At 02:15 PM 17/01/2009 -0800, Jan Heine wrote:
>I would not be surprised if the Chinese
>were braking right-front, too.
The most common Chinese bicycle for many decades is very similar to British roadsters from the 1940s and 50s. Unlike cable-braked bikes, the levers on these rod-braked ones can't be switched without major surgery, so what you see today is how the bikes came from the factory decades ago. I've done extensive web searching for pictures of these bikes and almost invariably the right lever pulls the front brake, just like the original British roadsters. The only exceptions I've seen have been French roadsters, which have the brakes reversed.
John Betmanis
Woodstock, Ontario
Canada