52telecaster

I'm fully convinced my bikes have nothing to do with me being slow.
​​​​​​

jon c. 

I read BF so I can experience the modern trends vicariously.

Relieves me of the burden of actually dealing with them in real life.

Korina

I've never been anyone's target market, so the industry's trickle-down-racing-tech/battery-operated-shifting are utterly irrelevant to me. #partypace

52telecaster

Korina

steelbikeguy

well, there's no denying that the safety bike led to thousands of hours lost to discussions about what chain lube is the best.

Steve in Peoria

nlerner

I’m into modernism, but that only gets me to about 1940.

branko_76 

I have passed them by.

Very happy with my 1970's 5 & 6 speed road bikes

79pmooney

I was reasonably current on (racing) bike technology through 1977 but after my head injury I had more important things on my plate. (Watched Klein from not too great a distance as I rode his before and a local shop I hung out at was a very early carrier of his bikes.) After another season of racing I had the Mooney built and focused on work and the rest of my life, just riding as transportation and for my sanity.

Two decades and a failed marriage later, I had a little more time and freedom to do bikes. Money was tight but I started buying '80s frames and building them up as fun bikes for specific purposed. A lightweight road fix gear. (Very, very cheap and a whole lotta fun!) A race bike. No, racing was completely off the table. Then I landed a solid job and quickly ordered the custom ti ride I'd wanted since I rode an early Merlin. Several years later, another custom ti, this time the road fix gear I'd wanted for decades. Modeled loosely off that oh so fun el cheapo.

And the technology! Never got past 7-speed until that first ti bike - well proven Campy 9-speed. Campy because 1) I'd kill myself with those shifting brake levers steadying my hand on the lever reaching for the water bottle. Been doing that far to long to re-learn. and 2) those exposed cables - come on! (Haven't gone brifter yet. Still use those dumb old SunTour DT shifters. So dumb they don't even know how to not work.) Brakes? Any calipers that work well. Currently my six bikes are - 2 centerpull, 2 sidepull, 2 dual pivot and 1 cant. (Yes that adds up to 7. My ti fixie has two "cockpits - stem, bars and brake caliper. In 5 minutes I can turn it into a completely different ride.) And on that note - stems. I have one threadless bike. 1" steel steerer. When the headset goes, steerer is getting cut and threaded and a sweet quill dropped in. Better looking and so easy to vary the height - any time. No torque wrench or special care required. The bearings don't care.

Tires - went from sewups to clinchers ~2000. I'm going back to sewups/tubulars. (When I was riding them, "tubular" was spoken by the highfalutin, not us lowly roadies.) Starting to slime as needed. And I'll avail myself to the repair by mail services when I collect enough.

So - brifter: not in the foresee-able future. Tubeless: I'm staying totally tubed. Carbon fiber: tried bar plugs but they were a poor fit and kept falling out. (And so light, I never noticed. So I'm back to heavy plastic plugs.) Disk brakes - will I ever? I did do a decade and a half of index shifting. (SunTour Command - nice idea but I was too late. SunTour FWs in the sizes I like were hard to come by and Sachs/Sedis with its slightly different spacing worked but only so-so. DTs, friction and Power were a welcome step back.)

So catching the trends? I caught the tails of a couple. Trends with tails big enough and bushy enough they were hard to miss. Cassettes. Dual pivot brakes. Slime. (Two tires so far.)

iab

Whale oil. Obviously.

GhostRider62

Gran Fondo-ification of cycling passed me by, my waistline thanks me.

georges1

For me, I have spent money back in 2015-2016 for upgrading my old mountain bike and bought two mountain bike frames in high end steel tubing and got at the endthree high end mountainbikes with the XT780T group,upgraded the wheels of my Giant Tourer as well as the tires. But this year was bitten by the road bike bug with high end steel frames, the groups I have chosen for my builds are Dura ace 7700,7800 but no 7900, 9000, 9100 and 9200. My Peugeot will be upgraded with Dura Ace 7700-7800 and my Raleigh will be upgraded with C record components. For wheels ,I bought 4 older Mavic wheelsets. No Disc brakes whether on my road and mountain bikes as well as no DI2. I never ride on tubulars only clinchers or tubeless. No use for me to go 11 speeds or 12 speeds. What's next? Spare parts purchasing

esasjl

Doesn't look like Birmingham to me.

halb 

I think it is a trick question. Look at the response.
My take on the question echoes others. Are you having fun?
My first "adult" bicycle was a Schwinn Varsity in '63.
When I traded it for a Frejus with tubulars THAT was a change.
Everything since has been incremental, and added little to the pleasure.
Well, maybe light clinchers made life a little easier.

1989Pre 

You are saying that you feel the frame-set could have been manufactured post-1957, when Raleigh bought B.S.A? Or are you talking about the scenery?

esasjl

The metal is more Birmingham than the scenery :-)

tcs

Ladies and gentlemen, in its 88th year of production, the Sturmey-Archer AW:

smd4

You can have the bike. I'll take the girl.

jdawginsc 

Thoughts from the peanut gallery...

Performance based innovations are pretty astounding over the period covered by modern bikes...accelerating tech advances are pretty cool.

I am still not that good...

ehcoplex 

"Bike Trends and Spending Money".....
My solution has generally been no money, no spending.....so...... no 'trending'!

cudak888 

The safety bicycle was just a gimmick to sell Range Rovers.




-Kurt

bark_eater 

I dont think anyone's mention aluminum rims. Im pretty sure the Ross BSO that I road into the ground (its softer than pavement) as a teen had steel rims and some sort of squealing suggestion of speed modulation.

El Chaba

The bicycle industry used to be dominated by small businesses that genuinely tried to make the best products possible to satisfy demand. As time progressed, many and then most of those small companies went out of business being outcompeted by increasingly larger companies. The critical issue is not that the companies producing products for a sport are large, but that along with that size comes marketing departments. No longer satisfied to satisfy demand, those marketing departments exist to CREATE demand. Participation in our sport has always ebbed and flowed on a cyclical basis, but the companies producing the products that we use are now too large to tolerate that sort of change in the level of sales. As a result they deal with lower participation levels with attempting to increase demand with new products. This strategy is especially important when dealing with a customer base that consists of the same participants with very little influx of new consumers. That is exactly the scenario that describes our sport today. Some of the “ innovation” is good, but sooner or later the supply of good ideas is exhausted and there is “innovation” just for the sake of change/being new. The lack of pertinent innovation is exacerbated by the fact that most of the large companies are no longer closely tied to the sport in any cultural way; they are detached. We are at least ten years beyond reaching the point of saturation by useless “innovation”. Whenever I make a cycling-related purchase, I always approach it from the standpoint of what I want versus what the industry wants me to have. When approached that way, it becomes very clear how over-marketed the industry has become.

1989Pre 

Yeah.., and how can you see what's up ahead, or around the corner, on one of those squat things, anyhow?!

1989Pre 

The first major upgrade that I made on my 1980 Grand Prix, a couple years after I bought it in 1981, was to put a nice set of aluminum Rigida wheels on it. It must have been tough, using aluminum in the '40's and '50's, though, when the material was still 3000 series. The Dunlop aluminum rims and the aluminum Constrictors had their problems.