It's All About the Bike

by Robert Penn

  At first the tyres were expensive and quick to puncture. Though the reduced rolling resistance clearly made the bicycle faster, the bulging ‘bladder-wheels’ or ‘pudding tyres’ as they were called, met with hilarity and derision in Ireland. In 1889, an Irish journalist rode a pneumatic-tyred machine from Dublin to Coventry, one place where the bicycle had never been a laughing matter. In a year, every racing cyclist in the country had pneumatic tyres. After two years, the Dunlop factory relocated to Coventry. Six years after that, the business was floated for £5 million.

  Dunlop himself never profited greatly; he died in 1921 with under £10,000 in his estate. In fact, he hadn’t invented the pneumatic tyre, though he believed he had. Another Scot had patented the idea (for carriage wheels) in France and the USA in 1846. Nevertheless, Dunlop’s pneumatic tyre came at a critical point in the development of road transport and played a crucial role in the birth of both the motorbike and the automobile. For the bicycle, it was the last piece of the jigsaw. The steering system meant you could balance on two wheels in-line; the diamond-shaped frame and same-sized wheels made the machine strong and safe to ride; the drivetrain made it efficient. And, finally, Dunlop made the bicycle comfortable. It was perhaps a development as important as the arrival of the Safety itself. The pneumatic tyre made the bicycle popular.

  ‘We start here,’ said Hardy Bölts, ‘with natural rubber.’ Huge carpets of thick rubber were being sucked on to rollers above our heads and heated with chemicals to make a black, gloopy porridge. It was like something out of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. As the porridge was squashed flat between rows of great drums, it spluttered and popped like a witch’s brew. The noise was terrific. Close to the rollers, it was hot. The workers with heavy gloves and beads of sweat edging their moustaches, grunted at us.

  ‘Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 358 days a year, these machines are rolling. For one week only each August, everything stops,’ Hardy said.

  Further down the production line, multiple layers of nylon thread were spinning off spools and being pressed and bonded into the hot rubber sheets: ‘The finer the nylon, and the higher the threads per inch or TPI, the better the tyre,’ Hardy said as we watched the finished, rubberized tyre casing being stored in giant rolls at the far end of the factory.

  The sensory assault was over. On the second floor, where the bicycle tyres are manufactured, the environment was more equable. The first thing I noticed was how many employees were female.

  ‘There are many steps in the production of high-quality bicycle tyres that just can’t be done well by machines,’ Hardy said. ‘Many of the jobs are fiddly and sticky. They involve small parts. Women have smaller hands . . . and they are more skilful.’

  The most delicate part of the process was the assembly of the tyre itself. I watched a woman roll a strip of casing material on to a wheel and add two beads of steel wire. The machine then folded this single ply over twice, before she added an anti-puncture strip and, lastly, a piece of tread. The ends were sealed together. A sticker to show who had made it was added and the tyre was hung on a hook behind her. The whole operation took forty-five seconds.

  ‘If you or I try this,’ Hardy said, ‘then everything is flying through the air. Every tyre has to be made like this, by hand. It is checked again and again. Every tyre has to bring you safely down an Alpine pass at 90 kph [55 mph].’

  A high-speed ‘blow-out’, when the tyre bursts spectacularly with the sound of a gunshot, is one of the things road cyclists fear most. If you are dropping like a stone down a mountain road, you can be thrown from the bike, leaving the gods to decide your fate. The one dramatic blow-out I had that still gives me flashbacks was in the Fergana Mountains in Kyrgyzstan. I was coming down from a pass on a gravel road, on a loaded touring bike. When the hairpins finished, and the road opened out before me, I let the brakes go. At full tilt, the front tyre — a cheap Chinese-made tyre I’d bought in the market in Kashgar — blew. The bike slid briefly, then the handlebar jack-knifed and I was off. Somehow, the bike was propelled into the air. As it came down on top of me, the teeth of the chainrings scalped the side of my head.

