tcs

Kleenfeet:

tcs

American Star of the 1880s, designed to resist 'headers':




The American Star had an interesting belt&ratchet/treadle drive:

tcs

The J-Rad of 1921 also had a treadle+cable drive and a 'crank forward' layout:




This layout is seen in the 'Sofacykel' of the 1930s




and continues today in the Rans/Phoenix Bike WRX crank forward bikes.

tcs

Eliminating the 'header' of the penny-farthing was a serious matter. These lowered & geared bikes were generally called Kangaroos:




The lowered, treadle machines were called Faciles:

tcs

Into the design orthodoxy of the high wheeler, John Lawson introduced his 1879 chain-to-rear-wheel drive Bicyclette:




"It'll never catch on," they said.

obrentharris 

@tcs thanks for all these fine examples!
Brent

VtwinVince

I believe post 12 shows an Alex Pong prototype, pretty interesting stuff that guy came up with. I have a set of his prototype cranks, hollow forged and with integral BB. Way ahead of his time.

steelbikeguy

well, "they" weren't completely wrong.

It is interesting how the design choices of the high wheeler stuck around in the early safety bikes. The use of a larger front wheel, as shown here, is one example. The use of footpegs (for mounting) on the back of the bike stuck around even longer. The upright rider position, with the bars quite close to the rider, stayed around for a while too.

It does make me wonder if this was because the designer hadn't considered alternatives, or if the designer understood that people wouldn't buy it if the appearance was too different from what customers were accustomed to.

Steve in Peoria

steelbikeguy

we've already discussed the shaft drive a bit, but I thought I'd share an article on shaft drive designs written by David Herlihy. This was published in the June 1996 issue of Bicycle Guide magazine.





Just in case anyone hasn't read it, David Herlihy wrote a great history of early bicycle development titled "The Bicycle". Definitely worth reading!

Steve in Peoria

52telecaster

Ty man!

steelbikeguy

Looking through my clipped magazine articles, I found another that is fun and interesting.
I'm not sure that is really "weird" tech, but it is certainly a bit excessive and dangerous!





The biggest I've seen was a quad or a quint (5 person) tandem by Santana... IIRC. I saw it on RAGBRAI, and it was towing a trailer behind the trail-a-bike attached at the back. Crazy.
edit: I found a photo of it! This was in the year 2000. No trailer or trail-a-bike. Still, I can't imagine the logistics of getting this on the road.




The biggest that I have a (good) photo of is an old quad tandem at the Billy Goat bike shop in the St. Louis, MO area. This is the former A-1 bike shop run by Ray Florian Sr. I think he may have built the quad tandem too.



Steve in Peoria

bulgie 

8 riders!


This book (Bicycles and Tricycles, by Sharp) was published in 1896, so the disk wheels were around by then, or earlier?






Amphibibious! (That's a classic movie reference, not a typo)


Bolted together (& disassembleable) aluminum frame with octagonal tubing, 1930s - before Loctite was invented. What could possibly go wrong?



Quad tandem, the hard way.
Watch out for low overpasses.


Jocelyn Lovell, on a bike he made himself. The gears on each side had different ratios, a lower one for the first 70 m, and a higher one for the rest of the race (a 1 km time trial, aka "kilo") He rode it at World Championships but didn't win, and it never became popular.

grant40

Possibly. I know that a lot of the old shimano road bike from free wheels and cassettes had had shorter teeth to aid and shifting before the modern sloped style of teeth were invented.

grant40

5 chainrings. This thing has some serious range.

grant40

A lower end, rivited 4x crankset on what they said is a Raleigh Delmara. Nothing came up when I Googled that frame.

bulgie 

Quad rings really lend themselves to tandems, that can go faster downhill but might need to go slower uphill.
Especially on a front-drive like this, with no chain-line worries — "cross-chaining" just isn't a thing, with such a long chain. Q-factor can even be kept narrow, by using a short spindle. No tire or chainstay to clear.

You need a front derailer that can "cover the spread", but they're out there, sometimes with a simple modification needed. Or make your own, like the Singer in the first photo!

