in praise of standards

Sir Ridesalot wrote:
On Thursday, 11 June 2020 00:04:48 UTC-4, Ralph Barone wrote:
Andy wrote:
On Monday, June 8, 2020 at 7:26:11 AM UTC-5, AMuzi wrote:
As Mr Brown often noted, standards are great so we ought to
have a bunch of them:

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/interv...36-wheels.html

If every imaginable thing is a standard what meaning does
that hold?
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

With a 36 inch wheel, would you need a ladder to get on?

:-)

Andy


Nah. With long chain stays and innovative headtube design, you could
probably build a bike where both the seat and the handlebars were below the
tops of the tires.

A recumbent?

Cheers


Not necessarily. I was thinking that the handlebars might have to attach to
the front fork, but ...

On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 7:02:52 AM UTC+1, Ralph Barone wrote:
Sir Ridesalot wrote:
On Thursday, 11 June 2020 00:04:48 UTC-4, Ralph Barone wrote:
Andy wrote:
On Monday, June 8, 2020 at 7:26:11 AM UTC-5, AMuzi wrote:
As Mr Brown often noted, standards are great so we ought to
have a bunch of them:

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/interv...36-wheels.html

If every imaginable thing is a standard what meaning does
that hold?
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

With a 36 inch wheel, would you need a ladder to get on?

:-)

Andy


Nah. With long chain stays and innovative headtube design, you could
probably build a bike where both the seat and the handlebars were below the
tops of the tires.

A recumbent?

Cheers


Not necessarily. I was thinking that the handlebars might have to attach to
the front fork, but ...

You might look into the latest Honda Goldwing. The front fork is steered via a wishbone system just like on a car. Of course, the Goldwing has a long wheelbase, so there's space for such refinements.

Andre Jute
Designing and Building Special Cars

On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 7:14:06 AM UTC+1, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 7:02:52 AM UTC+1, Ralph Barone wrote:
Sir Ridesalot wrote:
On Thursday, 11 June 2020 00:04:48 UTC-4, Ralph Barone wrote:
Nah. With long chain stays and innovative headtube design, you could
probably build a bike where both the seat and the handlebars were below the
tops of the tires.

A recumbent?

Cheers


Not necessarily. I was thinking that the handlebars might have to attach to
the front fork, but ...

You might look into the latest Honda Goldwing. The front fork is steered via a wishbone system just like on a car. Of course, the Goldwing has a long wheelbase, so there's space for such refinements.

Andre Jute
Designing and Building Special Cars

Duh. I was in such a hurry to get away for a ride before the rush hour, I quite forgot the obligatory bicycle content, though of course a Honda Goldwing is also a bi-cycle, just not a pedal-cycle (literally in the case of those Goldwings with auto gearboxes).

Fournales, a Frenchman who was a suspension design genius by appointment to the motor racing crowd, see --
https://www.fournales.fr
-- for years sold a systems of his special dampers, invented mainly for racing cars, for bicycle applications. His system was a complete fork with the wishbones integrated to the stirrer tube so that the fork could be fitted to normal frames. I looked into it about twenty years ago when there was supposedly still plenty of NOS since the bicycle end of the business had stopped trading not too long before that after Look screwed up the marketing of these clever bicycle fork units. The purpose of the design was very like Honda's system, short and long wishbones to keep the wheelbase -- specifically the distance between the contact patches of the tyres -- the same at all times regardless of road inputs, so as to avoid unwanted steering inputs, and their energy losses, from the changes in wheelbase and consequent unexpected behavior of the bike on a rough road. In this link from my files, dated 2008 which is several years later than the web page was made, you see a Fournales bicycle fork, and can make out the two wishbones with the damper continuing to the steer tube, and the clever way the unit is made self-contained by operating the steer tube and fork as separate parts only dynamically attached to each other by the geometry of the short and long arm wishbones with the damper between them accommodating any disturbance before it reaches the handlebars. See --
http://www.gedibikes.co.uk/image/713
In the end I didn't manage to find a Fournales fork that was actually for sale, and the braziers who had the last remaining stock wanted to build me a bike that would have been useless to me, so I moved on to the simplicity of doing my suspension with balloon tyres and a sprung Brooks seat.

Andre Jute
Always curious

On Wednesday, June 10, 2020 at 10:41:29 PM UTC-5, John B. wrote:
On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:29:18 -0700 (PDT), Andy
wrote:

On Monday, June 8, 2020 at 7:26:11 AM UTC-5, AMuzi wrote:
As Mr Brown often noted, standards are great so we ought to
have a bunch of them:

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/interv...36-wheels.html

If every imaginable thing is a standard what meaning does
that hold?
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

With a 36 inch wheel, would you need a ladder to get on?

:-)

Andy

How to "get on" even larger wheels :-)
http://www.hiwheel.com/
--
cheers,

John B.

that's funny.

Andy

On 6/10/2020 10:29 PM, Andy wrote:
On Monday, June 8, 2020 at 7:26:11 AM UTC-5, AMuzi wrote:
As Mr Brown often noted, standards are great so we ought to
have a bunch of them:

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/interv...36-wheels.html

If every imaginable thing is a standard what meaning does
that hold?
--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

With a 36 inch wheel, would you need a ladder to get on?

:-)

Andy


No, 36 has been a novelty item for some 25 years now:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coker+36%2...ages&ia=images

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971