Tag: Cycling

Table of Contents

• All Kinds
• Tires and Wheels
• Randonneuse and All-Road

All Kinds

The modern safety bicycle was first manufactured and sold at the end of the 19th century. Most sources recognize John Kemp Starley, the manufacturer of the Rover bicyles in the late 1880s, as the inventor. The Engineering Sport website provides a concise overview of the evolution of the bicycle. Earlier in the late 1800s some French developers tried to assert a priority to the intellectual property in the concept of the two wheeled human powered vehicle. According to David Herlihy’s the Bicycle – the History (2004) for a time in the 19th century some developers paid some royalties to avoid lawsuits for a few years.

The household/commuting/utiliity single speed bike was familiar in Europe and North America for several decades in the 20th century. The handlebars facilitated for an upright riding position. Most had horizontal top tubes; some were step-through. Most had coaster brakes. Many were manufactured with integral fenders. Some had cargo baskets or racks. Many people owned these bikes and had the knowledge and skill to inflate tires, repair a flat tire, and lubricate the drive train. The Chinese Flying Pigeon was/is a safety bicycle.

The bicycle has become more a concept or idea than a new, useful and non-obvious article of trade. The elements of the safety bicycle:

• Two (nearly) equal sized wheels, in a frame;
• Pedals, crank arms and a roller chain drive;
• One wheel, usually the rear, is turned by the power of the rider pressing on pedals;
• The front wheel can be turned on a pivot with handlebars;
• Pneumatic tires

Bicycle manufacturing depended on industrially produced materials and components. In the the early 20th century frames were build by cutting, bending and brazing industrial steel tubing. The early safety bikes experimented with heavier ferrous metal materials, but steel tubing was lighter, easily worked and even repairable. Bike builders began to have frames and other components fabricated. Bicycles for racing on tracks or roads were custom built. Manufacturers began to offer road racing bikes, a higher value product. Then mountain bikes. Innovations multiplied. In modern times, components may be protected from imitation by patents,

Buying, riding and maintaining bicycles became more complicated. Some categories:

• City or utility bicyles;
• Road bikes emulate the design elements of racing bicycles used in road races. Racing was the inspiration and source of design innovations that were adopted and adapted for mass production consumer use. Design innovation has been restricted by rules of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI)the main competive sporting body. A few people buy ultra light or otherwise non-compliant road bikes. Characteristics of road bikes:
  • drop handlebars;
  • a light and aerodynamic frame. At one time, horizontal top tubes were favoured. Top tubes slope from the head tube to the seat tube;
  • narrow wheels and tires;
  • a drivetrain that produces high RPM for strong riders;
  • drop handlebars;
  • almost no capability to carrying anything but the rider;
• Touring bikes and cargo bikes are designed to carry a load;
• Cyclo-cross bikes are designed for cyclocross (CX) racing (as opposed to cross-country racing, a competion for mountain bikes). They have drop bars and resemble road bikes, but have slightly wider tires and other design variations;
• Mountain bikes are designed for use on trails. The frames are different from other standard designs. These bike has to be stable and under control at lower speeds and during faster descents to manouver around rocks, roots and obstacles. Flat or straight handlebars are the rule. Front wheel and whole frame suspensionss are the rule. The tires are wider and run at lower pressure. Wide tires call for wheels with wider rims. Mountain bikes can be used on paved and gravel roads, but not comfortably or efficiently. They may be used to carry cargo – but do not normally have attachment points for racks. Instead, many mountain bikes have drilled and tapped fittings to hold bikepacking bags;
• Hybrid bicycles: multi-purpose bikes designed to used on paved roads and on some unpaved surfaces. Most hybrids are upright handlebar bikes, with tires in the cyclocross range and without suspension systems. They have some capability to be fitted with racks to carry some cargo, and to be fitted with fenders;
• BMX bikes are specialized racing bikes for special courses;
• Children’s bikes;
• All-road and Gravel bikes are hybrids or customized bikes blending design elements and components.

Many web pages and services discuss design, maintenance and tech in the cycling world. For instance Bike Insights discusses “geometry” (frame dimensions/sizing/ fit) – one of the ways to deduce if a bike might work for a given purpose. (Russ Roca of Path Less Pedalled inteviews the site founders in a PLP video).

