Re: [CR] American-made bike components, was: New Equipment Failure Rate

(Example: Framebuilding)

From: <GPVB1@cs.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 17:14:14 EDT
Subject: Re: [CR] American-made bike components, was: New Equipment Failure Rate
To: monkeylad@mac.com
Cc: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org


In a message dated 8/30/02 4:02:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, monkeylad@mac.com writes:


> At 2:08 PM -0400 8/30/02, GPVB1@cs.com wrote:
> >Anyone remember Excel derailleurs? My wife assembled them in the olds days
> in
> >a factory in Illinois for minimum wage. Really gave those Shimano Larks a
> run
> >for their money for a year or two...(not).
>
> I thought Excel (Is it one "L" or two?) was made by Ofmega, Galli, or
> one of those companies?

Excell was not Excel. Excel was an American-made "inexpensive" derailleur set from a company called Excel Dynamic Inc. (pretty cool-sounding in the '70s, huh?)


> bikes as toys, but good bike
> parts are in our history. People are
> also more than willing to pay top dollar for good bike parts as
> evidenced by the popularity of Campagnolo. Until the 1930s there were
> very good parts made in the US. So it's not like we always imported
> parts. When the popularity of cycling died in the mid-30's so did
> most of the companies. I've seen plenty of machinist built
> Campagnolo copy deraileurs, and was it George Flagg (SP?) who made
> his own deraileurs. So there were people who could do it. There was
> also the Mathauser brake which was a great brake though weird
> looking. We had everything to make it happen, but it didn't until
> the mid-90's with Paul's parts. I remember the Italianophile 80's
> and see the only reason we never made a US group was because Euro
> cool was better than US cool.
> enjoy,
> Brandon"monkeyman"Ives
> SB, CA
> --
>

Sorta true, since a good new six-day bike could cost as much as a good used car in the 1930s, but I think it was much more complicated than that. These days, a very, very small (and dwindling?) number of Americans is willing to pay for a top-end bike from their LBS.

I do think that for decades, US Manufacturing powers-that-be just weren't interested (until mid-Bike-Boom days, anyways, then they wanted a fast profit in many cases, without having a clue as to the true nature of the market). Then, when the same Marketing-type questions came up in the '80s, you had essentially the same "fat cats" at the top, so they remembered their '70s losses. Remember, American business often focuses on the next quarter's profits and their own bonus packages, unlike other places around the world.

It took some innovative, younger risk-takers to start up the CNC-ed parts Biz here....

Here in the Midwest, way back when, we had Omelenchuk that made track bike parts by hand. We had Pino Morroni, Harlan Meyer (Hi-E), Phil Wood, etc. These folks (privateers, if you will) filled some of the "early years' void," but only a small part of it.

Anybody have a mint set of Pino skewers they'd be willing to sell? If so, please contact me off-list.

Regards,

Greg Parker
A2 MI USA