HeikoS69

I have digitized all Réne Herse catalogues 1948 - 1979 and published the scans on Flickr with kind permission of Jan Heine.

Translations and informations are below the scans on Flickr, but probably not visible with a mobile device.

Short Flickr manual:
Wait until the page has completely loaded, may take a little time. Click on the arrow on the right side of your screen to browse through the scans.


Introduction, general infos, dating, order sheet, letters etc., 8 files:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/41420640@N07/49381147657/

First 1948 catalog,17 files:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/41420640@N07/49380464088/

Second, 1950s catalog from 1952, 22 files:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/41420640@N07/49380360548/

Third, 1960s catalog, from 1960, with extra sheets from 1962 and new cover from 1964, 31 files:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/41420640@N07/49379975683/

Forth, 1970s catalog, from 1971, 25 files:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/41420640@N07/49380523547/

Last, 1980s catalog, from 1979, 19 files:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/41420640@N07/49375248168/


Under the following link you will find a PDF-file with all texts aggregated, with direct weblinks to the corresponding scans.
https://www.rennrad-news.de/forum/thr...8/post-4633286

Kuromori

https://www.flickr.com/photos/4142064...7712640884851/ (Herse Catalogs)
https://www.rennrad-news.de/forum/thr...8/post-4633286 (PDF of text)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/414206...57709366920322 (Rebour Drawings)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/414206...57703148748612 (Herse advertisements)

non-fixie 

Excellent! Thank you. And Jan.

Kuromori

The lugless 753 race bike is particularly interesting. It reminds me of the interwar Barra built with 3/10 H.M. tubing.

bulgie 

This is stunning. The hours of browsing ahead will be joyful.

I can hardly image how much work went into this. The meticulous scanning alone would be cause for cheering, but the text transcription and translation, plus all the historical research that went into the PDF doc, makes this effort truly "next level".

Thanks a million!

Mark B in Seattle

Kuromori

The emphasis on rigidity, down to round track-like fork blades, and use of 700c on earlier randonneuses is interesting because it goes against several modern platitudes about randonneuses.

For anyone curious about the extra-stiff oversize tubing camping bikes, I'm not sure what Dupieux was ordering for France, but the standard Anglosphere tandem tubing in the 40's would have been a 28.6mm 0.81/0.56/0.81 top tube, a super heavy 31.8mm 1.2/0.81/1.2 downtube, standard 28.6mm 0.81/0.56 seat tube, heavy 1.2mm wall chainstays, oversize 17mm seatstays at 0.81mm wall thickness, and fork blades made from 1.4/0.91 wall thickness (extra thick) 22.2mm (undersize compared to modern) blanks.

I also note that Herse, in French, refers to the Cyclo shifter as double cable, despite some forum members' protestations that I am supposedly a xenophobe and 100% wrong for insisting that the rather boring and unpretentious double/twin/dual cable terminology seems to be the historically accurate and historically used term.

The 1971 Paris-Brest example, which seems to be a weight-weenie build by substituting plastic Blumel fenders and a plastic UNICA saddle for the traditional aluminum fenders and leather saddle, notably uses 5/10 531, which is apparently noteworthy, implying that many a Herse might have been built with heavier tubes. Rebour claims that 3/10(0.38mm, equivalent to 0.4mm customers demand on their custom modern planing rando bikes) tubing was available at the time, so the implication is either it was excessively difficult or expensive to obtain, and used only extremely rarely, or it was considered too light for real world use, and relegated to disposable event bikes and publicity stunts.

On the other hand, the 1971 Chanteloup says it uses Reynolds serie speciale, the term often used by Dupieux and Rebour for 3/10 tubing, but Herse had been building race winning and record setting tandems for decades at that point. The 1960 versions mentions that it set 4 records, and you can find advertisements in L'Auto (of TdF fame) dating back to the 40s where even companies that supplied Herse were celebrating his tandem victories in advertisements. On the other other hand, a tandem built with 0.4mm single bike tubes seems dangerously flexible. Jack Taylor said that tandem tubesets were getting scarce by the 70's, as he had to special order a minimum of 1000 sets from Reynolds, so quality tandem tube sets were already special in their own way in the 70's.

The Mont-Faron was a hill climb time trial, and the namesake bike is clearly a racing one. It notably uses 5/10 tubing, either 3/10 wasn't stiff or strong enough for hard use to justify the weight savings, or it was just really rarely used. 5/10 seems to be the standard leger upgrade option, apparently it's noteworthy enough to mention over just regular Reynolds tubes.

