by Robert Penn
To make his point, Brian had wheeled his own racing bike into the room. The frame was built by Jason. It was a beautiful bike, of course, but something significant happened when Brian jumped on to it, catching his weight on the pedals and his shoulder against the wall. The bike changed. It fitted Brian so perfectly that it came alive. It responded to his every move, as he shifted his hands briskly around the handlebars and transferred his weight back and forth.
Perhaps more surprising was that Brian changed too. Jumping on to the bike took thirty years off him. When he thrust his hands into the ‘D’ of the handlebars and sunk his torso across the top tube, his eyes flamed. He was ready to chase down a breakaway from the peloton in a race or launch a sprint for the finishing line. Just sitting on the bike, just being on his immaculate, bespoke bicycle summoned such powerful emotional memories that three decades of toil and wear were erased from his demeanour in a trice. The bike was a source of youthfulness and it was thrilling to witness.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was made when Brian stepped off the bike, swung it round and wheeled it across to me. It was breathtakingly light, well balanced and delightful to hold in my fingers. But when I hopped on to it as Brian had done, there was no transformation. It didn’t look special under me. I didn’t feel special on top of it. Although Brian and I are the same height and roughly the same weight, we are physically different in many other ways. Our arm, torso, shoulder, leg and thigh measurements are unlikely to be the same. It was Brian’s bike: it made me want my own more than ever.
There is a simple grace about an unadorned bicycle frame. Looking at the row of bare, handmade frames hanging on the wall of Brian’s shop, something struck me: though they were all made from different types of tubing, painted to individual specifications with different dimensions and angles, and would be built up into different types of bicycle and ridden in very different ways over varied terrain by diverse humans, they were all — in one fundamental way — alike. The frames were all the same shape: diamond.
The first diamond-shaped frame bicycle — the Rover Safety — was manufactured in 1885, in the unloved city of Coventry. It was called the ‘safety’ because the wheels were the same size and small, the rider’s centre of gravity was over the centre of the bike, and he or she could touch the ground with both feet: in short, it was safe to ride. It was the first modern bicycle — something we’d recognize and be able to pedal today.
The ‘inventor’, John Kemp Starley, later said in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts:
The main principles which guided me in making this machine were to place the rider at the proper distance from the ground . . . to place the seat in the right position in relation to the pedals . . . to place the handles in such a position in relation to the seat that the rider could exert the greatest force upon the pedals with the least amount of fatigue.
It was almost exactly what Brian had been saying to me all morning. Where a rider’s hands, feet and backside are placed on a bicycle for maximum efficiency, control and comfort is a matter of basic ergonomics, which has been essentially unchanged over a century.
These principles led Starley to design the lightest, strongest, cheapest, most rigid, most compact and ergonomically most efficient shape the bicycle frame could be. By 1890, ‘every maker worthy of the name’ in Coventry, Birmingham and Nottingham was producing a safety model. The safety swept away every type of bicycle that preceded it: velocipedes, high-wheelers, dwarf ordinaries, the Facile, the Kangaroo, tricycles, tandem tricycles and quadricycles were obsolete within a few years. The ultimate form of the bicycle had arrived.
Other safety-style bicycles were designed and patented before the Rover, but making the bicycle user-friendly animated Starley: his design was the best. He was also a good businessman and recognized the potential in the machine early on. In 1889, he adopted limited liability. In 1896, he floated J. K. Starley & Co as the Rover Cycle Company. The capital financed the construction of the largest cycle works in Coventry, then the global centre of bicycle manufacturing, and enabled him to survive the first big downturn in the industry at the end of the 1890s.
In 1904, Rover moved into car manufacturing, which was so profitable, so quickly, that the company dropped the bicycle arm of the business altogether. Starley himself had died suddenly in 1901, aged 46. Every cycle firm in Coventry closed their works on the day of his funeral, which was attended by 20,000 people.