  A few hours later, I reached a farm on the road — the first settlement I’d seen all day. Blood congealed with dust covered the side of my face. My shirt was shredded. Looking like a cross between a cage-fighter and a Sadhu, I leant my bike against the gate and walked up the path. Children and women scattered, shrieking. The farmer, a barrel-chested Kyrgyz man with taut, mongoloid features, appeared from the shadows with a pistol at the end of his stiff arm. I tried a few words of Russian. No reply. Then his eyes flicked past me to the gate, and my bicycle. The pistol arm fell limp. The leathery brown skin on his face re-set to a broad grin. Ten minutes later, I was eating kebabs and yoghurt as his wife sponged blood from my head. I had the bicycle to thank for my salvation: it was the last time I would ever grace it with a cheap tyre.

  The earliest pneumatic tyres had to be glued on with rubber solution. At the end of the 1880s in France, the young owner of a struggling rubber factory, Edouard Michelin, was astounded to learn from a cyclist with a puncture that he had had to wait an entire night for the glue to dry, after he’d repaired the inner tube and re-stuck the casing. Soon after, Edouard introduced a detachable tyre — the ‘changeable’. Any cyclist could now repair a puncture, without glue, in fifteen minutes.

  Edouard’s brother André was the marketing brain behind the business. Having treated the French professional cyclist Charles Terront (more of him in the next chapter) to a bibulous luncheon in Paris in September 1891, he had the famous racer sign a contract to ride the Paris—Brest—Paris race on patented Michelin changeables. Terront won, by eight hours. André strolled among the 10,000 fans at the finish on the Champs-Elysées, handing out brochures that read: ‘We have every reason to believe that the bicycling public will say of our tires, “An improvement? — No, a revolution!”’ In truth, the revolution was Dunlop’s, but the changeable soon developed into the ‘clincher’ — the type of tyre most of us ride today. The steel beads with which the woman had assembled my Continental tyres, became standard. Like Dunlop, Michelin became a household name.

  Remarkably, the tubular style of tyre that has to be glued on is still used today, mainly by professional track and road cyclists. Of course, the pros have a team of mechanics to deal with the messy business of fixing them to rims and repairing punctures. Tubulars are favoured for their marginally better shock absorption and road feel. ‘And they are a little faster,’ Hardy said. He should know — he rode in the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España on Continental tubular tyres.

  We watched a woman use a sewing machine to finish a tubular tyre. She carefully stitched the inner tube inside the rubberized cloth casing, blew it up, checked it over by eye and hooked it on the rack behind her. It was, again, highly sophisticated handwork. ‘It’s a small but important part of the business. We want to keep the pros happy. Perhaps this tyre is for Mark Cavendish’s bike,’ Hardy said.

  The final part of the process to manufacture my clincher tyres was vulcanization, the technique invented by the American Charles Goodyear in 1843. Natural rubber is sticky; it deforms under heat and becomes brittle when cold. By heating it together with sulphur, the rubber becomes durable, elastic and stable, rendering it waterproof and winter-proof. Without the vulcanization process, we’d still be riding on bicycle tyres made of iron.

  ‘See the raw tyres — they are your tyres, Rob — they are going into the oven. They have no form and you could pull apart the tread and the casing with your hands. But after three minutes inside the machine, at a temperature of 160°C [320°F], the vulcanization is complete and the tyres are indestructible,’ Hardy said.

  We were standing at the end of two rows of sixty machines that took one tyre each. They were closing and opening continuously, at different times, belching steam. Each one contained a negative mould with different tyre treads. Three men walked up and down the rows, placing raw ty
res into the maws of the machines and hauling vulcanized tyres out. One of the men nodded at me. We walked down to meet him. He spoke to Hardy in German and handed me a pair of industrial gloves. ‘OK,’ Hardy said. ‘Any minute now you can pull your two tyres from these ovens. They’ll be smoking hot, and ready to ride.’

  Placing the hubs on the couch between us, Gravy flipped open a clipboard. Both hubs were 28-hole: both wheels would have 28 spokes. All things being equal, the more spokes a wheel has the stronger it is. But more spokes do mean more weight and increased aerodynamic drag. It’s about finding a balance, then. The conservative approach, for the ultimate in reliability, would have been a 32-spoke rear wheel for me, Gravy explained, but as I weighed only 165 lb, we could easily build in strength to compensate, with the rim and spokes we chose.

  Step one was choosing the rims. Clearly I wasn’t going to be allowed the lightest rims. I wasn’t going to choose them anyway. I hadn’t come to California to get a set of super-light special race-day wheels: I’d come for a set of everyday riding wheels. My primary concern was strength, not weight.

