Small cog

I did sustain four broken ribs but they are better now, the rack is attached to the mudguard with an option to secure it to the mudguard mount which I would used if carrying heavy loads but for the time being I like the clean lines as it is.

cjefferds 

gthomson

Good use of a bottle cage What is used to mount the rear rack to the seat stays? I have a rack like that but couldn't find a decent way to mount it to my bike without scratching the paint.

cjefferds 

Original mounting hardware…can’t guarantee it won’t leave a mark. Might be able to find on eBay or try posting on the ISO thread.

familyguy

As purchased. A shade small, and some of the drivetrain appears beyond salvation, so might get turned into a moustache bar semi-townie instead.

browngw 

I often use a piece of rubber or even a couple layers of electrical tape on the contact area to prevent scratching the paint too badly.

Chuckk

Picked this up two weeks ago from the son of the original owner:
1984 ("BB") Cannondale ST400 that looks to have been built up originally as an '85 model with 600EX components.
Then it went through an upgrade ~ '90 with Tricolor 600 to get 700c wheels, click shifting and aero levers.
Still has the '84 EX crank, calipers and FD.

bOsscO

How small? Looks like a 59

orbeamike

Had this bike for many years, it never got ridden very much. I really enjoyed putting it together.

Johno59

Relaxing after the harvest taking some rays with my 1936 Sports when two noisy Americans showed up giving out them negative waves with those Pratt & Whitney radials.

This Robin Hood weighs a ton with those drum brakes front and rear.

Small cog

A Robin Hood perfect for riding through the glen, I have those drum brakes on a couple of bikes and despite the weight like them for working in the wet and not wearing your rims.

Johno59

I've since changed the bars. Those 'boy racer' swallow bars just don't suit this kind of bike. By this stage (1950s) Raleigh had bought out all the British marques such as Robin Hood and kept the original badge and some other distinctive accessories but it is really a Raleigh with stupid bits on it. But you're right if it's flat terrain and you hit a pot-hole you barely notice anything. On a modern bike it feels like you've ran over an IED.

Pompiere

Add one of these between the rack and brake bolt for extra protection against slippage.

familyguy

57ST x 56TT c/c. It's not something that can't be overcome with a taller stem though, but I have other projects. Picked this up on a whim more than anything. Turned out the entire drivetrain except the granny gear was cactus, so it's all gone.

gthomson

I'm curious, how come some bikes came with cantilever brakes instead of side pull brakes, allowing for larger wheels? It makes sense that buyers might prefer a larger tire and yet so many came with side pull brakes which would limit the tire size. Example below is not my bike but found on Pinterest. The frames appear to be similar, same components, except the braking system.



My bike which might allow 30 mm tires at best.

TenGrainBread 

Most tourists riding lightweight bicycles over the last 80 years have simply not seen the need for a touring tire over 25-32mm in width, which most sidepull brakes can handle. So your question is somewhat anachronistic in that you are assuming that wide tires (over 32mm) were always available and preferred for touring, which is not the case. A short review of bikes in this thread show that most came stock with 27" wheels with 1 1/8" or at most 1 1/4" wide tires. No problem for most sidepulls to handle.

The notable exception is the wide-tired 650b hiker bicycles of France from the 30s to the 70s, which is what the bikes in your picture are. These bikes generally required cantilevers or long reach centerpulls for clearance as they had tires 38-42mm in width and almost always had mudguards. By the 80s, most French framebuilders had abandoned 650b in favor of skinnier 700c tires even for touring bikes. There has only been a recent resurgence in interest in these wider tires in the last 20 years or so.

DanseMacabre

Regarding that picture, the bike on the left seems to be made at a slightly later date in the 1960s (just guessing, looking at the fenders) and might have been made at a different price point. I don't know, but I assume MAFAC canti's were more expensive then Altenburger sidepulls and required a bit more work.

gthomson

ThanksTenGrainBread, it's interesting how social media can be so misleading. I'm a huge fan of browsing through Pinterest and looking at all those gorgeous bikes and because I see many with both thin tires and thick tires (probably about 50/50) I was just curious if there was a shift towards the bigger tires for tourists, as the trend tends to be the way all bikes are going these days. Or, were they just traditional bikes as you mention above that someone then fitted with the cantilever brake to accommodate wider tires.

