Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by AeroFred

That's my ATB, my every purpose bike. On these pictures, it's been dressed up as a tourer to go along the Atlantic coast, a 700 km tour that I've done two years ago.

Originally Posted by bikemig

Honestly this is one of the best riding bikes I have ever owned. I have two long wheelbase bikes (42 inch with 18 inch stays), this 'dale and an '82 Trek 720. The Cannondale, IMO, is a better riding bike (and I'm generally partial to steel bikes) because it is responsive like a racing bike (since the tubing is overbuilt) but also comfortable to ride with 32 c tires. The only knock I have on the bike is that you can barely squeeze in 32c tires and fenders.

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by bikamper

1990 Miyata 600GT.

I bought it as a frame set in early 91 as my ride for PBP that year. I hung my own choice of parts on it. I built the wheels around SA brake drum hubs and Araya 27" rims.

Originally Posted by The Golden Boy

That's really sporty!

The Command Shifters and those Gran Compe levers really caught my eye-

I'm interested in more pix!!!

Originally Posted by rgvg

Wouldn't that Miyata normally have come with 700c wheels?