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In article <
[email protected]>,
Matt O'Toole <
[email protected]> wrote:
>Booker C. Bense wrote:
>
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>>
>> In article <[email protected]>,
>> Jeff Potter <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>> OK, I'm looking for a new road bike. A new old one. I like the 80's
>>> bikes.
>>>
>>> I've had a Pro Miyata forever and I like how it handles. I also had a
>>> Trek 760 and another sporty lugged Trek. Liked those, too. I didn't
>>> like an 80's Cannondale---too harsh.
>>>
>>> So I'm looking at a wide variety of nifty old top road bikes.
>>>
>>> Does anyone care to comment on how these various bikes rode and
>>> handled? Are they hugely different from each other?
>>>
>>
>>> Basso Gap
>>
>> _ I don't know about the rest, but I picked up a relatively new
>> Basso Gap frame on Ebay this summer and it's very nice. It's
>> definitely racy, but not unreasonably twitchy. I haven't been on
>> any rides longer than about 3 hrs with it yet, but I don't get
>> that "fighting" the bike sensation that sometimes get with racier
>> bikes when you get tired.
>
>I used to borrow a friend's Basso Gap, which I enjoyed riding. I wouldn't call
>it twitchy either, despite the 75 degree head angle. However, I think Basso put
>a lot of effort into making them handle well, by matching the fork offset to
>each frame size.
>
>Also, it depends a lot on your own size. Taller riders get squeezed onto the
>same short wheelbase as everyone else. This is stupid, the result of a fetish
>with "racy" short wheelbases. As a result, race bikes get twitchier as riders
>and frame sizes get taller.
>
_ I've dabbled in a lot of sports over the years and it's really
interesting that there's so little understanding of how things
actually work and how unnecessary understanding them is to
doing them. Skiing, biking and windsurfing all have in common
that most of the people doing them don't really understand how
they turn and how changes in the gear affect turning. If you have
to think about it, you can't do it.
_ Bicycles have been around for a relatively long time and
perhaps outside of rowing was the first "gear" sport. Yet even
after 100 years, there is no standard way of talking about bike
handling. It's can't be that complicated, yet it seems to be so
poorly understood, look at the drivel I wrote above. A bike is
just a rather simple machine, there ought to be a way to quantify
it. This dilemma suggests to me that we just haven't found the
right metric. We're measuring isolated things and making profound
statements based on them, when we should really be looking at
some derived quanity based on an integration of the various
measurements. For me that seems to be how wide my smile is
after a 100 miles....
_ Booker C. Bense
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