RiseAlways

I don't think any modern development can be attributed to the door being opened for more people to go, or get into, riding. Bar end, down tube, etc shifters didn't hold anyone up,... it's just that brifters are a new piece of tech.

I just think this is a goofy thread,... haha,...

What's the weather like there in Ireland anyway?.... we're bracing for a snowstorm here!!

LazyLegs

It's more the combination of improvements that have made it easier - certainly a cycling leisure cycling boom on over here with people who would have never considered it 10 years ago, myself included, now making up most of the numbers.

Ice and snow here, no place for a vintage bikes at the moment. Irish Winters are very corrosive on anything steel. Winter miles being ploughed through on an aluminum beater.

RiseAlways

Ugh!That s ounds like a Pennsylvania winter here in the states! Ours are certainly corrosive as well,.. they salt everything,..roadways, sidewalks, etc... kills cars as well!
Yeah, I have an old Peugeot UO-8 I have set up as a single speed with cyclocross tires,.. that's my beater! Sadly I'm stuck home with a bad case of Bronchitis currently,...so no riding, no matter how fun it looks outside!

cale

Yeah, that has to suck. Being unable to ride the clearly superior classic bikes for fear of damaging difficult to repair or replace parts. Must be like riding on pins and needles some times.

ppg677

I ride steel in the winter. I just lay on the Boeshield T-9.

cale

Me too. My steel bike was my beater.

Cougrrcj

Riding in winter is the ONLY justification for my owning a BSO (Bike-Shaped Object - aka Huffy MTB) that I got for free from someones trash - just needed new tires/tubes. If I was serious about riding in the NE Ohio Winters, it'd be on a old-school 3-speed - no derailleurs to get junked up. The Sears three-speed that I got for my 12th birthday and rode through four winters back in the early 70s literally rusted through. Well, I hit a hard snowbank and the top tube separated from the seat tube. I had it welded, only to have it break again a couple weeks later since the frame's metal was so thin from rust. Even though I had taken it fully apart twice each winter to oil the inside of the frame and repack the bearings.

LazyLegs

Winter here can last 4 to 6 months; add agricultural machinery dragging mud onto the roads - that means even with full mudguards, any bike worth caring about needs a proper cleaning after every ride. That's not so convenient if you live in an apartment and soon gets pretty tiresome if you have to do it 3 to 4 times a week. Hence I use a CX aluminum bike that can be used and abused, rarely cleaned and not have to worry too much about the frame suffering corrosion. It's really just about convenience for me, so I can spend more time enjoying the scenery and less time bike cleaning.

Having sleep on it last night, I think the dream fairy might have brought some insight - So there are clearly many differing tastes and opinions on C&V but two broad categories that seem to exist are:

1: Those who ride 'Modern' bikes daily, but appreciate C&V bikes in a historical/nostalgic context and will ride them on occasion (On nice days or for specific events) - I would put myself in that group.

2: Those who ride C&V exclusively and have chosen consciously or unconsciously to adhere to a certain cutoff point in bike tech.

I wonder if the difference between group 1 & 2 depends on when people got into cycling, I started in Summer 2010 with a Carbon Bike with 10Spd brifters and it is only since last year that I've started being interested in C&V, so it seems normal to see both side by side with Modern as the day to day and C&V as the special occasion bike.

Did Group 2 start with C&V when they were considered New and just choose not to be sucked into marketing trends and incremental change, where each improvement on its own didn't seem like much but 20+ years later it looks like a big difference to those looking back. I myself have not followed the upgrade trend to electronic gearing or 11speed as they seem to offer only marginal improvement at a significant investment cost, but if I hold this line at each further increment will I seem dusty and antiquated for someone buying new bikes in 20years time.

Finally, an analogy of sorts, so imagine the group 1rs are driving around in their SUVs all week but like to go Horse and Buggy riding on the weekend, whereas the Group 2s have chosen to live like the Amish and forego the SUV in favor of Horse & Buggy on a daily basis. Both groups are happy, well adjusted people who shouldn't be judged on those choices as long as they respect and get on with their fellow man. The problem is, I imagine, that even though the Group 1s share an appreciation for the Horse and Buggy, they don't understand it in the same terms as the Group 2s - And if the Group 1s arrive down on the weekend to ride around with the Group 2s they can't help but come across like it's all a bit of a novelty and perhaps even unintentionally make it a bit of a circus act.