The Milan-San-Remo however uses 7/10, perhaps a nod to sprinters. The extremely optimistic will see this and think 5/10 and 7/10 were both heavier than Herse's standard 531, although that would make 5/10 a curious choice on the aforementioned lightweights. It could also be interpreted that 7/10 might have been less expensive, but not considered lesser to a constructeur who built single bikes with tandem tubing on occasion. The take away with tubes might just be that a Reynolds tubed bike without wall thickness mentioned meant your choice of 7/10 or upgraded 5/10, or you could leave it up to Herse to choose. The 5/10 and 7/10 are given for very specific examples.

The stem shifter on one of the bikes is a nice touch. I've seen stem shifters on pictures of a Herse before, but it's good to see one officially documented as the way it came. I haven't seen a braze-on single pivot mount before either.

There's also a typo on the 10 speed competition which has the description copied from the 5 speed version. 1971 René Herse Catalogue Sheet 10 Side A also appears to be showing the wrong page for me.

TenGrainBread 

Invaluable. This type of information should be preserved for the coming generations. Thank you.

I've noticed this misconception as well. Although some constructeurs used the 650B wheel size on bikes designed to be fast randonneuses, there seemed to be a preference for 700C for any type of "fast" bike through the decades, even during the "Golden Age". The demi-balloon 650B tire was mostly utilized on city bikes, utility bikes, and camping bikes when it came to production bicycles.

ascherer 

Thanks for these. Outstanding stuff!

Spoonrobot 

Most interesting is that, back to back, the photographs express the item(s) much less clearly than the drawings. I noticed the same with the modern (non-cycling) Duluth Trading catalogs. It's especially obvious in the Herse catalogs as Mr. Rebour was a truly exceptional talent.

RobbieTunes

Excellent.

I still have a Rebour sketch of a Bianchi I need to get framed.

HeikoS69

Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks for the advice!
Both corrected on Flickr (and another two figure typos, 1960 2b Juyrecord-50 i.o. 60, 04 Dating second catalogue, e) first line 1951 i.o. 1952)
PDF file replaced, all links are the same, second download not required

Daniel Rebours thought on this are as follows (from "Le Cycle" Jan. 13th, 1951):

"Le fourreau de fourche sera-t-il ovale ou cylindrique?
Ce dernier est plus souple et travaille sur une longueur supérieure; il est donc plus confortable. Il fléchit moins latéralement et tient mieux
dans l'effort dit Ť en danseuse ť.
Mais il donne de moins bons résultats avec des freins ŕ tasseaux soudés, car lors du freinage, la partie du fourreau comprise entre la tęte de fourche et le tasseau tend ŕ fléchir et donner une trčs désagréable et dangereuse vibration dans la direction.
Espérons seulement voir nos fabricants de tubes imiter les Italiens, dont les fourreaux de fourche présentent une section ovale, en haut, de 29 mm sur 20 mm. Avec ce diamčtre, on est certain de fabriquer une fourche rigide dans les deux sens ŕ la partie supérieure."

translated:
"Will the fork blade be oval or round?
The latter is more flexible and operates over a longer length, making it more comfortable. It flexes less laterally and holds better in the exercise called "as a dancer" [i.e. out of the saddle].
But it gives less good results with brakes brazed on studs, because when braking, the part of the forkblade between the fork head and the stud tends to flex and gives a very unpleasant and dangerous vibration in the steering.
Let's just hope to see our tube manufacturers imitate the Italians, whose fork blades have an oval cross-section at the top of 29 mm x 20 mm. With this diameter, it is certain to produce a rigid fork in both directions at the top."

janheine 

The Rene Herse catalogues have been a great source of inspiration, and I'm excited that Heiko has made them available. The wonderful Rebour drawings of these amazing bikes will have us dream for many hours, just like potential customers did when the catalogs were first issued. By the way, the fillet-brazed superlight Reynolds 753 bike still exists. It's truly amazing.

Regarding the comments above, there is a misconception that today's randonneur bikes are just trying to recreate what existed before. It is true that most 1960s-onward randonneur bikes in France used 700C wheels and moderately stiff tubing. The ideas that narrower tires were faster and that stiffer frames were better already were deeply ingrained into cycling culture at that point.

