23skidoo

Someone has been trying to a 6000 on the Tulsa CL for several months now with a $750 asking price.

The Golden Boy 

It's cool, but I don't know about $750 of cool...

dddd

The questions I have:

Did all of those 6000 model bikes come withthe Phil Wood components? Did any?

Were the road frames made in Chatworth, or Japan?

Somehow this brand reminded me of the short-lived Detel brand, out of Wisconsin.
Another bike startup that liquidated their inventory and had a very regional distribution, with high-end Superbe components on some models.
And with a Trek-like Japanese frame, even finished in Imron.

auchencrow

I can't offer anything more than that I think it's improbable that Facet had any frames made in Japan. (Even the lower-end '2000 proudly displayed a Made in USA sticker).

ftwelder

Redline, Champion, Mongoose and others were manufactured in Chatsworth. About 1000 bikes a day.

unworthy1

I am gob-smacked, again!
Another factoid: because he lived there in the '80s...John Tomac was also "manufactured in Chatsworth", sort of....yeah, it's a stretch

ftwelder

I lived in SFV at that time also and rode with Tomac a couple of times. It was pretty amazing watching him ride away from everyone in an MTB race on a 24" wheeled BMX.

bikersetu

Hello Biotour 2000 discussers,
I just bought a blue Biotour 2000 Facet and I also have the owner's manual and am awaiting its restoration so I can ride it in Fla.

bikersetu

The Biotour 2000 owner's manual was printed in Japan.

reidracer

Hi all, this is a very old thread, but like to shed some light if I can. The frames for BioCam and Biotour 6000 were both made in Chatsworth. Both frames were handmade from Reynolds 501 tubing. In the case of the Biotour 6000, they were kitted to spec based on rider request. As a result none were quite the same. Mine has about half Campy and half other stuff. Bike still rides incredibly well after all these years. Pretty relaxed geometry. The handmade bikes are quite rare...the 2000 and 1000 not as much. Cheers!!

7mountaingoats

Wow! I have to say, that yes, this is the definitive source on the Facet Biotour. None of this was around when I acquired mine...which I guess was some time ago since this thread has been going for a while. I joined this forum just to chime in about my Bioutour....finally I've found some others! I have a very nice blue Bioutour 3000 -- I notice the 3000 isn't mentioned as much here? I'll post some pics asap. I've set it up with bull-bars and a flip-flop. No, it's not silly. It's one of my favs of my way way too many bikes. One that I'll never part with, unless I break it of course then it's garbage. I do torque on it quite hard with the one gear. Pure simplicity. No extraneous brazings save for the cable clip stays on the down tube. I will dig up some of my other research that I did years ago and also pore through some of these links you guys have given to see if any isn't mentioned, but I know there were some other bits that I haven't seen in these postings. I also have it in my head that mine is one of 218 or so made, I'd imagine that's just the 3000 series but considering the scarcity....Anyhow, pics to follow soon. Nice to meet all you (other) freaks!

WindBiker

This might be the definitive Facet/CalFacet/BioCam owners/employees thread!

I worked at Facet some time in the early 80s. I would guess 81 or 82. I took the job out of interest in BioCam, but when I arrived, it was clear there was nothing happening with BioCam. By the time I arrived, as far as I know, BioCam's place was limited to an area in the warehouse section. It was mostly a Scorpion bicycle assembly line - as depicted in the article listed elsewhere on this thread: Scorpion BMX

There might have been some 27" road bikes rolling off the assembly line too. I recall there was a rim-wrapping machine in the wheel building area. (At that time, 700c was primarily a racers' wheel used in training as a lower-cost alternative to sew-ups). The machine bent extruded tubing into rims, which were then laced, trued and, as best I recall, packed into boxes with new bicycles. The article says we were the only factory in the US at the time building stock wheels for BMX bikes.

Whatever diamond frame road bikes we shipped were definitely not 531 Reynolds tubing. They were average production bikes, assembled by largely migrant workers in the last days of the pre-Reagan SoCal job market. They were not BioCams. BioCam was defunct by then. They were regular production diamond frames, under what brand I do not yet recall. (update: The Oklahoman article I posted below suggests BioTour was the 10-speed bike Facet sold - without the BioCam drivetrain.) The company was competing with probably Japanese and maybe by then some Taiwanese assemblers that controlled much of the mass market for bicycles at the time. Maybe Facet bought the BioCam license, made a few, realized it would not fly on the market then tried their hand at mass production bike building.

