Originally Posted by
Darth Lefty
I was surprised twice, the first time when I learned 27" and 700c were different sizes, the second when I found you could still get decent tires in the obsolete size. But it makes sense, the 27" size was used to the exclusion of nearly all else on good road bikes, of which they made millions in the early 1970's and many into the 80's; so there will still be a market for service parts. What doesn't make sense to me is that they changed it for something arbitrarily slightly different but functionally the same. Can you imagine being a bike shop owner and carrying two sizes of nearly the same thing, or having to tell the guy the very nice bike he bought in '87 won't take the best tires available in '92?
It was used to the exclusion of nearly all else, in North American and possibly parts of the British Commonwealth, 700C was used just about everywhere else. I think bicycle companies eventually dropped it, because there were fewer and fewer countries that used imperial measure for everything. 27" disappeared in Canada and much of the Commonwealth in the late 70's as part of the move to metric. That left the US as the sole user of that size, and the bicycle companies, many of which are international in scope, dropped it, because it cost too much to maintain that size.
Personally I think we should quit using the old methods of referring to tire sizes, my road bike has 622-28 tires on it, and my mountain bike has 559-50 tires on it, I'd like to replace those with 559-38 or 559-42mm tires, and the road bike will likely get 622-32's next time. The only thing that keeps the old measures alive is marketing. I can't stand that idiotic reference to 622-50 and wider as 29"....