ehcoplex 

I think road quality has also been a determining factor in tire width- the nicer the road surface, the narrower the tire one can get away with and still be comfortable. France in the 30s and post-war had a lot of unpaved roads/cobblestones, etc, more or less necessitating wide tires, until the roads greatly improved through the 70s/80s/90s. I believe the current shift, at least in the US, toward wider tires reflects a few things- increased traffic density of larger and larger vehicles with distracted drivers (.....smartphones....etc...) has made road-riding increasingly dangerous, so a lot of riders are seeking out safer 'trails', MUPs, gravel roads, etc, where wider tires are more comfortable. Infrastructure in the US has been chronically underfunded/undermaintained (on top of often being built to much lower specs than roads in most of Europe) and is badly decaying- crumbling shoulders, more 'patch' than original surface, etc, etc. Wide tires are practically required on the terrible roads where I ride. And finally, 'research' in the last decade (see Jan Heine, et al) purporting to prove that wider tires are negligibly less 'efficient' than narrow tires. I've read plenty of critiques of the whole gravel 'revolution', chalking it up to just another round of industry hype and marketing to move product, but I think it does actually reflect real-world situations and changes.

Johno59

I have always found cantilever brakes more powerful. The power is needed to arrest the extra weight held in your panniers. It's for this reason cantilever brakes and drum brakes were used on tandem bikes as only one set of brakes had to slow down two riders rather that a pair for each rider on separate bikes.
There have been cases where carbon rims have melted on tandem bikes going down long steep declines so the ol drum brakes maybe the answer.
I have no idea as how disc brakes feature in this equation. Are they better/more powerful/reliable? My LBS loathes them but I have zero experience.

curbtender

Not a tandem but a friend boiled his brake fluid on a long steep downhill.

melville

I'll call that pilot error, probably dragging the brake the whole way.

Otherwise known as "Grabbing the Coward Handle."

pfaustus

"I'm curious, how come some bikes came with cantilever brakes instead of side pull brakes"

Part of it was just fashion/incremental improvement over time. In the 70s, most touring bikes came with center pulls or side pulls. Getting cantilever brakes almost required buying a custom bike from a builder. By the mid-80s, touring bikes with Cantilevers were everywhere. I suspect contemporaneous mountain bikes with cantilevers was not a coincidence.

muse kidd

This was a very popular bike in its day. I remember seeing many of them loaded and touring thoughout the the southern US in the 80's. Over-sized aluminum was heralded as the new tech to make touring bikes lighter. I thought they were great looking bikes, but questioned the siffness myself. A great find for you. Congrats and I hope you enjoy!

Trakhak

The myth of overly stiff aluminum Cannondales! A pet peeve of mine.

Yes, Cannondale's aluminum Crit series bikes, the ultra-short-wheelbase racing bikes they sold in the late '80's and early '90's, do ride stiffly---every bit as stiffly as the many steel Italian bikes designed with criterium geometry on offer during the same era..

I rode the top Bianchi racing model, the Specialissima Super Corsa, back then---very fast, but just as unforgiving on rough surfaces as the Cannondale crit bikes.

Of course, the only people who were in a position to compare high-end Italian crit bikes to Cannondale crit bikes were those willing to pay for the expensive frameset, plus the (usually) Campagnolo Super Record gruppo, plus a matching build kit, plus the labor to build it.

So it's fair to guess that the ratio of the number of people who went Italian, despite the trouble and expense, to the number who simply walked into a Cannondale dealership and bought one off the rack, for considerably less money, was something like 1:500.

In any event, the racers who were buying Italian framesets and building them up were mostly stepping up from another racing bike and didn't worry about comfort---they just wanted the lightest, fastest bike available.

(Short wheelbases weren't actually faster, except in terms of being ideal for riding elbow-to-elbow in a peloton, but we didn't know that back then. It wasn't until several years later that the Italians and everyone else went back to using more sensible dimensions for their racing bikes.)

So it's the wheelbase, not the frame material, that determines the smoothness or harshness of the bike's ride. (In the analogy employed by the reviewer of the ST400, that's why limos get stretched.)

Anyone who still wants to argue the point---please go ride, e.g., a (steel) Ciöcc Mockba '80 criterium bike (named for the 1980 Moscow Olympics) for 50 or 100 miles and then a Cannondale Crit series bike and report back.

Here's a road test/bike review of Cannondale's first bike model---the ST400. The reviewer speculates that the biggest hit against the bike might be that it's too versatile---great for loaded and sport touring, but take off the racks and it's great for racing a triathlon---in an era when people expected a given bike to be optimized for only one use case.