I do recall the Scorpion BMX bikes, including the red and yellow color scheme. The frames were press-fit into lugs - probably stamped metal lugs - in a combination of hand-buiding and psuedo-bot building. I say pseudo-bot only because they had this multi-torch thing rigged up to simultaneously heat the entire head tube. Brazing rod was placed at the end of the tubes before they were pressed into the lugs, then drawn out to the edge in the heating process.

My job was ostensibly quality control. I was reasonably free to roam the entire plant, and had some contacts in the front office. I remember pulling a bunch of BMX frames off the line due to dents in the tubes and gaps in the brazing at the edge of the lugs. That might have been around the time those images were taken for the three-page article in that other thread. (This one: Scorpion BMX) As I recall, somebody did not want a few dozen defective frames sitting around the factory when some reporters walked through. As a matter of fact, that might be me in that picture of the assembly line - the guy in the middle. I recall somebody suggesting that I should just go over there and play nice for the cameras.

That's all an aside from the Facet BioCam project. The company seemed to be angling for a share of the bicycle market, which was growing dramatically at that time. The Oil Embargo and Carter era had slanted forward-thinking investors toward nascant greenish ideas. The company was anything but that. A former Shimano engineer was something like my supervisor. A short portly guy, (built somewhat like I am now ;( ) he at one point told me "Bicycles are not made to ride. They're not safe. They are made to sell."

I don't clearly recall details of our full-size frame production, but I clearly recall that statement. At the time, I was a no-car bicyclist, refusing or declining to own anything more than a bicycle - to which I at times attached my well-built custom trailer for cargo and touring. I'd arrived at CalFacet as a bicycle enthusiast, but I was the odd man out in that regard. The labor force was more about working a job. My limited Spanish vocabulary ("no bueno") won me few friends on the frame line. As a matter of fact, nobody there seemed to have much appreciation for the fine art of bicycle mechanics whatsoever. It was a different time.

I found my way to CalFacet after a very abortive stint at Buds Bike Shop - the prestigious Claremont outlet for Santana Tandems. I'd worked at a pro-shop elsewhere in Southern California, and had some interest in the International Human Powered Vehicle Association. I aspired to be a bicycling innovator, oriented toward practical all-weather, hybrid-powered vehicles.This was long before hybrid cars came along but Jack Lambie had befriended me and told me how hybrid power runs trains. I figured it was a natural for bicycles, incorporating plugin, regenerative, solar, wind and internal combustion sources to support electric drives. I was at least 40 years ahead of my time - and still counting.

Okay, I washed out of Buds I think over the way I filled out tax papers. I was a no-car guy and had not exactly come to terms with a few other norms of modern life at the time. Bill McCready's crew was a bit more straight-shooting in that regard, so they kindly referred me to CalFacet before I'd been a bicycle mechanic at Buds for even a week. I think that was my last pure bicycle mechanic job, but, well, I'll take offers. I have a lot more skills now, outside the bicycle industry.

I was bouncing back and forth at the time between Tulsa and California, which might be how I had ended up at Buds. I think I knew about CalFacet from Tulsa, and Buds might've hired me when I contacted them to track down CalFacet.

This is where we get back to our main story - the BioTour. Anecdotally, at the time the story I'd heard was that somebody had used a cam-shaped chain-ring to be the first American to win Paris-Bret-Paris. I'm sure how far off the truth that story might be, but there is some thread of truth in it in so far as there is a Paris-Bret-Paris angle in the story somewhere.

My interest in cam-shaped chainrings also goes back to Jack Lambie. I'd seen him riding with an elliptical chain ring in front of the Orange County bike shop where I worked. He was a very friendly guy and invited me over to his house. He showed me some of the early wind-tunnel molds that predated the swoopy aerodynamic helmets that everybody now wears. They'd tested some aerodynamic boots, too. He had worked with Aerovironments, which at that time had done testing to prove cab-top fairings practical for long-distant trucks, and whose founder had championed pedal power flight and solar powered flight.