So perhaps there is some merit in the No Brifters club after all, because unless the Group 1s are willing to give them up they'll always be outsiders to the Group 2s, not intentionally but simply by the fact that to them it's all a bit of a novelty as opposed to a lifestyle.

seedsbelize 

I'm generally an anti-social cave-dweller--don't much like to mix it up with other human beings. Especially in an organized way. Yecch.

ppg677

I don't get it. My winter bike is not a beater as I spent $1400 on it (Surly Long Haul Trucker). I ride through salty Wisconsin roads. The bike is filthy. I don't bother cleaning it until spring. Yes, come spring the chain is a bit rusty. But so far I can find no corrosion. The frame is treated with Frameserver and I lay on coats of Boeshield T-9 all over the drivetrain parts.

LazyLegs

But you have a Winter bike, right - So you're not riding your 'good' bikes through Winter is the same difference, even if the Surly is still a good bike it is set up for Winter riding, I just happen to have acquired my Winter bike before I took an interest in steel bikes, the term 'beater', is more in a reference to the abuse it get's rather than having been selected for it's state of dilapidation, I bought the frame and parts separately and haven't worked out what the final cost was, but it's in the ballpark of the Surley. I do have a couple of steel project bikes (see below), not quite finished, that I would have no prob riding in Winter but only occasionally as I am still firmly a Group 1'r (see prev. post) and prefer the convenience of a bike with 'all mod cons' for everyday riding.

Wilfred Laurier

IME, beater usually means a vehicle (generally referring to cars, but can be used to describe bikes) where abusive or damaging or neglectful behavior is not a problem because it is 'fully depreciated'. For cars this might mean 500000 km or rust perforating the body, or it could mean it is the last remaining 1996 Dodge Neon on North American roads. Same applies to bikes - a 'beater' is either a bike so completely worn out that no amount of abuse or neglect can make it worse, or a BSO or other crappy bike that wasn't worth anything to begin with.

LazyLegs

Beater ....' a machine for beating half-stuff to pulp by separating and shortening the fibers to produce a gelatinous mass. - Thats how my legs feel after riding it for 100miles, in freezing cold conditions (Factious of course)



Anyway, thanks for chatting - I have to sign off this post (as I'm unintentionally dragging it off topic), so the good people of Frictionville can get their club started, might come back when I have a little more experience with DT shifters and have gotten fed up with threading cables under bar tape.

ppg677

No, life is too short to not ride "good" bikes :-) If I wear it out, I'll buy another one.

If a bike was not easily replaced, I would indeed take into account wear-and-tear in riding conditions. Is the winter road salt doing some damage to my Surly? Probably. But with proper application of Boeshield T-9, it doesn't seem that bad. People have warned me that Wisconsin's winter road salt will eat through a bike in no time.

I use my Surly year round. In the winter, it has the clearance to take 35mm studded tires and that's what I use it for. In the summer, the sturdiness of the frame makes an excellent bike for towing kids in the trailer. And it makes an excellent bike for loading up gear for the occasional overnight trip (I don't use it for fully-loaded touring).

gaucho777 

Forgive my absence from this thread I started. Been away from my computer the past couple days...

I guess I should have better anticipated some of the responses from those who felt left out or don't like cliques. And I'm surprised by number of spin-offs clubs it has started! Really, I started the Anti-Brifter Club as a tongue-firmly-in-cheek inquiry to find out who among us had still not taken the plunge to using brifters. Perhaps I should have called it the No Brifter Club. Or the Brifterless Brigade. Oh, well. If you feel the club is too restrictive, snooty, harsh, exclusionary, etc., it's just a silly meaningless internet group of retro-grouches and others still stuck in the last millennium. Let's not take this too seriously!

Interesting break-down. I also wonder the same. For me, I got into cycling in the 80s but then stopped riding almost completely in 1991, around the time brifters became common. When I decided to fix up my old bikes, it was the old bikes that appealed to me, and it's what I already owned. When I go out for rides, I feel far more limited by my own fitness than I do by not having brifters. So, I'd put myself in category 2. I ride C&V exclusively and have deliberately chosen to avoid buying bikes from the modern era because a) they don't appeal to me as much and b) I don't feel the need to have modern technology since I am no longer racing. I am likely to try brifters at some point, but I'm not in a rush to do so.