What we've been doing in recent years is take the best from the past as a starting point for further development. 'Planing' and the benefits of tuning frame flex to the rider's pedal stroke isn't something you'll find in the French literature... and the idea that wide 650B tires can be as fast as narrow 700C racing rubber also had been lost for many decades. (In the recent Bicycle Quarterly feature, Shin-ichi Konno of Cherubim, the Japanese framebuilder, explained how frame stiffness needs to be tuned to the rider, and that most Keirin sprinters find OS tubing too stiff for their liking. A fascinating case of two parallel cycling worlds coming to the same conclusions.)

Herse also seems to have been a bit coy about what he really built for his customers. When D. Rebour reported that no bike ever should have less than 45 mm trail, Herse didn't object, even though Rebour's own Herse – which Rebour praised as a paradigm of great handling – had somewhere between 30 and 35 mm trail. The simple truth is that everybody was copying Herse, and keeping people in the dark about how he built his bikes helped maintain some of his competitive advantage. Herse's catalogues may have mentioned 7/10 tubing because that is what customers expected, but of the Herses that I've ridden – especially the earlier ones – very few felt like bikes made from 7/10 tubing. 5/10 seems to have been most common, even for tall frames, while 3/10 (available only in France at the time) was reserved for very special bikes.

So the catalog texts need to be taken with a grain of salt. They were Herse's first introduction to his customers, and he already had a reputation as the best of the best. There was no need to be an iconoclast – much better confirm whatever the customers already believed. After that, Herse was famous for never explaining his customers the details of their bikes. He asked them about the features they wanted (rack, tire size, etc.) and the color. Then he made the bike. Even the frame sizing was as he saw fit – and all customers still report that their Herses were the best bikes they ever had. So customers like Rebour may have thought that they were happily riding a 7/10 bike with 45 mm trail, when in fact, they were on 5/10 with 30 mm trail.

Regarding the tandems, we've measured the thickness of some tandem tubes (both Vitus and Reynolds made special OS tandem tubes for the French market), and the walls are much thicker than on the single bikes, in addition to the tubes being oversized. I've never seen a camping bike made from all-OS tubing – only a single war-time porteur bike – but there are quite a few Herse bikes with an OS down tube – what we now call the Mule spec (except back then made with thicker walls). I've ridden one of these, and it was pleasant, albeit stiffer than the bikes I prefer.

Our goal is to use the insights of the past to make better bikes for the future, not to recreate what existed before. We benchmark our own bikes against today's best carbon bikes, because we like going fast. Lyli Herse never saw her father's bikes as classics, but as the most modern and best-performing bikes of their time. That is the tradition we're trying to continue.

Jan Heine
Rene Herse Cycles
Reborn in the Cascade Mountains
www.renehersecycles.com

TenGrainBread 

Right, I think the fact that now many people are realizing that there is a benefit to smaller wheels, wide tires with thin casings, and light-gauge frame tubing is coloring our view of history a little bit. These concepts come from the past but weren't the "norm" by any means, even in Golden Age France.

Funny that you mention Cherubim. I have two bikes from Shin-ichi's father, Hitoshi, from the 70s. One a 650A "randonneuse" and one a 700C sportif. The Cherubim catalogues from this time period offered the customer a choice between various grades and gauges of Japanese tubing.

Kuromori

Indeed, the shape of fork blades are another place where modern thinking on the way it used to be done doesn't seem accurate, especially in regards to Kaisei Imperial fork blades, which I think are pre-butted ~0.9/0.6mm or 0.9mm or 1.0mm even thickness, where as traditional Reynolds "Imperial" blades are considerably thicker at 1.2/0.81 (~1.6mm at the tip after tapering). The expensive "Super Resilient" blade is even thicker at 1.2mm at the fork crown, 1.4mm in the middle where the moment of bending is, and 0.91 at the tip, being designed to resist damage when crashed. It's only with the move to the wider Columbus wide oval shape do Reynolds blades become 1.0/0.56 (~1.0mm at the tip after tapering). However, round fork blades were made from thicker wall tubing standard in the UK 1947 catalog, and I think the French used the same fork blades and seat stays as in the UK, with round being 1.4/0.9 compared to 1.2/0.8 for Imperial blades. So the fact that these different shapes came in different wall thicknesses complicates things when trying to analyze relative stiffness.

Canti forks need sufficient lateral stiffness so they don't splay the fork blades out (if you've ever looked at canti/v-brakes on seat stays, you can see them flex under high braking force), but also sufficient longitudinal stiffness so the effective cable length doesn't change as the forks bend. As the fork bends from braking, it tends to make the effective cable length longer, reducing braking force, then the forks bend less since they're no longer braking as hard, making effective cable length shorter, increasing breaking force, starting the cycle over. This is actually also a function of steerer flex. On modern bikes this is solved either with a fork crown cable hanger, or V-brakes which have no cable hanger. This is less important on brazed on centerpull brakes, and a non-issue with sidepull brakes.

