Harvey Sachs wrote:
> Peter Weigle (I think it was my esteemed friend Peter) suggested that
> each owner in the Cirque show declare whether his bike is "original"
> vs. "restored," to make judging easier.
[much good stuff cut...]
4 comments on i) the meaning of categories with a connection to another Harvey Sachs, ii) bikes vs frames, iii) my own desire about bike shows and iv) and yet another appeal to catalog the geometries of these bikes.
I'm tickled beyond words that Harvey Sachs has raised thorny questions about categories as I've been reading a bit of Harvey Sachs and Harold Garfinkel in the area of sociology and language often called Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology. Of course, this is a different Harvey Sachs (which is just screamingly appropriate).
Sachs wrote a great lecture/essay on the how the word "hot rodder" comes into being that is just fascinating. The basic assertion is that nouns (categories) take their meaning from the context of a conversation, not some preset agreed to meaning. As a result, we find that all categories (all nouns) have maleable, hard to pin down boundaries -- messy edge cases. The results in congnitive pyscology are similar. People don't really think in terms of perfect categories. "The Big Book of Concepts" by ??? and put out by MIT Press gives a great overview and is well worth reading.
Short summary of this bit... I think it's well worth trying
to come to shared understandings of the words "original"
and "restored" in this context. In fact, I advocate the
same thing in terms of bike handling vocabularies. But,
in doing so, we must be at peace with the fact that we
won't be able to neatly bin bikes into one category or
the other, no matter how hard we try.
> But wait, it gets better: What about a custom, that was bought from a
> builder or shop as a frameset and built up? Does "original" mean
that
> it has the parts it was first ridden with, or only that the frame
finish
> is original?
This question begins to poke at the differences in the possible definition of the word "bike", perhaps as juxtoposed with "frame" or "model". The shop in which I learned bikes, the owner emphasized that the frame *WAS* the bike and that when you bought a bike, you should think of it as buying a frame that happened to have some parts on it. The ultimate ideal was to buy a bare frame, say from Trek (just out) or Mercian and select the parts yourself. Short of that, you could buy an off-the-shelf Fuji or Miyata from us and over time, upgrade and modify to meet your needs. Everybody who worked in the shop followed this principle and modified their bikes by swapping parts in and out with abandon.
So as a rider and mechanic, I've always regard "stock" bikes with a heavy dose of saddness -- something like a citizen of the land of unwanted toys. It represents a bike that hasn't yet been unified with the will and body of the rider. The relationship between bike and rider is still unconsumated by the necessary modification of the bike.
Please note... I'm not against the collecting of unaltered bikes. There's a huge streak in me that fully appreciates the historical record fullfilled by such bikes and I full heartedly agree they should be maintained and showed in their original state. But, I do live with this duality. The collector and historian in me enjoys the originals. But the rider and mechanic in me loves, loves, loves bikes that bear the marks of their riders.
On the third point on categories for shows... I've never been to a show yet. Hope to get Larz Anderson this year with no conflict in family vacation. I will suggest a third category to those suggested as "original" and "restored" and that would be "open" or "hot-rod". This get's back to my mentor's assertion that the bike is the frame. For me, if the frame is vintage, I'm interested in it. And, I see any incarnation of a vintage frame as being interesting, in the spirit of hot-rodding, so long as it's understood as it's own, separate class of art.
Two examples... My mentor (to my knowledge) still rides. His bike is Raliegh Clubman from the 50s. It sports a TA crank with 62/42/22 rings shifted with suicide levers. To make this work, he's made his own RD with a massively long swing arm. Hi fenders are made from spiral cut soda bottles. I think the bike (and the rider) is stunning. The bike and the rider are in harmony and the Clubman continues to have life and vitality. I could study that bike for hours.
I have a picture on my harddrive downloaded from flikr. Wish I could refind it and find the owner. It's of a beautiful old maroon Mercian. It's decked out in all black modern cockpit parts, modern drive train and blacked out bladed spoke wheels. It's stunning. The mixture of old and new is like an old T-bucket with a tricked out Chevy small block and massive blower sticking out.
Maintaining/restoring bikes as original (whatever that means) is one kind of art. Hot-rodding is another. I'm interested in both. If/when I make it to "vintage" bike show, I want to see both. If the shows don't have an open or hot-rod category, I think they should. The cut off, imo, should be the frame. If the frame is vintage, it should be shown.
On the last point... The geomtries of these old bikes are largely undocumented. I fear the cycling industry and community at large has forgetten more about bike geometries than is currently and collectively known.
I would love it if shows could collect and display the frame geometry data for these older bikes. It takes only a few minutes and can add so much to the understanding and appreciation of the bikes. I get so incredibly frustrated when I see great old bikes. I ask myself, "What are the angles? How long is that chainstay? How much rake is that?" This information should be required to show a bike.
...And it should be sent to the Bike Geometry Project!!! That way others can learn about them too!
-Dave Mann, Boston, MA
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THE BIKE GEOMETRY PROJECT
A community effort to document and compare bike geometries
http://home.comcast.net/