So however I caught wind of this cam-shaped chainring, it was somehow the inspiration for this Rupe Goldbergish BioTour Transmission. I think the idea with BioTour's complex machinery was to make it different enough from the PowerCam to not get caught in patent claims. (More about the PowerCam in a minute - that's the one that had roots in Paris-Bret-Paris.) Whether that is the real reason or not, I do not know. It probably was an attempt at constant variable shifting, but it just had far too many moving parts to be practical. I suspect the mechanical drag of the transmission defeated any biomechanical advantages of the differential gearing provided by the cam idea.

Way it works is, it has a cam-shaped device on both sides of the bottom bracket -- where the chainrings otherwise go. A cam-shaped track in this not-a-chainring guides a roller on each side that is attached to the short arm of a lever - which is in turn attached somewhere near the downtube. The long arm of that lever amplifies the short motion of that roller moving at variable distances from the bottom bracket axis along the cam-shaped guide track in the not-a-chainring:


At the top of this long arm of the lever, rods attach at right angles. They disappear (on each side of the frame) into a mysterious box, sliding in and out when the bike is underway. The other ends of those boxes are attached to the rear hub. What goes in the front as an in-and-out, front-and-back motion reminiscent of a steam train's drive piston (or mommy-daddy love business, if that metaphor rings a bell) ends up as a circular motion on the other end. The bulky boxes pivot up-and-down from their attachment point at the back, following the arc of that long lever as it rocks back and forth around its axis on the down-tube.

Got all that? Good. That's the easy part. What goes on inside that box to convert the in-and-out to round-and-round, all with constant variable transmission, was at the time a patent-pending mystery to me. The inside of the box was accessible using common tools, but it was clear to this young bicycle mechanic that it violated in spirit and letter the KISS principle that otherwise made bicycles such an elegant transportation solution. So many moving parts implied there would be design shortfalls, assembly errors, reassembly errors, fabrication flaws or any other incarnation Mr. Murphy might choose to enforce his well known law.

Okay, now, about Paris-Bret-Paris, Power Cam, BioCam, BioTour and, might I add, BioPace...

I'm writing mostly from memory here, and whatever links I find on the surface, so please fill in the blanks or correct any mistatements. BioCam might have been invented by Larry Brown, who also invented PowerCam.
BioCam, home
Power Cam main

Whether PowerCam was actually used in Paris-Bret-Paris or not, I did not verify, so far. Per my recollection from CalFacet, the inventor's "other" cam drive had been used in the French endurance race. I recall that was PowerCam. As best I can tell, it uses an eccentric cam in the bottom bracket to change the axis of the chain rings at each angle of the pedal stroke. It's the basis idea behind eliptical chainrings and Shimano's BioPace chainring - which was a cam-shaped iteration of eliptical chainrings. BioPace came into wide acceptance in the early 90s but soon fell out of fashion.

The idea with differential gearing throughout the stroke was to provide a higher gear ratio during the power part of the stroke, and a lower gear where the muscles are not we easily engaged. They probably fell out of fashion sports medicine tended toward spinning with a focus on aerobic support, rather than on delivery of pure muscle power.

I don't know much about how BioCam or BioTour found their way to the market separately than PowerCam. If they were the same inventor, it could just be a matter of developing different patents. Much like Facet, Houdaille Industries, which seems to have developed PowerCam, was a well-established manufacturer with roots well outside the bicycle industry. Like Facet, Houdaille was probably looking to diversify into a market poised to grow in direct proportion to trouble in the automotive or oil industries.

Based on failure of their products to take hold, it's a safe bet that neither Facet nor Houdaille ever made a significant profit off of their sizeable but proportionately tiny flirtations with the bicycle industry. If anybody made money off of BioCam, BioTour or PowerCam, it was the inventor who wisely cashed in on his intellectual property before Shimano could push competitors out of the market with their super-simple BioPace chainring technology.

Falcon3

Does the manual state what kind of tubing or butting was used on the 2000? Seems to be a mystery still...

