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As the owner of a classic Nishiki, I always take note of them when I see them on the street:
Wrapping over the brake hoods may be inelegant, but at least it gets the job done:
This Nishiki is more or less a contemporary of my own MUCH MUCH NICER Cervino, with which I recently spent some quality time:
While the Roaduno has been commanding my attention as of late…
…the two bikes do share something in common, which is that they are both what I shall heretofore refer to as “minimally geared:”
See, you’ve got your pure singlespeeds (and of course the Roaduno is quite happy to be set up that way) on one end of the gearing spectrum, and you’ve got your modern wide-range drivetrains on the other. Then you’ve got your bikes like the double-speed Roaduno and the six-speed Cervino, which allow you to change gears while riding, yet give you just barely what you need to get by and no more, like a boss who pays only minimum wage or a parent who doesn’t want you to take anything for granted lest you grow spoilt. Sure, you won’t have to resort to waking on either bike, but they’re not about to coddle you.
In the case of the Roaduno, you’ve got your road gear, and you’ve got your trail gear: your meat, and your potatoes. That’s it. As for the Cervino, the low gear really isn’t all that much lower than the high gear on the Roaduno. Today’s spinny climbing gears are nice and all, but they’re also just delaying the inevitable–you keep downshifting and downshifting until eventually you’re working just as hard as you would be in a 42×21, only you’re moving a lot more slowly whilst spinning away so it takes you an eternity to get to the top. Meanwhile, on the Cervino you’ve got no choice but to slowly grind your way up there, and once you arrive you realize it really didn’t take so long. “That wasn’t so bad,” you think to yourself on the Cervino as you shift back to the big ring and begin your descent. Meanwhile the riders behind you are clicking their way up their massive cassettes like serpents eating their own tails, slowly collapsing upon themselves like black holes of surrender.
All that grinding notwithstanding, the ride quality of the Cervino is sigh-inducing in the best sense, like putting on a pair of underwear that just came out of the dryer. This is due in no small part to the plush 30mm tubular tires a reader gifted me some time ago:
In addition to the inherent inconvenience of tubulars they’ve also got latex tubes which means you’ve got to re-inflate them before every ride, but as soon as you start pedaling it all seems worth it:
After reuniting with the Cervino I was all ready to return my attention to the Roaduno, but it was a wet weekend and so instead I opted for its be-fendered first cousin:
It’s also plush, but in a more comfortable way:
Thanks to those long chainstays and those low gears (the Homer is maximally geared, but in the old-fashioned triple-chainring way, not the newfangled massive cassette way) you can also easily climb your way out of that slippery bathtub, or up that wet leafy climb as the case may be:
Then on Sunday I headed out early and accidentally got mixed up in the start of the Tour de Yonkers, which I thought had taken place the day before:
Rides like this usually offer some great bike-spotting, and the best one was a Colnago Ferrari complete with Deltas and captained by a rider in head-to-toe Sponeed:
Sadly I didn’t get a shot of the bike, but I did plug “Colnago Ferrari” into a popular search engine and happened upon the disorienting mountain bike version:
It’s like riding a bad Photoshop come to life.
I daresay I too was on a real head-turner:
A lot of those heads were probably turning away to avoid looking at it, but still:
Using advanced carbon dating techniques, I’ve been able to determine that the wheels (well, the rear one anyway) is probably from 1996, since it appears in their catalog that year complete with CODA branding:
Here’s the line on them from Cannondale:
It’s true, they really do sort of smooth out the bumps! Occasionally I worry that this simply means they’re on the verge of collapse, but then I remind myself that if the wheel has lasted almost 30 years it’s unlikely to suddenly fail now. Granted, by that same logic you might counter that they’re long overdue for failure and therefore an ass-plosion is imminent, but I’m pretty sure if they could stand up to Cipollini in his prime they can handle me in my middle age:
By the way, that same catalogue also features Cannondale’s own Y-bike, though I’m not sure it ever made it into production:
I’m also not sure you were supposed to wear it with the plaid shorts:
“Slice” was indeed a fitting name, since with so few frame tubes you would be that much more likely to surrender a limb to those Spinergys. Between this bike, and the Y-Foil, and the Softride, and even that Colnago you’re still wishing you’ve never seen, you begin to appreciate just how desperate the bicycle industry was in the 1990s to eradicate the seat tube. Having spoken at length to one of the Trek engineers who worked on the Y-Foil, I know they were ready to go big with that bike if only the UCI hadn’t mandated traditional frames around the same time and scuttled their ambitions. The Y-Foil rode well, it was reasonably light, it was considerably more aero than its diamond-framed counterparts…all it would have taken was something like Lance Armstrong winning a Tour stage on it and it would have been a hit instead of a historical footnote. Some people like that the UCI reigned in bike design in the late 1990s and some people resent it, but whatever you may think about it, no doubt today if it wasn’t for them road bikes would look a lot more like this, if not crazier:
Alas, there’s no such governing body regulating the bikes being marketed to the average American. That’s why they’re morphing into motorcycles, as is evident if you visit a large home improvement store:
Non-cyclists are often shocked when they find out how much good bikes cost, but slap a battery and some fat-ass tires on a crappy one and you can charge them over $2,000 for it:
At this point the pedals have become vestigial, and as you can see they’re weaning the next generation off of them completely:
Buy all three and get the whole family “riding” for just $3,500!
Coming to a bike path near you…for a ride or two, after which they’ll sit out on the front lawn for eternity.
The bicycle has not only survived but thrived despite well over 100 years of motordom, but at this rate the e-bike should finish it off by the end of the decade.