Many handlebars are for the upright position. These bars are flat or straight. There is diversity in the variations of upright bars. Upright bars:

• encourage an upright riding position,
• support balance and control at lower speeds,
• support a front basket or bag,
• provide a surface area where users can bolt on bells, electronics and other accessories, and
• provide several locations to mount a rear view mirror.

The other main category is drop handlebars. Drop bars with long hoods (brake lever assemblies) provide a comfortable fairly upright riding position with good steering control and access to brakes and shifters. As the “tops” and ramps of the bars are taped, they provide upright riding positions. Drop bars provide less space for carriers and accessories, and less locations to mount a mirror. There are alternative handlebars. Russ Roca of Path Less Paddled, the all-road, touring, gravel and bikepacking site has a video about the Velo Orange Granola Bar; and a review on the new Alternative Cycling Network of the new model flat bar Specialized Diverge. Alt-bars revive old styles like the North Road Bend.

Tires and Wheels

The dominant way of containing air is an inner tube, within a bead clincher tire. The wheel has rim or a bead channel, and tire has a bead. The tubeless tire emerged late in the 20th century. Some modern bikes are tubeless ready : tubeless wheels and tires, installed with an inner tube. Wheel manufacturers have refined the bead hook at the outer edge of the rim into a channel – to make the bead fit tightly, to let a user install tubeless tires. Bike mechanics know how to break the bead from a wheel with tubeless tire bead channel without using tools that might mar the bead or the rim. Fixing a flat at the roadside by dismounting a tubeless ready tire and replacing an inner tube may be a challenge.

Pressure affects performance on different surfaces. The conventional advice for road bikes has been, for the last few decades, to inflate tires with inner tubes to the pressure as stamped on the tire. The marked pressure is a maximum and a safety warning – it is half the pressure at which a tire will fail predictably, such as by the bead of the tire not holding to the rim of the wheel. It is not a recommended pressure to reduce the risk of pinch flats or other damage to tires, inner tubes or wheels. It is not a recommended optimal pressure. Optimal pressure depends on road, rider, and load. Sheldon Brown’s approach to tire pressure was nuanced. (The link to a Bicycling Quarterly article on the Sheldon Brown site page has gone stale – the useful equivalent is “Tire Pressure Take Home” (2016)). Russ Roca of Path Less Pedalled published an interview with Jan Heine of Bicycling Quarterly about wide tires and lower pressure, and an interview of Josh Poertner “Your Tires are Lying to You“. Wider softer tires have been becoming more popular

Tire pressure affects the accuracy of (older) cycling computers that count wheel revolutions – e.g. Cateye Mity 8 – which need to be programmed with the circumference of the wheel, usually in 1 cm increments from 170-225 cm. The circumference of a tire mounted on a wheel is affected by the actual pressure by up to 1-2 centimeters. The tire will flex under load; the distance travelled is a little less than the circumference of the inflated tire measured at the label pressure, unloaded. The difference between running wider (e.g. 700 x 38c tires) at 45, 60 or the maximum 75 psi affects how these devices record distance. Where the distance travelled on the ground is about 50 km, the effect is several hundred meters. This inaccuracy is only about .5-1%, which should not affect navigation or trip planning.

Randonneuse and All-Road

Some endurance events required that the bike should carry some cargo, and be capable of riding on rougher roads including cobbles and gravel. Sheldon Brown’s 2008 Bicycle Glossary. (His blog is maintained, and the site is updated, with many modern contributions from John Allen and other friends of cycling) has entries for randonée, randoneur and the French designer René Herse. The René Herse name is now associated with the Seattle manufacturer/shop René Herse Cycles (formerly Compass Cycles).

The randonneuse was usually a custom built bike, although some manufacturers mass produced a randonnuese model- e.g. Peugot. A randonneusse was a hybrid with road and touring features for riders in long-distance rides over mixed roads – pavement, cobbles, grave and even dirt. It was also kind of gravel bike for bike camping – bikepacking is a modern version of bike camping. A feature found on many bikes was the demi-porteur front rack which supported by a stay from the fork crown and cantilever stays above the midpoints of the blades. The load stabilized the front wheel and permitted other design variations. Another feature was that the frames had enough clearance between the fork blades and chain stays to mount wider tires and rim brakes for the rims that support those tires.

Jan Heine of René Herse and Cycling Quarterly, a student of design, writes about long rides in the Pacific Northwest, the randonneuse, and supple tires (wide and inflated moderately). Jan Heine identifies wide tire drop bar bikes – mainly the randonneuses – as the all-road bicycle. There has been a revival of interest. Several custom builders will repair or restore/rebuild such bikes. A few build new bikes to such designs.

