You explained how the brakes activate to grab the rims, but how do the cables work? Why do it like that? How does the front brake work?
About Jan Heine, Editor, Bicycle Quarterly
The front brake works like a standard cantilever brake, with a cable hanger at the headset and a straddle wire hanger. The rear cable runs over a pulley, so the mechanical advantage is doubled. The double roller uses a chain link, with custom aluminum rollers. I added a photo to the post that shows this.
Some builders did this routing with standard cantilevers, too. However, why the rear brake should have more mechanical advantage than the front…? Yes, I have spent many hours in the Alex Singer shop, and seen quite a few bikes take shape. When I saw an old Singer stem stripped for rechroming, you could see that it was all steel with no brass joining the tubes. The same applies to the unified head tube. Ernest Csuka told me that they were gas-welded. Thank you for this beauty! I have smile and tears on my face at the same time tears for not having or only seeing such bike.
Hope one day I will have something like this, but not likely.
Happy ride and keep on with beautiful things you are doing BQ and others! For road riding, how do the Singer and the Rene Herse compare? The only classic Herse I have ridden extensively is a B model. Both handle similarly, but the Herse, with its wider tires, feels more planted. My new Herse is an attempt to combine the best features of both bikes, with the Nivex derailleur and thin fork blades of the Singer, and the B wheels and associated geometry of the Herse, plus a frame that is more flexible than both based on our experiments with frame stiffness.
Jan, thanks for the tour of the Singer. I notice the rear fender has a brace to distribute stress where its attached to the seat stay bridge.
Singer simply sandwiched the reinforcement plate between fender and frame. It still distributes the stress. The idea originally came from Herse. In , Lyli Herse and Robert Prestat rode the Poly de Chanteloup hillclimb race at record speed on the tandem, but got disqualified because their fender had broken — apparently, they crashed taking a sharp hairpin at very high speed.
Herse devised the reinforcement to prevent this from happening again. Are the fender edges rolled so that there is a hollow to get an electrical wire through? Most fender edges now are tightly crimped. But you can open the current fenders pretty easily — at least the Honjo aluminum ones we sell. Stainless steel fenders are harder to manipulate. It looks more like four cogs and two chain rings for eight to me. How many teeth on the cogs and chain rings?
I am wondering about the gear range and steps. Four cogs and two chainrings, for a total of 8 speeds. I prefer a 5-speed. The chainrings are By the way, if the original owner would have liked more gears, they could have opted for a triple and five or six cogs on the rear. Triples were common in France starting in the s, and five-speed freewheels gained popularity in the late s.
I assume you mean the jumps. Sorry, I meant to say that the gap between gears is a tad larger than I like it. Yes, on my new bike is perfect. In PBP this year, I used every gear except the I used that more than enough in the Pyrenees. On TV, Jacques Pepin was making soup.
Half a Century Old and Still Going Strong | Off The Beaten Path
I enjoyed the simultaneous dose of French culture. The bike is, obviously, worthy of being in a museum. Thank you for posting the brake cable detail. How many cool things can a single bike have? How difficult is it using the front derailleur on the seat tube? Any chance for a photo of that? Repeating the above comment, thanks for the blog, books and products. The derailleur on the seat tube is very easy to use. The first front derailleurs of the s were operated with a cable and downtube shift lever. The direct lever on the seat tube was seen as an improvement!
I suspect this was because the direct lever a saved weight remember, this was the time of the technical trials when weight was everything and b it offered a more feedback, so there was less risk of overshifting the chain to the outside or the inside. I would be very entertained if you could post a second youtube movie of that front derailleur in action on the repair stand.
I have found that using salmon pads and adjusting the toe-in of the brake shoes helps a little, and that having a fork crown mounted cable stop helps tremendously and usually completely eliminates the judder. Modern cyclocross bikes with cantilever brakes often have problems with judder. Do you commonly encounter this issue on classic bikes equipped with cantilevers? The Singer does not have cantilever brakes in the modern sense. The judder comes mostly from play in the sliding surfaces of the brakes.
