At 12:05 PM -0400 7/16/06, Ken Freeman wrote:
>It would be interesting (danger, danger, potential OT excursion!!!) to use
>your sensitivity in a blind test, with at least one sample being a very
>rigid frame. My question would be, how does it feel after you get
>acclimated?
Maybe some day we'll be able to get a number of externally identical
bikes and do a double-blind test - only the builder would know which
bike was 1, 2 and 3, and we'd make our observations and then report
back. Ideally, the bikes would be exactly the same component-wise, so
we wouldn't even know which one we are riding at any given time.
(They would be marked under the BB with the number, and I would give
a random bike to Mark, my second tester, and he'd make observations,
and vice versa.)
>
>From your note, I think I could infer that you did not spend much time with
>the heavy-guage OS frame, certainly not the 70 to 200 miles you spent with
>the other bikes.
I did ride the superstiff frame as far as the other VBQ test bikes,
so at least 200 miles. Even upon becoming acclimated, it never
exhibited the easy performance of my favorite bikes.
>I could easily understand this as flagging interest. I'd
>personally not want to spend time evaluating a Huffy that I could spend
>evaluating a Masi, Singer, or Woodrup!
It's one of the benefits and curses of doing in-depth bike tests for magazines. Benefit because I get to ride a lot of interesting bikes. Curse, because I have to ride them all, whether I like them or not. There have been days when I really wanted to take one of my favorite bikes, but the deadline was looming...
--
Jan Heine, Seattle
Editor/Publisher
Vintage Bicycle Quarterly
c/o Il Vecchio Bicycles
140 Lakeside Ave, Ste. C
Seattle WA 98122
http://www.vintagebicyclepress.com