Perhaps the mourners had the prescience to know the Rover Safety was a transport phenomenon, and that the basic shape of the bicycle would remain unchanged for the whole of the twentieth century. Contrast the Wright Flyer, the world’s first powered aircraft built by Wilbur and Orville Wright (both bike mechanics, as it happens) in 1903, with, say, Concorde. Or take Karl Benz’s four-stroke vehicle powered by a gasoline engine, also invented in 1885, and compare it to a contemporary Formula 1 racing car.
In both modes of transport, aeroplane and motor car, the vehicles have changed almost continuously. With the Rover Safety, however, the modern bicycle arrived virtually perfectly formed. Today in aeroplanes and automobiles and countless other mechanical devices there are numerous design variations and opportunities for improvement. With the bicycle, there is one absolute shape. Sir Isaac Newton said we make advances by standing on the shoulders of giants. No one has been able to climb upon Starley’s back.
I’ve had nineteen bikes. This number includes neither bikes that I’ve owned for less than a month, nor the bikes I’ve never bothered to lock up. Out of those nineteen bikes, eighteen were built according to the principles of the Safety. The only exception was my Raleigh Tomahawk. The ‘ape-hanger’, hi-rise handlebars, different-sized wheels, odd-shaped frame and spongy saddle with backrest may have been as cool as the Lone Ranger, but riding a Tomahawk was like pedalling through molasses, dragging a dead pig. Like its big cousin, the Chopper, the Tomahawk was designed in response to the dirt-track roadster bikes popular in the USA in the late 1960s. For the manufacturer, Raleigh, the Chopper opened up a new market in children’s bikes, and it marked a shift in the company’s philosophy; the bicycle became a consumer goods product, rather than a valid form of transportation. Though remembered fondly, the Chopper was a toy, not a bicycle. It’s the worst example of the collapse in confidence in the real value of the bicycle that happened in the 1970s.
The principal structural function of the bicycle frame is to ‘maintain integrity’ under loads, to have the strength and rigidity to hold the wheels in place and support the rider, and to absorb the rider’s efforts in pedalling, braking and steering, as the machine rolls forward. The triangulated, tubular diamond frame remains the best structure to do this. An architect or engineer would describe it as a ‘truss structure’: the diamond frame is a variation on the super-strong ‘seven-membered’ truss, a common element in structural and mechanical engineering. Trusses on the roofs of buildings apply the same principles.
There have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of attempts to better the diamond frame design in the century and a quarter since it ‘set the fashion to the world’. None could be said to have got close. There have been innumerable refinements in the materials used to make frames, and the constructional aspects of bicycle tubing — non-round shapes, varying wall thicknesses, and tapered diameters—have become highly sophisticated. But the basic diamond shape, made up of two triangles, remains unchanged. Racing, mountain, touring, hybrid, track, utility, cruiser, fixed-wheel, dirt-jumper, porteur and BMX — almost all bicycles are constructed with a diamond frame. Today, the global fleet numbers well over a billion: nearly every one is made to Starley’s paradigm. You can spend $15 on a rusting roadster at a yard sale, or $120,000 on a 24-carat gold-plated bicycle encrusted with Swarovski crystals, and you’ll still get a diamond frame.
The constant shape of the bicycle over the last century goes some way to explaining why, today, we find riding one so elementary. It’s also why there is a sense of classical moderation in the kind of pleasure c
ycling offers. As the late Sheldon Brown, the esteemed bike mechanic wrote: The diamond frame ‘is one of the most nearly perfect pieces of design known, due to . . . its purity of form’.
When I rang Brian, a month after my initial fitting in the shop, to arrange our ride, he immediately asked: ‘How’s that bike?’ I had ridden it daily and it was very comfortable. He recalled all the adjustments he’d made, even though he must have worked on hundreds of bikes in the intervening weeks. Only after I’d commented on each of them to his satisfaction did he ask how I was.