The Rebour drawing shows a TA with extra-long chainring bolts, maybe custom-made? My favorite way to do it, with TA 5-pin rings, is to use two outer chainrings, one on either side of the 5-pin flange on the crank. Then no custom bolts are needed. I bolted the outer 2 rings to each other with normal double bolts, at the "Randonneur" bolt circle, and then the inner 3 rings are bolted together at the "Cyclotouriste" bolt circle. That does require an extra set of bolt holes to be drilled in the 2nd-largest ring, which is bolted to the larger outer ring and also to the inner rings. Drilling holes is easier than making custom longer quad bolts. The whole double-drilling, double bolting nonsense probably isn't strictly necessary — that outer ring could stand alone, bolted only to the crank at the 50.4 mm circle — but it stiffens up the assembly and prevents the chain wedging itself down between the two outer rings. Large TA 50.4 rings are not very stiff side to side.

This method could also be extended to 5 or more rings, still without needing extra-long bolts.

Mark B

grant40

pics?

tcs

Thor Heyerdahl thought there were some unnecessary features in the old hieroglyphs for his recreated reed boat, the Ra, and left them off. The Ra disintegrated in the Atlantic ocean, and he discovered the old designers knew what they were doing! (The Ra II incorporated those features and safely sailed from Africa to the Caribbean intact.)

It was a front end geometry they knew and understood to work acceptably well for riding solid tires on rough roads. As designers brought the front wheel diameter down in the early safety bike era, they tried all manner of suspensions and springy frames. Blessedly the pneumatic tire - and the Good Roads movement - arrived.

tcs

Index - Sturmey-Archer since 1903.

tcs

I read on the internet (and if you see it on the internet, it must be true) that Tulio Campagnolo invented derailleur gearing for the 1937 Tour de France.

Okay, now that you've spit your coffee out your nose, bicycle gearing dates back to, oh, let's say ~1882, when the first practical, useful planetary gear sets were offered. Several companies pursued this, the most successful being Crypto-Dynamic. They began with gear sets for tricycles...

Fun fact: Tricycles outsold bicycles in the late 1870s and early 1880s in England. Queen Victory owned one! (She never rode it - it's probably still in the back of a shed at Balmoral.)

...and engineered a drive hub version for ordinaries (penny-farthings).

They rolled with the times, moving their two-speed hub to what was called a 'bantam' ordinary with pneumatic tires




and advertised it heavily with racing prowess:


"It is an absolute fact that not withstanding all the efforts to disparage the front drive, almost every rider who has tried it prefers it greatly to the rear drive."

Alas, chéri, it was not to be, and by 1900 they were advertising rear drive safeties with their two speed hub.




There's a nice restored bantam ordinary (later called a chainless safety) @
https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/18...d-safety-no-2/

Thus died this 'weird tech'. Or did it?

tcs

Beginning in the early 1890s various inventors tried putting bicycle gears at the bottom bracket. Probably the most successful (least unsuccessful?) was Adler of Germany in the 1930s.




One on display @
https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/19...-gang-typ-155/

For a variety of technical reasons this is pretty much a dead end...well, except for those Effigear, Pinion and Sturmey-Archer gearboxes in current production!

martl

nice find

Pompiere

In the 1970s, DANA had a 3 speed bike transmission conversion kit. It was designed to replace a one piece crank with a 3 speed gear box.


Dana 3 speed transmission
https://www.utoledo.edu/library/virtu..._bike_ads2.pdf

tcs

How fast can you ride in a draft?




In the 1890s they answered this by riding behind 'pacing multis':




To improve the draft, they moved the rearmost rider over the rear wheel. This was called a 'donkeyback'.




The big pacing multis were replaced with motorbikes after ~1900. Amazingly, though, a donkey back is still produced:

tcs

Tandems - where do you put the lady?

The Victorian answer scoffed at the question. Of course the lady goes in front!




There were technical issues with this, solved by putting the lady in the back. This change needed the social construct challenged and changed - with advertising!