Singer abandoned that design when centerpull brakes became popular. It appears to be a problem that occurs especially with modern bikes. In that case, moving to a fork crown-mounted cable hanger is a work-around solution, as the steerer tube flex no longer affects the brakes.
A better solution would be to redesign the fork. Jan, always happy to read and see some great pics of the older Singers.. I am the custodian of three of them. Cyclo rear, Simplex JUY 56 front. Maxicar front and rear and a very interesting Mahe seat pin, forward and aft movement. How do you like that mini front bag, Jan? The lid opens from front to back, opposite of the larger bags, correct?
Can you access the contents while riding? Several stores sell the Berthoud Mini 86, which is different, and less elegant, in my opinion. This bag from Grand Bois looks very similar to the one on your Singer: Is it now only available from Grand Bois in Japan?
The bikes I usually ride carry a large handlebar bag, so it is obvious what I prefer. The small bag can hold a raincoat, spare tube, wallet and small camera, but it gets overwhelmed when you need a spot to put a long-sleeve jersey as the day warms up.
You cannot access the content, because the bag sits too low and opens the wrong way. The bag in the link from Grand Bois is the same bag as that on my bike. I believe it is available in the U. Off The Beaten Path. This year, the bike is a half-century old. To celebrate, I took it on a ride with my friend Sam. Here it is click on the photo for a bigger image: Email Facebook Print Reddit Twitter.
Bicycle Quarterly magazine and its sister company, Compass Cycles, that turns our research into the high-performance components we need for our adventures. This entry was posted in Our Bikes. March 2, at 7: March 2, at 9: Jan Heine, Editor, Bicycle Quarterly says: March 2, at March 2, at 1: Harald Kliems HaraldKliems says: March 2, at 2: March 4, at 1: Love the feature in your book as well but its nice to see it on the road.
Freewheeling to equality: how cycling helped women on the road to rights
Thank you so much. Can we expect to see new Nivex-alike derailleurs in the list of future Rene Herse components? March 2, at 8: March 3, at 6: March 3, at 5: March 3, at Jan, Your bike is as pretty as a girlfriend. March 3, at 1: The Singer is indeed lovely. March 3, at 2: March 4, at 7: March 4, at March 7, at 4: March 7, at 5: March 4, at 4: Others, however, were less keen on this development.
No girl over the age of 39 should be allowed to wheel. Unfortunately, it is older girls who are ardent wheelers. They love to cavort and careen above the spokes, twirling and twisting in a manner that must remind them of long-dead dancing days.
Has cycling finally become a natural part of British city life?
In particular, the act of straddling the bicycle was viewed as unseemly for women, with widespread concern that it might cause sexual arousal. A bicycle with both pedals on the same side was developed to allow ladies to ride side-saddle; others had the centre cut out of the saddle to prevent any rubbing that might cause unwanted excitement. Medical objections were also raised. Doctors were creative with their diagnoses — one writing in claimed cases of women suffering chronic dysentery as a result of cycling — but one of the more common concerns was that women might exhaust themselves with too much exercise.
To the extent that over-exertion was a risk, it was caused in large part by the ludicrous clothing women were expected to wear while riding. Corsets and heavy dresses were damaging enough on a day-to-day basis — but exercising in them was near impossible. Some cyclists even came up with ingenious designs to convert their skirts into cycling-friendly wear when needed, as a research project led by Kat Jungnickel of Goldsmiths University has shown. And, for many women, the relationship between freedom and cycling continues. In Yemen, where a combination of fuel shortages and cultural barriers to women cycling has left many unable to get around, photographer Bushra Al-Fusail launched a campaign last month to encourage women to get out on their bikes and break the taboo.
The campaign has received a huge amount of attention, both positive and negative — with conservatives raising the familiar complaint that cycling is immodest for women. Topics Women The women's blog. Feminism Inequality Cycling features.