Bike Forums - View Single Post - The times are changing?

09-06-08, 11:40 AM

#1

Robert Foster

Banned.

Join Date: May 2008

Location: Southern california

Posts: 3,498

Bikes: Lapierre CF Sensium 400. Jamis Ventura Sport. Trek 800. Giant Cypress.

Mentioned: 0 Post(s)

Tagged: 0 Thread(s)

Quoted: 0 Post(s)

Likes: 0

Liked 1 Time in 1 Post

The times are changing?

I was looking over one of the forums asking the question about my favorite decade. While I couldn’t decide I did start thinking about how things have changed since when I was riding in the late 80s and today.

My first road bike of that era was a Schwinn Varsity. Not a real light bike but a durable one. Frame mounted friction shifters and some of those aftermarket brake levers that you could use when riding on the Hoods. I don’t even remember them calling that part of the bars “hoods”. But the biggest difference I believe was in the wheels and tires. My next Road bike was a Viscount Aerospace Pro. It was a bit more aggressive than the Varsity but all in all it has about the same shifters even if the components were better. The wheels and tires were lighter but still not that different. It seems to me the average road tire then was a 27 inch 1.20. A high-pressure clincher was a 1.0. We thought a 1-inch tire was pretty narrow. The real racers seemed to use sew-ups. It seems to me they were less than an inch wide. Today just about every road bike I see in the shops are 700c x 23. I see clinchers a lot smaller than that on the top end bikes. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sew-up. Do they even use them any more?

Reply