We met up a few miles north-east of Stoke-on-Trent, on the moors, and rode along a ridge with grand views towards the Peak District. Brian knew every geographical feature in sight: this is where he trained when he was racing. He pointed to distant hills and described riding up them on single-speed bicycles; he recounted descents into steep-sided valleys on bleak days in forgotten winters, with failing brakes. Together, the stories created an alternative map of the area, with a distinct narrative. I remembered an Ernest Hemingway quote: ‘It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them . . . you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through.’
Brian rode beside or behind me, examining my pedal cadence and analysing my position on the bike in different circumstances — accelerating, climbing, ‘watching the cows’, descending and sprinting. We didn’t go far. It was grey and the wind was scudding across the tops of the hills.
‘I’ve had a good look at you,’ Brian said. ‘Back to the shop, then?’
There were a couple more incremental adjustments — saddle height again and the position of the brake hoods on the handlebars — before Brian got out his long metal ruler and started noting down the measurements of my frame in his notepad. Down on his knees, with the ruler pressed against the head tube and the seat post, he asked, ‘What’s this frame going to be made of then, Rob?’
There were few sure things about this bicycle at the outset, but one of them was the frame material: steel. It’s been the backbone of the bicycle for over a century. Until the mid-1970s, it was the only real option. Even in the early 1990s, the majority of high-quality bikes still had steel frames. Today there are many materials on the market: aluminium, titanium and carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers are common, but you might prefer your personalized steed to be made from moulded plastic, magnesium, beryllium (a toxic chemical element found in minerals and used in rocket nozzles), hemp, wood and bamboo. In fact, bamboo is emerging as the new material of choice for socially entrepreneurial frame-building projects in Africa, though it was first used to make bicycles a century ago.
I’ve tried all the major frame materials. I’ve had aluminium road bikes with carbon forks, steel mountain bikes, aluminium mountain bikes, a steel touring bike, a titanium road bike, a fullcarbon road bike and an aluminium mountain bike with carbon seat stays. So which material, or combination, provides the best overall ride? I have my opinions on all the bikes I’ve had but I know they are affected by my personal experiences riding them: how long I had the bike, where I rode it, who I rode with. Objectively, I’d be pushed to say which material provides the best overall ride. I know from reading about it that frame materials do have different properties: in fact, some people eulogize profusely about the ‘ride characteristics’ of this material over that. I’m not so sure. Such things are very subtle, and only measurable with sensitive engineering instruments.
There is much nonsense passing as wisdom about materials for bike frames. The reality is that a good bike builder can make a good frame out of any of the materials mentioned, with any desired ride qualities: if the diameter of the tubes, the thickness of the tube walls and the geometry of the frame are right, the bike will be right.
The poppycock really piles up when people talk about the stiffness of a particular frame material: this property of a material is measured by something called Young’s modulus or elastic modulus. A stiff frame transmits the impact of every pebble and nick in the tarmac directly to the nerves in your gluteus maximus, that is, your bum, while a flexible frame absorbs the shocks. Most people who have ridden both aluminium and steel frames would say that aluminium frames are stiffer. Actually, steel has a much higher Young’s modulus than aluminium — it is stiffer. It’s just that aluminium tubes tend to be much larger in diameter than steel, and as a tube’s diameter increases, its stiffness increases to the third power of that number.
In reality, the tyres, the wheels, the seat posts and the saddle proper absorb the bumps. The frame itself contributes little or nothing to shock absorbency. It’s also important to remember that two frames made from different materials would not be made to the same tubing dimensions, making a relative comparison impossible. The frame feature that does have some bearing on comfort is the design of the rear triangle — the triangle formed by the seat post tube, the chain stays and the seat stays.
The most deceptive aspect of modern bike frames is weight. The frame of my newest road bike is carbon (Toray T-700 SC carbon, if you must know). It weighs under 3.5 lb. It’s ‘Phwoarrr’-light. People who aren’t familiar with modern road-racing bicycles pick it up and actually go, ‘Phwoarrr’. Unquestionably, the lighter a bike is, the easier it is to pedal uphill. But the industry has become obsessed with making bikes lighter when, for the vast majority of riders, the paramount consideration is not weight, but that a frame should not break in use.