Jan Heine regards all-road as a collective term describing randonneusses, and the monster-cross variety of gravel bike used in endurance events on routes that have gravel roads and tracks. Others use the term as including wide tired endurance road bikes.

Cannondale Topstone 105

My Cannondale Topstone 105 Alloy is a gravel bike by Cannondale, a subsidiary or brand of the Canadian conglomerate Dorel Industries, manufactured in Taiwan. The frame is an aluminium alloy. This is what it looks like

This Cannondale model is named for the Shimano 105 groupset which is marketed by Shimano as a road groupset. It has several Shimano 105 branded components: brakes, shifters, 11 cog cassette, and derailleurs. The crankset was FSA, with 172.5 mm crank arms, and 46/30 rings – a “compact” road bike crankset. The largest cog on the rear cassette was 34 teeth; lowest possible gearing was 30 to 34. The lack of more climbing gears is a flaw of this and other production gravel bikes.

The 2019 Cannondate Topstone 105 Alloy has a profile at Bike Insights. It is neutral on the upright/aggressive scale. It is a neutral mid trail bike. Cannondale builds it in 5 sizes that it calls XS, SM (small), MD, LG, XL. I bought the medium size, which means, according to the datasets used by Bike Insights:

• The seat tube is 505 mm long;
• The “effective” (horizontal) top tube length is 561 mm;
• Stack 579 mm; Reach 385 mm – Average for category;
• Trail: 63.7 mm;
• Chainstay (horizontal) 423.4 mm.

The Cannondale Topstone 105 shipped with tubeless ready WTB ST i23 TCS wheels and 700c x 40 (ISO 40-622) WTB Nano TCS tubeless ready tires. The tires are knobby, like many mountain bike tires and cyclo-cross tires. 700c x 40 may the largest/widest tires that run on this bike.

There are eyelets at the drop outs for the rear wheel and on the seat stays to mount a rear rack, but the chain stays are short which limits the use of panniers for touring storage. The stays are widely separated for wide tires and disc brakes. There are eyelets behind the bottom bracket, on the seat stay bridge and at the rear dropouts for a rear fender. Some racks and fenders can be fitted.

The carbon fiber fork lacks the front facing mounting point at the fork crown found in bikes with rim brakes. There is a rear facing eyelet at the fork crown for a fender with an L-bracket. There are no eyelets on the outside of the fork blades. There are eyelet on the inside of each fork blade 150 mm above the axle drop-out. The limits the options for front racks, and bags:

• A demi-porteur randonneur rack requires a front-facing eyelet at the fork crown and eyelets above midfork to mount the cantilevers;
• A low rider front rack requires eyelets at the drop-outs;
• The cable routing along the drop bars limits the options for proprietary mounting braces (eg. Arkel, Salsa); the space between the drops and brake levers.

The frame has several eyelets for bikepacking bags and accessories.

Rack

I tried to use the Tubus Logo Evo touring rack that I had used on my Trek. It fit on the wider chainstays (longer rear axle) of a disc brake bike with modification of fit kit parts. I was able to install a Tubus Vega, which can carry a trunk bag. The point is to carry some tools, an inner tube, some clothing and little food. The rack legs and the bolt heads for fender stays interfered with the rotation of the thru-axle handle. The thru-axle may have to removed to remove the wheel for maintenance and repair. The handle may be removed with a 4 mm Allen wrench, but when that is done, a larger (e.g. 12 mm) fixed wrench (combination or open end) will be needed to release the axle. An after-market rear axle (Robert Axle Project) that can be removed using a 6 mm Allen key was part of the installation of the rack.

Table of Contents

• Variety
• Gravel

Variety

I shopped for a new bike last summer (2019). The literature of bicycle manufacturing is vast. The Guardian published a survey and list of printed works in 2016. Some books and resources address innovation and engineering:

• David Herlihy’s Bicycle: The History;
• Article – The History of the bicycle (2012) at https://engineeringsport.co.uk;
• The timeline page The History of Bicycles at Bicycle-and-bikes.com;

Many books are about competitive events – or the special bikes used in competition. Racing on tracks and roads became the most visibible use of bicycles at the end of the 19th century. The single speed utility bike with coaster brakes was the common bike for much of the 20th century.