It's also worth noting that carbon forks can be more flexible than steel forks, but also have superior damping to deal with the increased amplitude of vibrations. Perhaps the wood plug found in some steel forks offered some degree of improved damping.

Do you have a source for digitalized "Le Cyclo" or are you searing in hard copies and transcribing everything? If you are interested in finding more Herse references and maybe some advertisements, Gallica Digital Library has a searchable archive of Desgrange's "L'Auto" newspaper as well as some other cycling periodicals like "La Pedale," "Audax Club Parisien" and a few more. I have run across Herse's name several times when looking through L'Auto at least.

Kuromori

That is possibly because all early French 531 was seems to have been 5/10(0.56mm), with the speciale 3/10(0.38mm) coming soon after. I have a fair degree of condfidence that wall thicknesses were not true metric, in line with Reynolds' (perfidious Albion's) later practices. As of 1937, Dupieux gives both "metric" wall thickness and SWG gauges, with 531 being offered in 7/5/7 and 9/5/9, both with 5/10 centers. Stamping on old French frames seem to confirm this reading "REYNOLDS 531; BUTTED 20-24." H.M. was also offered in these gauges in 1936 as well as speciale 6/3/6. By 1938, speciale 531 in 5/3/5 was also available. Notably, these gauges are lighter than Reynold's Anglosphere standard 531 gauges that date back to at least the 40's. 5/10 was quite normal for the constructeur bikes of the day.

1/7/1 531 seems to be a later development. It also seems to be a later development in the Anglosphere, perhaps tied to Reynolds A tubing being phased out. It doesn't show up as a standard line item in the 40's or 50's catalog, but pops up in the early 70's catalog. I also acknowledged the mention of 7/10 could just be an indicator it was used for bikes that needed to be stiffer, like a sprinter's bike or a non oversized camper.

I'm not entirely sure if 5/10 was "standard" or not in the years 7/10 was an option even if it was typical, the Federal models and several 3 tubes examples seem to indicate cost cutting could take place, even on a Herse, but it's also very possible that most people who could afford a Herse could pay for the more premium lighter tubing.

There's also some murkiness behind the meanings of 5/10 because Reynolds preferred to reference top tube gauges, which they often drew thinner in Imperial dimensions, but that wasn't true to continental tubing, and Dupieux seems to have been ordering whatever he felt would sell well in France.

On the subject of 753, as of 1970 Rebour states speciale is 7/3/7 (0.71mm/0.38mm/0.71mm, conveniently close to modern 7/4/7 tubing). O’Donovan as SBDU moves away from titanium because of non-standard tubing diameters, but picks metric sizes to develop 753 in, with the top tube size conveniently matching those given by Rebour in 1970. Heat treated 531 existed since at least the 40's. It's not unthinkable that 753 may have been a very direct evolution or remarketing of speciale.

I'm not saying modern randonneur bikes at the same as the ones from yesteryear, but if you hear it from many framebuilders and customers, many are under the impression that these modern developments are traditional, rather than actually novel and modern, because of retrogrouchiness. The scaling of the weight of riders and stiffness of frame size raises the issue that if a 25.4mm 7/4/7 tube is ideal for a M/L frame, do undersize tubes need to be given serious consideration for smaller frames which tend to have lighter riders and inherently stiffer frames? That would lead to 22.2mm/23.8mm top tubes being the obvious next step in stiffness tuning. Tubing manufacturers already have the dies for these diameters, it's just a matter of getting mandrels made. Given that I ride smaller frames, it's certainly be something I'd be curious to try building a bike with.

bulgie 

Ha, I used .6/.3 single bike tubes on my 1989 tandem, hasn't broken yet. And not the fake Reynolds .3 that was really .4, I mean really 0.3 mm middle sections. However, only for the internal bracing tube, that goes from the head tube to the rear bottom bracket, crossing the captain seat tube in the middle. That tube frankly is there mostly to hold up water bottles, and a nice straight-shot route for the derailleur cables. It does partly triangulate what would be a parallelogram in the rear part of the frame, if the bracing tube was left out completely ("open frame"), and thus allows a bit thinner/lighter tubes to be used in the periphery of the frame. The top tubes on that bike are .7/.4, but oversized (DT is .8/.5), plenty strong and rigid enough for racing and loaded touring, and we are a heavy team. (Well as a gentleman I should point out that I am heavy and Laurie is petite!)

