Chombi1 

The early Cannondales were interesting to me as a concept, challenging the then, typical steel bikes, but the looks and build quality on them never pushed me over to ever consider buying one for myself. Especially when Cannondale dealers back then explained to me that the slight curving of the oversized aluminum frame thbes where one would expect them to be straight. Was a normal byproduct of the heat treatment that Cannondale subjected them through, despite their guaranteeing me that they were all still perfectly aligned at the dropouts when they leave the factory. This, plus my younger brother with a steel butt, complained to me how really harsh his Black Lightning rode, even back then, when he was in still in college at his toughest days......

Trakhak

I wish I had asked the Cannondale rep why the frames were suddenly arriving with wavy tubes back then. For the first couple of years of production, the frame tubes were perfectly straight. The heat treatment step likely was a production bottleneck that made it hard to keep up with the suddenly enormous demand for their bikes, and so they moved to some new, speeded-up method.

Unfortunate that they must not have tested the method thoroughly before investing in the new equipment. Their stopgap workaround was to paint the frames with wacky patterns to make it more difficult to see the waviness.

Cannondale was the first and only company to market affordable criterium-geometry bikes in great numbers during the brief period in the '80s when those ultra-short-wheelbase bikes were faddish.

Other than the Cannondales, your only choice for crit geometry was pretty much an expensive high-end Italian bike, and those were being bought almost exclusively by bike racers, who knew what they were getting themselves into. The Cannondales were being bought mostly by people moving up from a sport touring bike, so the short wheelbase would have made for a rude awakening.

I raced one of those high-end Italian crit-geometry bikes back then, and, believe me, your brother would have found the ride just as harsh.

Ironfish653

Curious what era all these "wavy tube" Cannondales are from. I've got a couple of CAADs and a 3.0, that I went to go look over after I read those last couple of posts.

Guess I'll have to start shopping KLEINs next time I get the itch for a 80s-90s big-tube bike

Chombi1 

I thought it was pretty much all of them with the heat treated warped tubes, but apparently, the real early ones supposedly had perfectly straight frame tubes.

rccardr 

Nah. Some were slightly curved, some were perfectly straight. One model year, I think 87, was worse than others.

Ironfish653

Everything after ‘85; got it. Guess I don’t go back that far.

Weld quality leaves something to be desired, as well.

top506

I would think the fat-tube Schwinns would be more Klein-like than Cannondale-ish, as they were made under Gary Klein's patents.

Top

Trakhak

If you had to check for tube waviness in bikes you've already owned and ridden for a while, I guess it never bothered you.

His name is Gary Klein, by the way, not Gary Klien.

Trakhak

As I recall, the wavy-tubes problem didn't last for more than about a year. Maybe a little more, maybe less.

I'm not seeing the weld quality problem you alluded to. Many people prefer the vintage Cannondale ground-down welds to the stack-of-dimes welds of other welded aluminum frames.

Looking back, I'm amazed at how successful Cannondale was in the 1980s. People liked the bikes, obviously, but their dealers had mixed feelings about them, mainly because they were both significantly more expensive than similarly equipped steel bikes, making them harder to sell, and significantly more time-consuming to assemble. Where all the steel bikes were something like four-fifths assembled out of the box, for the first several years of production the Cannondales came as a bare frame and fork in one box and everything else in another box. Built wheels, though, so that was a plus.

Ironically, the early Treks had come disassembled in two boxes for the first two years we carried them, so we were building those from the ground up early on. Then, right around the time when Trek finally began shipping mostly assembled bikes to dealers, to sighs of relief all around, along came Cannondale bikes, and we had to go back to bike building from scratch.

Ironfish653

I have no issues with my Cannondales, that's why I own three of them right now.
I was responding more to Chombi1's comment that they found the looks and build quality lacking, and therefore wrote off the brand in ~1985.

Early Dales are definitely a niche; with a tech-nerdy East-Coast vibe; they kinda attract the same people who drive SAAB Turbos.

