in honour of next week's NAHMBS, i am gonna feature my two most nasty bikes. i love them both. the observant viewer will discern they are, in fact, made of aluminum, something which comes as a surprise to some. but there is a significance in this: these two bikes represent the very best aluminum road bike ever made, and the very worst. the interesting twist is this, however: the entire bicycle industry only made 3 aluminum road frames - apart from these 2 distingushied examples it is a well guarded secret that every other aluminum road frame ever made was actually the same damn thing. oh sure, they were clever about it and all - sometimes they squeezed a tube here or there into a shape like an aero-plane's wing - sometimes they glued a little piece of CF someplace or another. and so forth. but they never fooled some of us.
in the meantime, we are left with these fine examples of the wilder bloodlines:
1st up. the vitus-that-beat-us. best alu bike ever made. why is that ?? the art-deco lugs alone should do it, the crazy elmer's glue consturction technique. the way it would shift across a 5-speed spaced freewhel from flex in the frame on a climb. the buttery smooth ride never matched to this very day. all these things are good enuf but the main reason is of course this: the frame in actuality utterly sucked, but sean kelly kicked ass and took names on one anyway. that, my friends, is the beauty of cycling.
2nd up. the first generation c-dale SR900. this is - bar none - the worst road bike of the modern era. c-dale made them before they realized that aluminum gets soft like butter when you heat treat it, and they had no idea how to keep the soft tubes from drooping this way and that after they were welded. ride one thru a puddle, and you will seee its wheels track on two entirely different planes. it weighed more than a steel bike of the time. it rode like the brooklyn bridge. the cable guides all fell off, as did the paint. its geometry was grafted from a touring bike, or something. in order to move them once people realized what they were, they had to EP them under the cost of the campy group that came on them. but you know, i rode mine at the halloween-cross and it sure beat working that day.
so, i am pretty easy to please. next weekend, in the hall full of the finest bikes on the face of the earth, i just might lose it. B-there-or-B-square, say i.
1 comment:
The Vitus was cool. Sean Kelly on a Vitus was tres' cool. They were however never built for a man like I. The glue method of construction most likely brought the world down the path to gluing together carpet fibre. This means that without Vitus, Trek may have continued making those sweet steel bikes to this day. *sigh* too late now.
The Cannondale was and is a blight on the earth. Please see that it is quickly recycled into something useful - like cans to hold PBR.
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