Dear Will, Expanding on my own post--is this a sign of senility? Anyway,
I did want to point out that the rear fender lines of early Rivendell designs aren't accidental. They are consistent with most non-constructeur builds of any era. There were a few Japanese bikes, a few now very influential French bikes, and a few British bikes that bucked this trend, but they were the exception, not ordinarily widely produced, and, significantly, ordinarily featured vertical dropouts. If you design around maximum "versatility", you build around horizontal dropouts (fixed wheel/singlespeed/internal hub gear/derailleur gears all work fine), and, if you maximize the tire clearance for a given bridge-mounted brake, then you end up with an offset chainstay bridge given the dropout configuration--bad fender line, but big tire clearance without deflating the rear tire. This is the bargain the early Rivendell designs made. You can do anything with them, they're lovingly built of the best materials, fantastically finished, and they maximized the stock technology of the mid-1990's. Digression: I bet there is a lag from the widespread switch to vertical dropouts and capitializing on the improvement to fender alignment made possible by vertical dropouts. It sounds like Grant's designs caught up sometime after the early bikes (including my own Heron) and the early Atlantis were designed. This switch to vertical dropouts resulted from a push from the MTB world to shorten chainstays, one initiated by....Grant Petersen's MB designs. It was enthusiastically picked up by the 22mm-max-tire-crit-racing bike designers that finally drove "road bikes" into a ditch that Grant worked hard to avoid with his road-going designs, before leading/following his demographic into lovely cruisers and non-suspension light mountain bikes. "Gravel bikes" and most cyclocross bikes, honestly, are probably the non-racer's commercially-available road-bike answer to the mass-market road-racing bike, which started to fall into the specialization trap starting sometime before I rode road bikes thirty-five years ago, and has stayed there, immobilized by strictures of "lighter, stiffer, and more aero", and the "purposeful" racing aesthetic of really tight tire clearances. Modern racing bikes are a ball to drive, but they're not practical machines for most of us. Moving on.... In fact, many builders though the mid 2000's, including Waterford, just specified a standard cast bit for the chainstay bridge, which, depending on the chainstay length and the chainstay configuration, would be located in different places relative to the rear axle, but well away from the arc of an inflated tire as it was removed from a (hypothetical) horizontal dropout. Basically, that one, even if a threaded boss was added for a fender, had a go/no go spec, and users of fenders could work out how to make up the difference on their own time, and if the buyer isn't insisting on more closely-specified design, or didn't know to ask, then why torture your builder to locate that bridge in a given spot--about an "unimportant" detail? "It has clearance, clarence...." With vertical dropouts and braze-on brakes, there really isn't any good functional reason (there are production reasons, but they're minor if you care) not to place the bridges equidistant from the wheel axis, and there really isn't any good reason not to include a threaded boss perpendicular to the fender--unless it isn't a design consideration or unless you specifically don't want fenders on the bike. Even so, basic good design puts the support structure in the right places. For example, my own Road Sport, built by Waterford under contract to Boulder Bicycles, includes equidistant bridges and would fit fenders and its design tire fine, even though the bike was intended *not* to accept fenders by its maker (no eyelets, no bridge bosses. Mine ended up with one bridge boss, due to a prototyping error...) due to the potential horror of toe clip overlap potential on racing bikes. Best Regards, Will William M. deRosset Fort Collins, CO On Tuesday, December 29, 2015 at 8:36:15 PM UTC-7, William deRosset wrote: > > Dear Steve, > > Sure. The Longstaff was built to carry fenders full-time. The basic > Rivendell design templates were adapted/lifted from Bridgestone and Schwinn > Paramount production concepts and standard American build practice. These > are not bad roots, but they are grounded in a less-specified build concept, > that of frame+wheels+parts+accessories vs. integrated design. > > The Rivendells products I have used were built with horizontal dropouts, > and used a forward-biased fitting for the chainstay bridge as a result. > They were built to clear a design tire when inflated, and fender line was > apparently not a significant priority. Having room for them was an avowed > concern. > > Besides, the Rivendell sales literature ppked a bit of fun at the Honjo > fenders in favor of Esges, and made specific reference to the difficulties > of Honjo setup. > Best Regards, > Will > William M deRosset > Fort Collins, CO > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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