 140 Lakeside Ave #C
> Seattle WA 98122
> http://www.bikequarterly.com