  Even so, the one place on a bicycle you don’t want to carry unnecessary weight is in the wheels. As wheels are accelerated round as well as forward, the mass of rotating parts is doubled, for the purposes of calculating acceleration. So, if a 22 lb bike has 13 lb in fixed mass and 9 lb in rotating mass, the effect will amount to 31 lb. It’s partly why high-quality wheel rims are made of lighter materials like aluminium and carbon, not steel. It’s also why the quality and attributes of rims, spokes and hubs can have a greater impact on the performance of a road-racing bicycle than any other components.

  ‘I’m gonna steer you towards a DT Swiss rim. DT Swiss have been in the business a long time and I know how history makes you Brits feel kinda warm,’ Gravy said.

  Ah, the comfort blanket of history. DT Swiss began drawing wire at a mill on the banks of a river outside the town of Biel in 1634. The wire was used in the manufacture of shirts for soldiers in the French army. Biel, the cradle of the watch-making industry, is famous for micro mechanics and the manufacture of highly specialized tools and machinery. It’s the sort of pedigree that makes me feel, yes, warm.

  The rims — model RR 1.2 — weighed around 18 ounces. They were made of aluminium, but they looked robust. The spoke bed was reinforced and, Gravy explained, the whole rim was coated in helicopter rotor paint, which adds to the longevity.

  The weight and strength of any rim is, of course, only relevant within the total assembled structure: put another way, you can buy the most expensive rim in the world, but if the wheel is badly built, it’s no good to you. As to colour, I had the choice between black or silver — a no-brainer for me. Scratch black paint and a new wheel rim looks old; scratch silver and it’s silver underneath.

  The RR 1.2 was not a cycling fashionista’s choice. It wouldn’t bring tears of envy to the eyes of the ‘weight weenies’ — the sub-cult of road cyclists who obsess about the weight of every component. But the wheels would, Gravy assured me over and over, last a long, long time.

  People were ambling in and out of the shop while Gravy and I talked. Some had business to conduct. Others simply came in to chat, over the dub reggae, with one of the mechanics — about bike parts, routes or that evening’s music gig across the street. It was as laid back as a beach bar in Antigua and it said much about the strong, friendly community that exists around the bicycle in Fairfax.

  The previous evening, I’d wandered around Fairfax, a town of 7,000 resolutely individual people and home to Van Morrison in the 1970s. I watched all the smiling cyclists spilling into the town centre from the surrounding pine-covered mountains, at the end of their evening rides. I ate Vietnamese food at the farmers’ market in Bolinas Park, listening to a busker playing classical guitar. I had a smoothie in the organic supermarket and a beer in 19 Broadway, listening to a blues gig. In Peri’s Silver Dollar Bar, the dance floor was full of people jiving to swing music. The manager led me into the ladies’ toilet — a shrine devoted to Elvis. ‘You gotta meet the guy who did this, right?’ he said. ‘He’s called Rudy Contratti. You can’t miss his place. He’s gotta a picket fence made out of old skis and a 14-ft blue marlin stuck to his house.’

  I invited myself into Rudy’s, passing beneath the 14-ft blue marlin. We had a beer (‘I drink it cold, Rarb. Can you handle that?’ Rudy asked) and a tour of his fleet of fully restored, art deco bicycles from the 1930s to the 1950s. The bicycles were museum pieces. The house smelt sweetly of marijuana. I thought Fairfax might be the kookiest town I’d ever idled into. It was a town of big hats and tattoos; a town of healthy people who held your eye and smiled spontaneously; a town where purple trousers had never quite gone out of fashion. I asked Rudy if people in Fairfax were happy. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said, ‘ain’t nobody here lost money in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi. And everyone rides a bicycle.’

  ‘For sure everybody rides,’ Gravy said. ‘I never owned a car.’ For every mile of paved road, there are 15 miles of dirt road in Marin County. There are half a dozen groups going out riding from Fairfax every day: you can join any one. As a kid, Gravy used to ride all over Mount Tamalpais, which is how he met the guys at the birth of mountain biking in the mid-seventies.

