Originally Posted by
repechage
Barry Harvey knew what was needed, (Harvey titanium was in Santa Monica) trouble was concern about market acceptance, a "welded" frame was looked down upon in the steel world.
If he had given himself the freedom of a straight leg fork, and under the bottom bracket cable routing, the only issue would have been with the shifter mounting.
Licked that and the downtube could have even been bigger.
But, was the market ready for such radical change in1974?
Were there braze-on brackets for front derailleurs back then?
I agree that the existing sense of aesthetics and conventions about what braze-ons were acceptable held back the design of titanium frames. I wonder how hard it would have been to get tubing that was a bit larger O.D.? I'll just assume that new tooling for drawing a different tubing size would have run into a fair bit of money.
On the subject of fat tube aesthetics, I'm reminded of the Klein ad in the January/February 1980 issue of Bicycling...
When I had scanned the magazine and put it onto Flickr, I shared it with the Classic Rendezvous crowd. Bob Freeman recognized the model..."Is that Jan Johnson in the Klein ad?", and Jim Merz replied with "Yes it is! Gary was still in San Martin when the photo shoot went down. The story I got was Gary wanted a large size frame in his ad so that the tubes looked more normal, and he wanted a female model. Jan fit the bill, what is she 6' 3" or so? "
Jan Johnson was the wife of the recently departed Peter Johnson, noted frame builder.
I was surprised that there was an intriguing back story behind such a mundane magazine advertisement!
Steve in Peoria