WindBiker

Facet Shuts Bike Plant | News OK

The Oklahoman reported on March 24, 1982 that Facet sold its bicycle companies to Scorpion:
:

Dsbikes

Thanks for the thread. Picked up a blue 2000 from the curb today! It's huge. Wouldn't fit on carrier. Needs new tubes and cables.

chipwamsley

I bought the remnants of the cal facet bike inventory in 1982 with two bike distributors: Bob Merrill in Syracuse NY and Tom Waters in Pittsburgh PA. We looked at the inventory at a public warehouse in Jackson TN in mid February 1982, put in a bid which was accepted contingent upon us having the contents removed by Feb 28. I helped load 5, 44 foot trailers and warehoused the contents for several years. There were no complete bikes, just frames and parts. There were a few frames of Reynolds 531, painted black that had been made by Trek (there was also 7000 sets of Reynolds 531 tubing in bales with the original shipping labels to Trek Bicycles in Waterloo WI). I kept 2000 sets of tubing to use in my frame building operation and sold 5000 back to Sturmey Archer in Chicago (the importer for Reynolds tubing at that time). There were several hundred frames, made by Kuwahara in Japan, painted candy red, candy blue, silver and a few in metallic orange. The parts were entry level, some basic steel wheels, some alloy wheels, rolls of gold Shimano chain, Diacompe brakes. There were a few Shimano 600 parts and a bunch of Avocet seat posts, seats and Bellri bars and stems. Unfortunately no Bio cam systems. A lot of the parts were sold by Bob and Tom and I built up two levels of bikes with the Kuwahara frames that I sold through my retail store. I built a basic 531 frame from those tube sets (1000 for BCA in 1985). As for them being ridden in Paris Brest, a friend of mine, Mark Langenfelter from Columbus Ohio was an ultra cyclist and put together a team to do Paris Brest in 1978-79. He was using it for his Doctoral research, so not only was he taking blood from all of the team riders, but also riding himself. The team didn't get the bikes until they were in France and only had a day to get used to the drive train before the race. You can't spin at high cadence with out severe muscle pull--it even has a warning in the instruction manual. As could be expected, the results were less than steller, but Mark did get his degree. I hope this sheds some light on this mysterious brand.

Vintage_Cyclist

Biotour 2000 sounds like an old Roger Corman movie title.

WindBiker

Maybe you can't. Or maybe the rhetorical "you" can't spin the biocam at high speeds without getting a muscle pull. Or maybe I don't spin at a high-enough cadence to obtain the promised muscle pull. But here's my story, and I'm sticking to it until the first threat that I'll be waterboarded...

Absolutlely no flame or shade intended on my part. Honestly. Smiley face. LOL. This is humor, ableit wrapping an attempt to explain a quasi-serious subject. I appreciate the well qualified contribution to a thread I risk hijacking, were it not for my brief experience with BioCam in Chatsworth in the early 80s (which makes my rambling, marginally on topic contributions arguably relevant). If your contract implied you got all the inventory, some escaped, because there were a few of the BioCam bikes left there in the Chatsworth facility - I rode one across the San Fernando Valley to the place I was staying in Woodland hills. It was one serious Rupe Goldberg of a contraption. Why would anyone, I wondered at the time, and I still do.

The cam-shaped power cycle, not so much did i wonder. I had some use for a different pedalling style during the long, cold, dark, lonely hours I spent in the saddle. But as of lately, it looks like I and all the other non-circular-chainring crowd has been crowdsourced as wrong. There are a few well informed threads scattered across the internet dismissing without mercy any possible advantage to cams, elipses or any variable power stroke technology that casts shade on the sacred scientifically proven only right and good way to pedal a bicycle, which we all know is -- SPINNING.

But, since the NSA does not snoop on Internet posts, I think I can get away with some sacreligous heracy. Or maybe I don't care if I lose my head on the guillatine. I'll just come on out and say it, right here in front of God, the NSA, Russian hackers and everybody: I suspect there might be a vestigial advantage in some cases to pedalling in some way other than spinning.

Yeh, I know. I'm psychotic. Dangerous. I expect men in white coats at my door, backed up by a SWAT team within minutes of this heracy posting, but I'm old and tired, so I just don't care anymore.

No, really. The first time I saw an eliptical chain ring, it was on a bicycle ridden by Jack Lambie. Look him up. He was some sort of real scientist. Of course that doesn't make it science (I'll get to that part in few hundred words). At the time, Jack had been doing some work wind tunnel testing those goofy aerodynamic helmets we all wear now, which were first used in the Olympics some time in the early 80s or late 70s.