Carbon fibre is currently the most popular frame material for elite professionals, largely because it is so light. If your absolute priority is having the lightest bike possible, because you’re a professional cyclist and you need to shave seconds off the time it takes you to climb a 12 mile mountain road in the Pyrenees, to give you a competitive advantage, make a living and put food on the table for your children, then you must have a carbon frame. For the rest of us, it’s either an indulgence or we’re victims of a conspiracy. Or both.
Yes, even the bicycle industry has a conspiracy theory. It goes like this: the manufacturers of mass-produced bicycles spend a fortune on R&D to ensure that the top professionals they sponsor ride the lightest, fastest bicycles, and win races. The manufacturers need to recoup this expenditure while reducing the costs of production, so they throw everything at marketing to the public the same, or similar, elite bikes as the pros ride.
My dream bicycle will be made from steel. Here’s why:
1. Steel is very strong. High-quality steel has a very high yield strength or elastic range— the point at which it bends permanently rather than bends back to its original shape — making it durable and less likely to bend in a crash. This means that steel tubes can be thin, with a small diameter, making steel frames light and sufficiently flexible. As people like to say: ‘steel is real’.
2. Steel has a long life. When I visited Argos Cycles, a well-established frame-building workshop on an industrial estate in Bristol, I was shown several dozen steel frames dating back to World War II. There were frames made by some of the great names, such as Hetchins and A. S. Gillott, hanging on the wall, awaiting restoration work. They were about to be realigned, shot-blasted, rubbed down, primed and resprayed. Further along the wall there were several fully restored, gleaming frames waiting to be collected. They looked brand new. ‘Years of riding left in them,’ Mark, the workshop manager, told me. ‘We have a near constant supply of steel frames in for restoration. Many are over fifty years old. A carbon frame simply won’t last anything like that long.’
3. Steel is not prone to sudden failure: despite recent advances, carbon still is.
4. Steel is also easily repairable: aluminium, carbon and titanium are not. In fact, a small crack in the chain stay on a carbon frame often means the whole frame is destined for the bin. Crucially, steel can be repaired anywhere in the world by a man with a blowtorch and a welding rod. I know this, because I bent a steel bike in northern India, when I was riding around the world. I was slipstreaming a tractor on the Grand
Trunk Road near Amritsar. We were going downhill at a lick when I rode into a pothole the size of a hot tub. There was no time to react. I had what American mountain bikers call a ‘yard sale’. The bike, panniers, sunglasses, water bottles, tent, pump, map and I were strewn across the tarmac. I lost a lot of skin but the bike took the brunt of it: the top tube and the down tube were both bent, leaving the front wheel shunted backwards, rubbing against the underside of the down tube. I wondered if my round-the-world ride was over.
It took me an afternoon to find the best mechanic, or ‘top foreman’ as the locals called him, in Amritsar. Expertly, he removed the handlebars, the stem, the forks and the stressed headset from the head tube, while attendants handed him tools as a nurse attends a surgeon. Then he shoved a metal spike through the head tube and literally bashed the tubes straight again. It was terrifying to watch. Thirty minutes later, he’d reassembled the bike. The job cost me 100 rupees (about $2.25) and a packet of smokes. I still had 7,500 miles to go to reach home. The two bent tubes had to be welded again in Gilgit, Tashkent and then Meshad, in Iran, but I did get home, on the same bike. The bare frame, still bearing the wounds, is on the wall in my shed.
For years after my return, I was reluctant to take the frame back to the frame-builder, Roberts Cycles. The marks left by the Iranian welder were heinous. When I eventually did go back, I explained to Chas Roberts what had happened. He was delighted. He thrust me into the retail part of the shop where two men were about to wheel away their brand-new expedition touring bikes — one to cross America, the other to circumnavigate Australia. ‘Here,’ Chas said, ‘listen to Rob’s story. This is why you’ve bought steel frames.’