Aardwolf

Hiya Folks,

I was looking up vintage bicycle weights - as a possible guide to frame quality and I found this link: https://weightweenies.starbike.com/f...ic.php?t=67195
But the intersting bit was the "stiletto fork form" on a 1910 Labor "Tour de France" (13.3kg - quite heavy)




That is truly weird

clubman 

Can't imagine the torque required to keep the rear wheel from slipping. Probably has a track end and axle retainer.

oneclick 

Single-sided forks - front or rear - are a Completely Stupid Idea.

Basic mechanics shows their strength- and rigidity-to-weight ratios are much worse; hence your 1.3kg fork.

Most likely the thing the builder was trying to make lighter was the customer's pocketbook.

stardognine

Which is probably why I opened this thread. I seem to be drawn to weird stuff. 😁😉

I totally don't get the whole "lopsided" thing though. 🤔 You'd still get that weird steering, on banked curves, only maybe worse. Or maybe better, I dunno. 🤔

bikingshearer 

Not surprised that the stiletto set-up is not weight-weenie-ish. With many a car model that has both a hard top and a convertible option, the convertible weighs more. Why? Because you have to make up for the additional structural integrity of the hard top somehow or else the convertible will be a twisty hard-to-handle mess. The solution? A beefed up (read: heavier) lower half of the car. My WAG is that lack of triangular support resulting from the absence of the second fork blade and rear stays means that the remaining tubes have to be significantly beefed up (read: heavier) to keep the thing from feeling like overcooked pasta.

Of course, I am not an engineer, do not play one on TV, and did not stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I could be really wrong here. By it stands to reason to my non-engineering brain.

smontanaro 

Didn't Chris Bishop make a righty or lefty bike a few years ago? I can't seem to find it. Maybe I'm thinking of some other framebuilder. Help me out here peeps.

bulgie 

Dave Levy at Ti Cycles made a cool one, I'm pretty sure a one-off show bike. It was an urban bike suitable for errands iirc, just what you want to spend $10,000 on, or whatever he would charge to make a second one... maybe much more than that, I have no clue about prices. (Me, I prefer a '73 Schwinn Super Sport that weighs 40 lb, but I'm a cheap ba$tard.)

One cool thing about it was being able to fix a flat by replacing the tube (this was before tubeless) without taking the wheel of the bike.

The rear wasn't exactly one-sided, not full-time anyway. It had a left-side seatstay and chainstay, but they pivoted out of the way for when fixing a flat, or more offten, for use as as the bike's kickstand. How cool is that? OK kinda nerdy, but still cool I think. And that seatstay/chainstay clamped very rigidly to the frame for riding mode, and yet unlocked with a single cam lever.

Hmm, lets see if he has pics of it on his website. Ah, just this one (that I could find anyway) and it doesn't show as much as I'd like:

Though you do see the left rear triangle down as kickstand, and the one-sided truss fork.

Here's an article in Bike Portland from 11 years ago that mentions it, with 2 pix.

Disclaimer, I used to work at Ti Cycles, but that was another ~15 years earlier, well before he made this weird showbike. No connection now or in recent decades. Other than I'm still friends with his sister. Oh and I'm married to his ex-girlfriend. (ooh,soap opera! ...no not really)

Mark B

Aardwolf

I'm firmly of the opinion that forks are meant to have two blades.
However if skilled engineers want to try weird stuff that's fine with me.

I would prefer they also work on reintroducing ornate lugs or mesh (drillium ?) tubes or something.
All in steel naturally.

bulgie 

Sorry about the thread drift but I'm-a gonna digress a bit.

From the subject line, I was afraid you were talking about the Davidson Stiletto, a frame I helped develop in about 1989 when I worked there.
I don't know why I would care really, if people bad-mouthed it, but at the time I felt invested, took some pride in it. Not so much now all these years later.

Back then it was no superlight (Ti, Al and crabon were eating steel's lunch) but it was thinwall Tange Prestige, not too tubby for a lugged steel frame.

I wanted it lighter though! It was slightly OS tubing compared to traditional, with a 28.6 mm TT and a 30.0 mm DT, 24 mm chainstays. The rest normal, 1" steerer for example.
Anyway I thought, with the OS diameters, we should go lighter. When I was making the first prototype (which was about a 57 cm IIRC), I wanted to use .7/.4 for the TT, but Bill told me to use .8/.5. I thought that was missing the point of OS, so I just went ahead and built it like I wanted, using .7/.4. When it was done, Bill picked up the frame and said "you used .7/.4, didn't you?" Busted! I don't know if he could really tell just by hefting the frame, or whether he just knew me and how insubordinate I was. I was a terrible employee in many ways but not toooo bad. When I eventually quit, he was mad at me for quitting, a back-handed compliment I guess.

Production Stilettos (Stiletti?) got the tubing Bill wanted, so they were a bit on the heavy side. I wouldn't call them "surprisingly heavy" though! Just a little. Nice and stiff at least, for those who like a stiff frame. Which is not me. (I was into planing when Jan Heine was still in grade school. )

OK, we now return you to the 1910 Labor TdF bike thread, already in progress.

Mark B

bulgie 

A requirement that the Labor bike fails, but the Ti Cycles passes. Two blades — they're just both on one side of the wheel.

jethin

Just because you can…

The Golden Boy 

Perhaps we should leave nature alone to its simple one-assed schematics.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f0b6d307-b4ed-4e22-b4f0-700ce0b95682

John E

There is always the Strida. https://www.strida.com/

clubman 

My greatest fear would be my foot, leg, animal, inanimate object finding the open path into either wheel.
Forks and stays are welcome, built-in guardrails against all sorts of catastrophic calamities.

Chombi1 

My Strida folder has single sided front and rear wheels......

Tubes are oversized and hefty but there's still quite a bit of flex through the frame when riding......

stardognine

Dang, there's some crazy stuff there. 😎 I could really use a couple of those roll-up fenders. 👍

RustyJames 

I read the title and thought, “Threads on watches and cats and now one on ladies shoes!?”

Aardwolf

Just did a search for "cycling in stilettos" and it gets saucy quite quickly.

Here's some interesting stuff:
Biking in heels - how to: https://www.7x7.com/biking-in-heels-...781332541.html
Cycling in heels: https://totalwomenscycling.com/lifes...better-than-us




Fairly sure I don't want to try it.

stardognine

That hurts my ankles just looking at it. 😲

And why do I feel like I stumbled into some kinda porna-graffy thread? 🙄😁😉

Aardwolf

It's an innocent story, honest.
From the link I gave:We came across this story of a designer who having recently built up a bike for his beloved, came up with the idea of making high-heels with a clipless cleat. He said:
The project spanned about 18 months, and sadly, outlived my relationship.
Unfortunately the link doesn't work any more.

I'm fairly sure I won't be trying it.

stardognine

Is it any wonder? 😁😉

My previous silly comment was no reflection on you, I just like overstating the obvious, sometimes. 🙂

xiaoman1 

I was pleasantly surprised to see this thread was about frames and not side tracked with images like this.

Best, Ben

bulgie 

Yes, that would be terrible, if people started uploading pictures like these.
This one is a cautionary tale about toe-overlap:

Don't do it kids! Those toes can shred your front tire.
Save those boots for climbing chain-link fences
And please, no more pics of women wearing torture devices of any kind.
Think of the children!