He had been associated with Aerovironments around that time. They'd also done some tests that proved cab-top fairings improved fuel efficiency on semi-trucks. And I guess under-trailer skirts, too, but those didn't show up on highways until recently. Jack Lambie told me Aerovironments helped pioneer the science of cab-top fairings and aerodynamic bike helmets. And Lambie was also some sort of pioneer in the hang-glider and ultralight aircraft communities. A very kind gentleman, and one of the more inspiring mentors who invested time in showing me how dreams and ambitions are worthwhile, although I knew him as a neighbor and friend for a very short time.

Anyway, this is about bicycles. In particular, BioCam and BioTour. And if I have my way, cam-shaped drives in general, but only in so far as it applies to the BioCam. Which I think are so important, I plan to use up a significant part of the Internet's limited supply of letters typing tedious details about this archaic and medically dangerous topic.

Anyway, Lambie was the one who introduced me to the people who had the BioCam factory, or who had just sold most of the remaining inventory to Chip Wamsley - except for a few remaining BioCams, one of which I rode around the San Fernando Valley for a few days. Maybe even took it down to Orange County for a ride, I don't really recall.

Okay, so Jack Lambie thought eliptical chainrings were worth riding. That's how I met him. I saw him riding a bike with eliptical chainrings outside (was it Chapman Drive) where I worked at Bicycle Man of Orange and chased him down to see what's what with that. That led to me eventually working at the factory in Chatsworth -- and maintaining a durable interest in non-circular pedal power curves.

So then, years go by. I had some extra cash and mountain bikes were starting to be the thing. But I saw this folding Montague and it had some BioPace chainrings. It wasn't exactly mountain bike, but at the time, it was closer than most bikes. So I got it. And got some BioPace chain-rings to boot. I was back in the non-circular power stroke bandwagon, research team and heretical cult.

At the time, at least in Northern Wisconsin, there were not many people living bike-only lifestyles. Didn't go over well with the inlaws at that time, either. Bike-only was more a Portland thing, and maybe Frisco, in the early 90s. Elsewhere they called non-car bike people by another name. I heard it recently on CNN -- LOOSERS!

Who cares. I was riding a lot as a commuter and practical cyclist at the time. These days, 30 miles a day to work is routine for a lot of people - if you have like, a "lifestyle" but then it was, you know, different. I rode literally 15 or 20 miles each way in below freezing weather to a roofing job. On very dark, often icy roads. The wider tires of the Montague helped - I'd been riding 27" 1 1/8" tires on packed ice, in the dark. The Montague had slightly wider tires and upright handlebars. It was practically a "mountain" bike. But this is about those BioPace chain rings.

I started using this odd pedal stroke. I'd still spin, sometimes, maybe more often than not. But other times, I'd sort of lope. Kind of like kicking a skateboard. It was like two sort disengaged rotations followed by one strong power stroke, then on the other side. spin-spin-LEFT-spin-spin-RIGHT-spin-spin-LEFT-spin-spin-RIGHT.

I know. Pure evil. Deluded hallucinations probably caused by fatigue, cold weather and maybe oxygen deprivation resulting from not spinning correctly, but it seems that loping pattern could get me along just as well as spinning. And I could rest on two strokes, then power every third stroke. The two between strokes just kept up momentum on the cranks, and probably flushed metabolites out of my blood as well. Then the higher-gear part of the BioPace stroke let me add a good kick every third stroke.

Here's the thing. About this science called sports medicine. And spinning. And philosophic pragmatism in science. In a pragmatic society, a hypothesis is treated as truth until better science proves it wrong or improves on the hypothesis. And the current hypothesis is that spinning is the only right and good way to pedal a bicycle.

Spinning moves the blood, invigorates the heart and applies not too much muscle which would result in too much crystalized metabolite matrials in the cells or wherever, which would cause pain. Don't want to cramp? Spin! It's settled science.

If you want to win a race it's settled science. If you want to keep up with the cool kids who get $2,000 bikes down off the top of their $40,000 SUV for the Wednesday night club ride around town. If you want those cool guys at the bike shop with tatooes and suave attitudes to like you when you go buy a new tire. You spin.