Much of the innovation for riding on trails and rough roads came in the mountain bike and BMX sectors in the last 4 decades of the 20th century: frame design, wheels, wide tires, cleated tires or knobby tires for traction in mud and on climbs and descent on bare ground, wider gear ranges, more efficient brakes. Mountain bikes have been discussed in books, but seem to have been discussed in on the internet – for instance in inteviews and discussions like The genesis of the mountain bike, according to Tom Ritchey, published at Handbuilt Bicycle News in September 2016. [Update – August 2021. The Cyclist Magazine’s Podcast Episode 34 interviewed Tom Ritchey in two parts on July 8, 2021 and July 16, 2021. Tom Ritchey raced track as a teen and began to repair his own frames. He was a mountain bike pioneer. His company also makes highly regarded road bikes.] Special gear was developed – e.g. frame bags for mixed terrain cycle touring (i.e. bike-camping or bikepacking). Mountain bike races on unpaved roads and trails, touring on back roads, bike-camping and adventure rides became popular. Mountain bikes permitted new kinds of competition. Cross-country mountain bike (XC) races became organized, and competition became specialized into XC, downhill, endurance and other events. Endurance blossomed into multi day ultra distance events along difficult and challenging routes such as Tour Divide and Trans-America.

Cyclo-cross (CX) racing is a competitive event in cycling, for riders on drop bar bikes. Cyclo-cross bikes are similar to road bikes with wider, knobby tires for traction and other features for races off of paved roads. As road bikes tended to use narrow tires at high pressure, road bike frames often did not have clearance for the right tires. Some mountain bike innovations were adopted to design and manufacture CX bikes, including tire clearance. CXbikes retained nearly horizontal top tubes, for reasons related to conditions of those races. For some applications, users and shops began to adapt and develop monster-cross bikes.

The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the international sporting body has rules or standards for track and road racing, CX, mountain bikes and BMX. The rules are seen as restricting technological innovation in cycling. UCI has recognized gravel in September 2021 – UCI announced sanctioned gravel events in 2022.

Gravel

Road bike riders began to use unpaved roads more extensively for training and recreation, and to participate in Ultra cross and endurance events on rough roads. Randonneur rides became more common. Gravel grinders – races or endurance events on gravel roads. Some custom bikes and adaptations provided some advantages in such events. Gravel riders started blogs or published on sites like Gravel Cyclist. Salsa (a subsidiary of the conglomerate QBP released the Fargo, a fat tired bike with drop bars, a “mountain touring bike” in 2009 (it has since become favoured as a touring bike), the Vaya gravel/touring bike in 2010, and the gravel racing Warbird in 2012. Other manufacturers moved into gravel bikes. Production gravel bikes incorporate technical innovations from road, mountain and all-road: disc brakes, threadless headsets, internal frame routing for cables, indexed shifting integrated in the brake levers, tubeless ready wheels and tires. Gravel bikes with disc brakes will usually have thru-axles (as opposed to quick release skewers). Thru-axles fit to closed drop outs with threaded fittings for the axle at ends of the fork blades and the rear stays. Some have suspension forks in the front; some manufacturers have some types of rear suspension.

The features of gravel bikes:

• wider tires than road and cyclo-cross bikes. Most new gravel bikes are shipped with cleated/knobby tires – an imitation of the way mountain bikes a shipped;
• most gravel bikes have drop bars; the drop bars are often wider, flared, and shaped differently than the drop bars on road bikes (article at Bikepacking.com);
• the geometry is different;
• gear combinations for moderately fast riding and moderate climbing:
  • a single chainring or a two ring set (similiar to a road bike compact -a large ring with 46 teeth instead of 50 or 52 and an inner ring with 30 teeth);
  • 10 or 11 cog rear cassettes. a range from 11-34 teeth would be normal. Riders can customize for small increments or larger gears for climbing.
• eyelets for frame bags, and for racks to carry panniers

Bike Insights describes the typical attributes of all-road/gravel bikes:

• Wider, smooth or treaded tires, typically from 38-48 mm;
• Trail (a design geometry concept related to the head tube angle and the responsiveness of steering) around 57-71 mm for improved handling off-road;
  [Update – an article from Cycling tips on design geometry]
• Short to mid-length chainstays of 421-443 (Touring bikes have longer chainstays to allow riders to carry panniers in rear racks).