A very good interview, with some real words of bicycle-design-wisdom from Grant; and yes, thanks for posting this.
Y'know, Grant has always been, as far as I've ever been able to read him, a contrarian, and I really like that. But my likes aside, this contrarian streak has resulted in wonderful bikes precisely because he bucks trends, as in the "woman specific" design and "need to clear 2' obstacle" idea. *And* I've often thought that Mt. Diablo influenced Rivendell bike design. (I do think Grant downplays top tube length too much; I'm not the only one who has sold a Riv because the tt was just to damned long. Sometimes you like to have your bar in a particular spot with respect to the saddle, and playing with bar height then does not serve to compensate for a less than ideal top tube length. But I gather that Grant has cut tt length on some Sams. But he's right that you can't look at tt length in isolation from multiple other variables.) "I’m pretty happy with the way Rivendell has shaped up and gone." I recall a long ago statement in another interview where G said, "We are product driven, not market driven."Because of this, and because, simply, I liked Riv bikes, I wrote a paper on Rivendell for my MBA marketing class citing Riv as an honorable commercial enterprise in the face of (I recall this bullshit from the time: HP talking about "*perceptions* of value": don't give me perceptions, give me value!) And the paper was a good one, though the marketing classes were largely useless. But I believe that it is precisely this product integrity that has made Rivendell, whose chances of success in this horrible, shark-like world of competitive commerce were minimal, in fact succeed and, more, modestly prosper -- and this while paying honest wages and benefits to builders and shop staff. And nice words on trail! But what is this pointing to? Also, there’s another steering/bike handling parameter that probably matters more, although it’s far less well-known than trail is. Everybody at Rivendell knows what it is, we have a name for it, and all of our bikes are designed with it in mind. That’s true whether it’s me designing a new model, or Will or Roman or Mark working on a limited-run Rosco Bubbe. Everybody here knows, but I’m not going to say what it is, because it’s another can of worms, and it’ll attract the meanest mathematicians and physicists on the internet. Why do that? -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