I made Rodriguez tandems from '79 to '84, and we had access to Reynolds Tandem tubes. We put the oversized "Jack Taylor" blades on all our tandems, and the 28 mm OS steerer, and 531 headtube to match, on request. Angél Rodriguez designed a very strong and nice-looking cast crown for the JT blades, that could be bored for either steerer size. About half of our customers chose 1" steerers for compatibility, but the 28 mm 531 steerer was clearly a better choice for most people in my opinion. Remember this was before the introduction of 1-1/8" (28.6 mm) steerers and headsets, but 28.0 mm steerers go back many decades.

The downtubes we got from Reynolds were 30 mm and double-butted. It was my understanding at the time that the Taylors also used that DT, though I don't remember if I measured the DT on a Taylor -- anyone here know? I thought I heard that Singer, Herse et al. used 30 mm DTs also, but I don't remember where I heard that, so don't believe it unless we get corroboration.

Mark B in Seattle

Kuromori

No doubt, the 40's Imperial tandem set is really really stout. Unfortunately, I can't find a single technical source for French Reynolds tubing that isn't 2nd or 3rd hand or just an advertisement, so I haven't a clue about the French tandem set, or what tandem set Jack Taylor was using, but his bikes do seem French inspired at times. Tandems are really on the periphery. Dupieux could have specified something closer to what Vitus or Durifort were making for tandems at the time to fit French lugs but in even lighter gauges. It's interesting to note that 1 1/8 steerers do appear in the Reynolds 40's catalog, so they were made at one time.

bulgie 

Yes, that's very interesting. I guess that means someone made a 1-1/8" headset also? First I've heard, after being a tandem specialist since the '70s, so they must be rare. I worked at Bud's Bike Shop back when they bought a half-page advertisement in Bicycling Magazine each month billing themselves as "THE Tandem Shop". Before they started Santana, they were buying all the tandems they could get from anywhere in the world to satisfy the demand (including a large fraction of the Taylors' output), and servicing lots of vintage machines. I saw a lot with oversized steerers, but they were all 28 mm. Of course Bud's/Santana was a USA shop, so they only saw what had made it to these shores. Lots of British, French and other brands, especially smaller-volume ones, have probably never been seen here.

Still, I wonder if Reynolds was talking about 28 mm, and just "rounding up" for their English-speaking audience?

My all-time favorite tandem steerers were the tapered ones that were 28 mm at the bottom but regular 25 mm at the top. I think those are rare but I've seen them on Herse, Singer and Bushnell tandems. I saved for myself a 531 steerer in 28 mm, and my hope is to someday use it on a bike after tapering it, and making a suitably flared head tube to match, like on this Singer:


Those 28 mm steerers are unbutted, same very thick wall all the way up, so they still take a 22 mm stem. Tapering them to 25 mm (or 1 inch) sheds some unneeded weight.

Mark B in Seattle

clubman 

1 1/8 headsets were found on a few trade and delivery bikes I've seen, my 51 CCM Delivery bike being one of them. Perhaps they were a stock product in the frame parts market and then migrated into other bike designs.

bulgie 

Good to know, thanks. Did they use a regular 7/8" stem, with the resulting very thick (1/8") wall?

Since I've always specialized in lightweights, that's kinda gross to think about, but I bet it gets the job done! As long as the job doesn't involve hills...

Kuromori

UK catalog with no mention of metric tubing anywhere, except a little conversion table at the back. 3.7/1.6 or 3.3/1.6 wall, so not the same tube. Looks like the standard option at the time was for a head clip headset and stem. It could just be that the French market was floating a fairly niche market or the tandem niche started settling on French influenced standards.

clubman 

Yes to the stem and likely the wall. Can measure? And If I'm reading this cool thread right, a little beefy weight never hurt a good ride.

HeikoS69

The latter (but meanwhile I have OCR)
I spent many hours there. We must have missed

Kuromori

Herse's name appears much more frequently if you omit "Rene" and only search for "Herse" in L'Auto. It's actually quite interesting to see how frequently Herse is mentioned by other companies. Sometimes you can find things like mentions of Rene Andre riding for Herse before he set up his own shop, or mentions of Herse himself when he rode for Narcisse.

rowebr

Wow! Heiko, a sincere thank you for all your hard work, it is wonderful to have these available!