  ‘I was the first little punk on the scene with all these dudes wearing logging boots and jeans and getting all sideways on their bikes and going super fast,’ he said. ‘You know, they had this gonzo attitude and they were so into it, it was infectious. I got involved.’

  The other side of Gravy’s life is no less intriguing. His Dad is Nick Gravenites, a Blues legend, upon whom John Belushi’s character in The Blues Brothers is based. His Mum was flatmate and stage-clothes designer to Janis Joplin. As a baby, Gravy lived in a flat above the Grateful Dead on Haight Street, San Francisco, navel of the hippy movement that gave counterculture to the world. I asked about the move from the all-night crowd to the keep-fit crowd.

  ‘Yeah, the bicycle saved my life all right,’ Gravy said. ‘And building wheels is like tuning guitars: every spoke has to be humming perfect.’

  Sapim have been manufacturing spokes in Belgium for over ninety years. Apart from a few tools, the company makes nothing but spokes and the small nuts or ‘nipples’ that secure them to a wheel rim. Expertise, innovation, strict quality control, specialization, the ability to adapt to technical developments in other parts of the bicycle and a small loyal workforce: these are the characteristics of Sapim. They also happen to be characteristics common to the best bicycle component manufacturers from the birth of the industry until today. I’d read all about Sapim. The company bears the stamp of quality.

  Their spokes have been ‘a staple’ in the world of professional racing for decades, according to Lance Armstrong’s ex-team director and confidant, Johan Bruyneel, a former pro rider himself. Perhaps more than anyone in the modern sport, Bruyneel knows that success in road racing is about scientific precision. Love and hate in the Technicolor peloton, doping, courage and the depth of human suffering make better newspaper headlines, but the reality is — you win with the best components. Armstrong won all his seven Tours on Sapim spokes.

  Sapim make a great range but Gravy recommended the traditional round, double-butted stainless steel wire spokes. They are lively, springy, and less prone to breakage with a little fatter surface area for threads, which increases the strength of the ends. Gravy opened a lever-arch file and extracted a spoke from a plastic sleeve. In his tennis racket paws, it looked like a spoke from a child’s bike. I could see it was ‘double-butted’, with a middle section that was thinner than the ends: I knew this increased elasticity and strength while reducing failure from fatigue.

  The front wheel of a bicycle is symmetrically dished, it carries less weight than the rear and it doesn’t have to bear any torsional load. This means you can get away with lighter spokes. Gravy recommended the standard Race model for my front wheel: 2 mm in diameter at the ends, down to 1.8 mm in the centre.


  As the rear wheel has to be stronger than the front, Gravy suggested something different: the Sapim Strong spoke. It, too, was double-butted, but 2.3 mm at the ends down to 2 mm in the middle. On a 28-spoke rear wheel, it would provide a great balance between ‘feel’ and durability. And it fitted with the overall philosophy of the bike — an everyday riding bike, built to last.

  Most spokes are made from stainless steel: it’s strong and doesn’t corrode; it has good fatigue resistance and it’s easy to cut smooth, strong threads for the nipples. You might find titanium or ornately shaped carbon fibre spokes on very expensive wheels. But, like oval and flattened spokes — designed to reduce wind drag, but susceptible to torsional twist — these are really for racers who value weight and performance over durability and cost. Most cyclists require round, stainless steel, and double-butted spokes. Gravy knew well what I needed. And in selecting different spokes for my front and rear wheels, I was getting the full benefit of the made-to-order service.

  The big question was whether the Strong spokes would fit through the holes of my Royce hub. Rolling a spoke between his thumb and forefinger, Gravy placed it carefully through a hole in the flange. With a ‘tch-ik’, it dropped into place.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Look at that. That’s awesome.’ His face broke into another Golden Gate smile. DT Swiss RR 1.2 rims, Sapim spokes — Strong in the rear and Race in the front, standard brass nipples. It was a deal. We high-fived.

  ‘I’m going to hit the trenches now and build some wheels. And you’re heading up the mountain . . . I’ve just seen Joe Breeze walk in with an original Breezer mountain bike and you . . . are . . . in . . . for . . . a . . . treat. I wanna go! You’re gonna go do Repack, with original Repack riders, on original Repack bicycles. You’re gonna be mobbed. You’re gonna have smoking, flaming, burning wheels of fire. Yeah!’