LeicaLad 

That pretty much sums up the baseline of my POV. Only the small details differ. I road through the 80s & 90s +, on bikes built in or prior to 1981. Isolated, so I emerged as Rip van Winkle. Thus, the familiarity of the mid-80s and prior hardware.

Yet a third supporting reasons exists: budget. Middle of the road carbon bikes are pricey and seemingly disposable. For less money - although sometimes getting close - I can have spectacular specimens of hand-crafted steel art.

I ride because it makes me happy. I don't race, but love speed. I mostly ride alone, from convenience. Love riding with a few others, but I avoid any notion of a peloton.

As noted elsewhere, I belong only by default.

:-)

LazyLegs

Rather than a club name for what you dislike, why not go for something based on your passion, something like 'The Frictioneers' or something like that, not a criticism - as I said, having slept on it I'm coming around to the reason why this is relevant. It's just that it's always healthier to promote something from a positive basis rather than a negative.
@LeicaLad Love the old steel frames, don't disagree with you there, and you have a valid point with Group 3, though brifters are coming down in price all the time and there's bound to be a few trash picks turning up with them these days, they are more likely to be broken or in poor working order as trash finds than friction shifters and much less easily repaired and I agree with the sentiment that what you ride is secondary to the riding itself.

Wilfred Laurier

I qualify to join your club. I have several bikes and none with brifters. But I am qualified only because I am too cheap to buy new parts, and the parts I had laying around when I assembled my bikes did not include brifters. However, brifters are superior to all other forms of shifters used on road bikes, unless you insist on running incompatible parts. Brifters are a major step forward from the previous unequivocal improvement in bicycle shifting - indexed shifting.

andr0id

I'm going to call you out as a hypocrite if you are running down tube shifters but you have brake cable housing under the handlebar tape.
The only proper cable routing to go with DT shifters is out the top of be brake lever.

Six jours

There are too many cyclists cluttering up the roads already. Especially too many cyclists who aren't even competent enough to figure out incredibly simple things like downtube shift levers.

Oh, and get off my lawn.

andr0id

New tech? Shimano introduced integrated shifting in 1990. That was TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO.

The ABC should also shun Nirvana being that it is too new and modern.

Six jours

If your DT shifter cables are coming out of the top of your brake levers you're doing it wrong.

LazyLegs

The Beatles and Nirvana both made music but they are classified in different categories and different genera, so what's the problem with using the term 'Classic' to describe bikes made up until the mid to late 80's and 'Modern' to describe those made after when a shift occurred in the approach to bike design that moved it away from one Era into a Clearly different newer Era.

The concept exists for Art, History, Literature, society etc - Modern Literature does not stop being Modern because of the passage of time, nor does it somehow age into Classical literature just by sitting on a Library shelf - Sure it may no longer be contemporary but it remains Modern because of many distinguishing factors that carry more meaningful weight than simply its age.

So what's the problem with accepting that concept in relation to bikes - A bike may be Modern but Old and it may be Old but not Classic and the passage of time won't change that unless some future developments occur such as to make the now contemporary bikes and classic bikes seem more similar than whatever is replacing them, for example. If in 50 years time, the contemporary bike is a flying holographic trans-dimensional bike, then yes a Scott Foil and PX-10 may occupy the same classification category and may all be called classic. But a 25 year old flying holographic trans-dimensional bike that uses voice command instead of a mind reading interface will not be bungled into the Classic column just on account of its age. Moreover if these promised flying holographic trans-dimensional bikes, somehow never make it to market, then contemporary bikes and those made in the last 25 years or so, may be labelled 'Modern' for all eternity.

BTW: Apparently the modern era began approximately in the 16th century, which is news to me as I though it only began with Facebook...

RiseAlways

Hahaha,... well said!

RiseAlways

I haven't looked at a LHT in a while,... does it have the small weep/vent holes in the forks?...and the frame on the chainstay, etc?
If so,.. then trust me,.. moisture gets in there,...