Crankstank 

It's always nice to bring granny along for the ride.

RobertUI 

I just sold this bike, but this was a rather speedy triple!

Andy_K 

"Fast" is a relative term.

merziac

In general I have triples on all my riders, they would be fast with fast riders, me, not so much.

Most of Jim's touring builds and many others had them, many he made himself and many had the Campy setup that he also made and sold a 42t adapter with 31t inner ring.

Pink/purple JM027 has a Dyna drive that he made for the 3rd owner after they bought the frame and had him build up.

MTB JW338 also has a Dyna drive that is original to it with pedal adapters that Jim also made.

thook

merziac i never not get a little giddy over your merz herd.

here's a merz....from the web....with a triple....

rjhammett

My one and only road bike with a triple.......and I am thinking of converting it to a double.

merziac

Tx!

That would be mine, its in the post above as well and the pink/purple one was Jim's that he built for himself.

This one is almost completely original, got the panniers from the original owner after the fact when I found out he was just down the road from me. He had all the original paperwork, catalogs, notes, etc. when I got it I took the Eclipse adapters off as they were unsightly but then got the bags and put all back together.

It wasn't ridden a lot as it ended up being a bit small for him, it is in fantastic shape which of course is fine with me.

thook

no fooling??? (as zappa would say) i've saved that image to a tab on my browser so i could obsess from time to time....lol. only a little, though (not really )

i've seen your purple one on another web sight/image, as well. not just here on the forum. merzzzzzz!

gthomson

Let's add a bit of education to this thread to explain why some bikes were built with double cranks and others triple? I have a bike that came with an Ovaltech triple and this was new to me as I thought older road bikes only came with doubles. The guys in the 60's & 70's competed with barely any gears at all so at what point did someone say, "hey lets throw some more gears on". I mean it makes sense if you do any riding with any kind of elevation. Modern bikes come with 20 speeds at least, mostly 22 now and mountain bikes started with triple cranks a long time ago.

merziac

The pic you posted is from one of the shows at VeloCult, we had several, most were so awesome, that pic is actually from BikePortland article when Jonathan came to that show.

SurferRosa

So is "sister."

Andy_K 

There was a time when men were men and derailleurs were something that hadn't been invented yet. So the pros raced with the limited options that were available. Eventually, it became clear that changing gears provided a competitive advantage and derailleurs caught on. Over time, racers generally settled on 52-42 and a corncob freewheel. To various extents and in various places, it was fashionable for "road bikes" to emulate professional race bikes, so that's what you got. But there were also people who used their bikes in different ways and they eventually developed the idea that a third chain ring providing lower gears was really nice for things like touring. That generally led to the prevailing historical situation where "fast" bikes had a double and "slow" bikes had a triple. Sometimes even the slow bikes had a double. I don't know enough to put years to any of this or even do more than hand waving, but I think what actually happened bears at least a passing resemblance to what I just said.

Interestingly, there is one outlier in the history of racing: Giovanni Battaglin in the 1981 Giro (https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/l...narello-174073). He had a 53-44-36 crank and a 13-21 freewheel. It didn't really catch on. (Though more recently Chris Froome has been seen to use a compact double with a 34-32 low gear.)

Then there are people like me who like the way racing bikes look but don't have the legs to ride them with traditional gearing, so you get unholy creations such as are on display in this thread.

Andy_K 

Look, just because my family is from West Virginia doesn't mean we still see things that way.

nlerner

It seems mtbs and most gravel bikes sold now are no longer triples but 1x setups. You triple fans are just anachronisms.

thook

and "cousin" is more acceptable??

trainman999

My fast triples: A 78 Trek TX900
100_3868 by galon783, on Flickr
A 92 Schwinn Paramount
100_4085 by galon783, on Flickr

Andy_K 

Snake oil, plain and simple.

Besides, a 10-50 cassette just doesn't look right on a vintage bike.

Also, isn't anachronism the whole point of this forum?

thook

but, the derailleur for it could double as a kickstand!

bulgie 

Hey now, don't be mean. This here's C&V and in a lot of cases (most?) that means guys on the downhill side of the col de la vie. Me, I can't claim I was ever really fast, since I never got out of Cat.3, but I did have enough points from winning Cat.3 races to move up to Cat.2 — twice! Avoided it both times, once by not taking a license at all the next year (I was always wishy-washy about racing), the second time I was old enough to switch to riding the Masters race. (Actually it was called "Veterans" back then, that's how old I am.) Now I need tiny gears partly because I lost a lot of lean muscle mass while I was on "the cancer diet", couldn't chew solid food or ride a bike since end of August until just recently.