I came into the brand through MTB in the 90s, when they were definitely an innovator. The road bikes I added later just fit with the qualities I liked from my XC bike.


​​​​​​Interestingly, I have both a Cannondale and a Klein from 1989 (a 3.0 and a Pinnacle) the Dale doesn't have as elaborate details on the frame, but what it does is finished more finely than the Klein, particularly the welding around the BB and rear triangle; despite being a significantly less expensive bike

pastorbobnlnh 

Hahaha! Currently I own four Cannondales (three are pre-1995) and one SAAB Turbo! All told, I've owned five SAABS, albeit not all were turbos.

panzerwagon 

Hilarious! I knew someone years ago who drove a saab and frequently had his cannondale on the trunk rack. Now I wonder what part of the NE he was from...

rccardr 

No question that frames produced prior to 1986-87 are less pleasing to the eye in terms of weld and filet finishing.
Still fine frames, just not as pretty in that respect. By 86 Cannondale had significantly improved the finishing aspect; by 88 they were cosmetically superior to earlier efforts.

Chombi1 

I think everyone, including the people in the bike shops were still split back then, on wheter they can accept the new bike aesthetics that was being sold to us by Cannondale. We were so conditioned to the beauty of steel frames with their fancy lugs snd graphics that the Cannondales looked just a bit too plain to most. The then almost then concurrent fad for Aerodynamic designs made the fat tubes on the Cannondales just a bit too.... uhhhmmm.. fat.... for some to get comfortable with.
That's why I think the Cannondsle were almost a niche bike ehen they first started.

Trakhak

In retrospect, aero designs didn't make all that much of an impact in the 1980s. Shimano tried and failed with their AX components, while the various bike manufacturers that produced frames with flattened tubes went back to round tubes quickly. Really, it was only during the last 15 years or so that aero wheels and then frames finally became an important selling point.

The flip side to seeing steel bikes as classic beauties is that, to at least some of riders who appreciated the benefits that the fat tube Cannondales embodied, those steel bikes suddenly looked a bit antiquated. You're right that the Cannondales must have looked austere to some of the people who were used to gaudier steel bikes. They certainly looked a bit too plain to me.

(In fact, I was riding a Bianchi Specialissima when our shop started carrying Cannondales, and yet the next road bike I bought, 10 years later, was a Reynolds 853 Schwinn Peloton, simply because it was the cheapest Ultegra STI-equipped bike I could get with my employee discount. If the equivalent Cannondale had been close enough in price, I definitely would have bought it, and I regret that I didn't ignore the fairly small price difference and just buy the Cannondale.)

But lots of people also started removing all the decals from their steel bikes around that time---why else would there be so many "Help ID My Bike" threads in Classic and Vintage? The stripped-down aesthetic of Cannondales might even have been what inspired that trend in the first place.

As to their being niche bikes when they started---they could hardly have been otherwise, given how radically different they looked. But it took only a few years for Cannondales to become a heavy hitter in the U.S. market, driving the other major manufacturers to introduce competing aluminum models---reluctantly, it must be presumed, given the costs involved in revamping their factories to meet the challenge.

Alan and Vitus had been around for years, of course, but those had been and continued to be niche brands both before and after Cannondale's entry in the market, until they finally disappeared. It wasn't until Cannondale became a serious competitor that Trek, Schwinn, Raleigh USA, and Specialized, together with a number of Japanese brands, all came out with aluminum bikes.

It's worth remembering, by the way, that there was a brief period when American bike brands dominated the U.S. bike shop market. Cannondale even started making inroads into the European market, at least partly due to their Cannondale-Saeco team sponsorship. (There's a video on YouTube of Mario Cipollini riding along in a peloton and yelling to a motorcycle cameraman "Cannondale! Is best bike!") I had a couple of customers who said they'd bought Cannondales in our shop, toured in Europe, and then sold the bikes there for considerably more than they'd paid for them.