gios

Reading Sprinting Through No Man's Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France and came upon this.

Later they describe flipping the rear tire to get to the other gear in the Pyrenees. Fascinating read, great pics.

No close-up pic of the bike / rear wheel though. My bing-fu is weak.

chaadster

gios you may enjoy seeing the wheel flip in action:

znomit

Yeah but they didn't have to put up with the 41.

bikemig 

I was finished reading Fournel's Anquetil, Alone. I thought it was a good read. We're obviously talking about the derailleur era but Anquetil pushed the envelope by being one of the first to use a 13 tooth cog for time trials and a 26 tooth cog for climbing. I own and ride occasionally an Olmo Gran Sport from 1960 that is pretty much all original. That bike came stock with half step gearing, 49/46 (steel cottered crank, aluminum rings), and the campy gran sport RD can handle a 26 so the low is 46.5 inches.

macstuff 

Hi, just peeking in on this interesting topic.
I've been perusing early Tours DeFrance lately so it caught my eye when it was mentioned.
I have been surprised to learn that there were a lot of early Sport, Club and Racing bikes that had what they call today, a flip-flop hub.
Not quite as early and a bit more refined, I have a version on a 38" Armstrong Moth Velox Sport Club Bike. It's pretty easy to change over with wing nuts and rear facing dropouts.

gios

Looks interesting. With my library had that.That's it - thanks: flip flop hub.

gios

Found this - Tour de France: 'skirting the frontiers of human possibility' - archive, 1924. Great tube wearing pics. Now I'd like to see a tire being sewn on.

RChung

Modern Flip-Flop hubs are fixed gear on one side and ratcheting on the other, but they're the same number of teeth so you don't have to change the length of the chain. To change the gear those riders would have had to have had either another front chain ring or else a lever or idler to change the chain length.

Lazyass

Sewn on to what? You mean a sew up tire, aka tubular?

macstuff 

Yes, having the same amount of teeth would be a requirement unless the bike has a chain gather like a derailleur has. but a chain gather can be added to any rear axle with or without a derailleur. Many of the early tour bikes were two speed in that they had a different cog on each side with a spring loaded gather to take up the slack on a longer chain required for different size rear cogs. One size for flat and one size for hills. Sturmey Archer still sell these gather arms today although the actual name of them escapes me right now. They don't call them a gather.

ThermionicScott 

Nope. Horizontal dropouts allow a couple-tooth difference in cogs without needing multiple chainrings or modifying the chain length.

79pmooney

I designed and had built a frame that is what we might have raced around 1990 had freewheels and gears never existed. Pure fix gear road bike. A racing machine. (And that's obvious as soon as you start riding.) The bike of my logo. Designed to be ridden in the high mountains on pavement using the full range of velodrome worthy drive chain. 1/8" chain. (So the dropout - not track end - can handle from 12 to 24 teeth with no messing with chain length. I ride a 42 or 43 in front. Dropout has just enough angle to keep the brake shoe on a Velocity Areo rim without touching the brakes. Works really well. I've ridden all of the recent most mountainous Cycle Oregons on the bike. To Crater Lake and around twice.

Details:
Sugino 75 crankset. 144 BCD. I have Sugino and Campy rings. Izumi chain
Euro-Asian cogs from 12 to 22. Surly 23, English (and nice!) 24. I use 12 tooth bell shaped lockrings for the 12 and 13.
Miche fix-fix hub
DT 1.8-1.5 spokes from and rear. Open Pro front rim. Ultegra or Chorus front hub. Vittoria Open Pro or Corsa G tires. (I will go sew-up when these rims die. GP4 rims.)
Cinelli quill stem, pista bars. Tektro V-brake levers to Shimano dual pivots.
Shimano 600/DA semi-platform pedals. I use 3-bolt shoes and Exustar aluminum track cleats.
TiCycles large setback post, Terry Fly seat.
18 oz 22" aluminum chainwhip (good tool!), Pedros Trixie spaner/hub wrench, velcro straps to carry spare cogs on tool bag. (2 minute wheel flip, 5 minute cog change.)
TiCycles ti frame, 531 fork.

Being a 1990 racer for another reality didn't occur to me when I ordered it. I had set up a Reynolds 501 sport Peugeot frame as a summer light road fix gear with a somewhat mismatched probably Bridgestone fork. Lover it! Steering was almost as quick as the Fuji Pro I raced decades before. 5 years later, I had TiCycles build me a mountain worthy version of it. (High BB, long dropouts with vertical exit, ti and a frame I could trust my life to. That Peugeot had been hit hard by a SUV and the BB was low! I called that bike "Slinky".) First ride on the new rig, "Yup! This is a race bike!" It's still just on training wheels. Itching to lace up the sew-ups and turn it loose! (GP4s - 400 gms. My racing days winter weight. I'll get some 330s as my new "racing wheels", reflecting that I am a near 70 yo - will never race again. Those 290s Fiamme Ergals will stay a memory.)

79pmooney

There's another approach to getting mountain gears on a fix gear. Multiple chainrings that line up with their respective cogs. I set my Peter Mooney with its standard Campy road dropouts up fix gear with a 46-42-36 triple and a MIche fix-fix hube dished about 2mm. Had a double cog made; a 17 tooth brazed to a 21. Run a (say) 14 on the other side. Gives me 46-14, 42-17 and 36-21. Three very different ratios, all with near perfect chainlines that feel velodrome worthy rock solid.

Not planned but this also runs just as nicely as a 17-18 or 16-18. (18 is as small as the inside cog can go. Cog is flipped and very close to the spokes; in fact the chain hits but since there is no relative movement between the two, contact doesn't matter.)

I did this to ride the 2017 Cycle Oregon week to Crater Lake (up the north entrance). 30 miles of grave with big both climbs and descents were promised. I wasn't going to ride that grave on the 25s max of the bike of my previous post but I had the wisdom in 1978 to get horizontal dropouts and spec clearances for big tires! The Mooney could do it. Now to allow my legs to do it also! Sadly, never happened. Fires.

ofajen

Yeah, my old Schwinn road frame has the standard semi-horizontal road dropout and can handle a change of six teeth total difference with the same chain length.

If I had a freehub on the rear wheel it would be easy enough to install two cogs that line up with two front chainrings and use the same chain length for both a serious climbing gear and a normal SS gear around 65-67 gear inches. But we have no mountains here so normal SS works pretty well. 😊

Otto

kraftwerk 

Early shifting was made via a straight-rod mounted midway up the seat stay, so you reached back there to select a gear.
At the time a common term for this 'remote' gear shifter was "Chain Dancer" a term I always tickled me. Like modern sail boat racing, which is much faster today, the sailors aren't better now, just different. Same with historical cycling hero's: those guys were tough as nails. Furthermore, there were rules , against getting help to fix anything you broke along the way. One racer was re-forging his broken forks (!) during a race and was disqualified because a helper was operating the bellows to keep the fire hot.

MinnMan

Seems like a Classic/Vintage thread to me.

Andy Somnifac 

Wait, what?

You do understand that the tires aren't "sewn" to the rim, right? "Sew ups" are just another name for tubular tires, which are still used today.

Yes, the tube is sewn into the tire casing, but the tire is then glued to the rim.