Everyone here who needs low gears has their reasons, and you might be in the same boat someday, wishing the forum denizens would cut you some slack.

I won a lot of sprints on my '89 Davidson. There was a weekly, season-long after-work crit series on the Microsoft campus in the '90s, run as a points race with a sprint every third lap. I had a teammate (a pursuiter not a sprinter) whose joy came from giving me an awesome lead-out, and I won the whole series two years in a row in the Masters. I know, big whoop, but a lot of those Masters racers were also Cat.2s. I didn't win every sprint but I won a lot. I still have that bike, but now it has a triple with a 28t granny, and a 30t freewheel. Lower than 1 to 1 on my "racing" bike, and sometimes I wish it was lower, c'est la vie.

Get ready brother, time is coming for you too!

Mark B in Seattle

bulgie 

Oh yeah, my wife, who won 3 Seniors medals at State championships (road and track), raced Road Nationals, and won her Masters age group at a national championship series MTB race, has a 24t granny on her triple, with a 34t freewheel cog, on her Litespeed Ti road racer. She rides a lot more than I do, practically every day when she's not cross-country skiing. At 68 y.o., she's not ashamed to have low gears, nor should she be!


Dura-Ace 7400 crank (1984 vintage) with a Stronglight triplizer middle ring, Suntour granny ring. 24-38-48. Ti pedal and BB spindles, alloy bolts everywhere. She gets all the cool vintage crazy-light stuff because she's light and doesn't break stuff. (No carbon though, that's against our religion.)

Mark B in Seattle

merziac

So there's more to the story, imagine that.

TW189 was built for 1979 Paris Brest Paris by the original owner, it ended up being a tad small so he scrambled to have a Davidson built and rode it to a very good result, 27th out of 129 Americans, 502nd out of 2113 overall, pretty fast for 30lb+ touring bike, especially with a triple.

Bob Freeman helped Tom with all of this and he didn't really say why he switched to Davidson for the new one, again, fine with me as this is in great shape. He did ride this in STP a couple of times and was fast on it, pretty sure Tom was fast on whatever he was riding.

He also said that after PBP he was feeling very good and rode around Europe for a couple of weeks with the guys he raced with thinking he might race full time but by the time he got done with that it was not to be. He actually quit riding and never went back to it.

bulgie 

A few years ago Jim Merz bought his wife Heidi Hopkins a vintage Davidson, pics here. I wish I could say for sure it was one I built, but I don't remember that specific frame and there are no serial numbers or other records — but it's likely I made it. I started there in '84 (with 7 years experience elsewhere) and pretty soon after that I was making all the custom frames, until I left in '94. Jim thinks Heidi's is an '85. It's all Dura-Ace 7400, which came out in '84. Last I heard, it was her main road bike. Jim reports that she loves it.

She won a lot of races, came 2nd at US Road Nationals, 5th at WORLD Road Championships (1980) where her main job was to support Beth Heiden. Heidi also came 2nd at a big stage race in France. So it's a feather in anyone's cap to have her on one of your bikes. Especially to have someone like Jim Merz think it was nice enough to buy it for her. Maybe he couldn't find a vintage Merz in her size?

Mark B in Seattle

bulgie 

Ha, that's the article I mentioned earlier in this thread. Almost everything they say in that article is wrong or exaggerated! For one thing, the bike they show is not the one Giovanni rode that day on Tre Cime. It's not just that so many of the parts are wrong, but also the frame is different. You can see some of the differences in the race-day photos from the cycling press.

The funniest claim is that the Campy triple crankset was invented by Pinarello and made just for Battaglin. The pictures show a bone-stock "factory" triple, Campy part number 1049/5. It first appeared in Catalog #17 (1974) but we know it existed as early as '72 when it came stock on the Schwinn Paramount touring model.

The real bike that Battaglin rode that day also had a stock Campy 1049/5 crank, but one that had been de-anodized, reprofiled and highly polished, then mated to a titanium Super Record spindle. The 36t granny ring was also drilled for lightness (or maybe more to the point, for the look of lightness) but not very well done. They used a dull drill bit and left the burrs on the holes! The rest of the bike is exquisite though, so I think the drillium was a last-minute decision. The stock 36t inner ring (part # 804) is a bit porky looking, kinda ugly in its stock shape.

Anyway, Cycling Weekly got punk'd on that one.

Mark B in Seattle

Andy_K 

As @gugie always tells me, never let facts get in the way of a good story.

seypat

One must have the proper gearing to make it to the summit...........so they can go really fast descending back to the bottom. Simple as that.