But the science was about SPORTS medicine. It was not about a roofer pedalling a bike 15 miles home in freezing weather after spending 8 hours on icy pitched roofs, pounding off old shingles. It was not about casual riding. It was about racing. And the science from sports racing trickles down to inform all other types of riding.

Sure, you can still buy BioPace rings or eliptical rings somewhere on the Web. But the science has proven them, and bless his heart, the late Jack Lambie, wrong. No advantage. Maybe even harmful.

However, I suspect the warning in the BioCam manual about muscle cramps might have something to do with Jimmy Carter, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and some post-60's, post-Vietnam tendencies. I don't doubt trying to spin the BioTour can cause cramps. But it might not all be about spinning. I don't know what the inventors had in mind, nor have I read any where else about this loping cadence I found so useful.

I would not dare claim I had an original idea, either. That is what Others do. I was a bike only guy (a LOOSER) and I couldn't even succeed at that. Now I have a car. A big, boaty old Cadillac-- the same year, make and model I scorned honest rich guys for driving when I was a LOOSER bike only guy. That's me now. A former BioCam, BioPace and eliptical-chainring guy, now a fat lazy office worker, guzzling gas in a 20-year-old boatcar and spewing Planet Killing GreenHouse Gasses into the faces of honest, hard-working, wealthy bicyclists, taking a break from their day jobs as stock traders to SPIN the way God meant for bicyclists to ride. The way races are won. The way triathlons are won. SPINNING.

There is no other way to ride. Eliptical chainrings, cam-shaped chain rings and all other non-circular power patterns went out just the way leeches and bad humors were discredited from medicine. Just the way Butter was proven more deadly for the heart than margerine or even Crisco. Transportation science is refined in racing, sports medicine informs racing and all the leading sports medicine people say SPINNING is the only right and good way to pedal a bicycle.

If you are not riding as fast as possible, you are not doing it right. You're not putting your heart into it. That would make you a LOOSER. If you are fatigued and want to back off, grow a pair. Man up. Quit trying to prove you are bigger patriarch by mashing those pedals. SPIN. Just because some LOOSER on some interwebs thread about some failed LOOSER bicycle technology said he "Loped" on some weird shaped BioPace chain ring means nothing. All it means is that's the way LOOSERs ride.

mkay?

Gravity Aided

Thanks for this thread, this looser has just found a blue Biotour 2000 locally, in a 65 cm frame, I'll post some pictures when I buy it. Looks like a good, light frame for touring, and I think I can fab up some sort of arrangement for water bottle cages using hose clamps

rad7

Just bought a red Biotour 2000 in Atlanta, GA. Happened to stumble over this great thread. Looks like I have a bike with some history in my hands.

Slightspeed

To keep this old zombie thread alive and kicking, I thought I'd post some pictures of the old Sentinel building where the Facets may have been built or at least assembled. I've lived about 2 blocks from this building since the mid 70s. I worked at a nearby computer company, and we had a discount deal with Sentinel since we were just around the corner. Our boss, an ex NFL 49er, was very health and fittness conscious even back then. We got a factory tour, but back then as far as I was concerned, if it wasn't Italian, it wasn't worth looking at, so I passed. Here's the old building on Mason and Superior Ave, in Chatsworth, CA. still occupied, though not sure what they do. They are building a huge Marriott Hotel complex and shops just 1/2 block north, but this building is safe as far as I know.

Old Sentinel factory.

Further north up the block this was a Puch-Bergmeister scooter office and warehouse. I don't know if it was connected with their bicycles. It used to be an old Safeway store. The strip mall between Sentinel's building and this one has been demolished for the Marriott. I hear that they are keeping this building too.

SpeedofLite 

This thread seems to be a repository for information about FACET bikes in general, so it seems reasonable to include this 4-page glossy insert for FACET BioCam bicycle (Bicycling Aug 1980).
Product specs and dealer info are on the last page.

math05440

I worked for Facet Filter for 45 years. At one point I was at their plant on 12 Mile between John R and Interstate 75 in Madison Heights MI. When Facet left the bicycle business we brought several hundred bikes into our plant and sold them individually so that is why there are so many in SE Mich. We also had a warehouse in Jackson TN. I just gave a red Biotour 2000 away this morning which hadn't been used for years. I sold several to people near Buffalo NY and also the Boston area.