Originally Posted by
Andy_K
But what if someone has put 11-speed electronic shifters on a classic Schwinn Paramount (I'm looking at you @
RiddleOfSteel)? That certainly doesn't meet the requirements for the new forum. I also think we need a thread in the new forum for late 90's bikes with friction shifting.
That's one of the problems right there. A bike
starting out as a C&V friction-shift only bike or
starting out as a downtube-index shifting bike,
but later becoming an STI/Ergo bike now has 'claims' to two eras, and all it took was an hour or two of my time to do so. And then we play thread-reporting whack-a-mole and I can't imagine people liking getting their bikes/bike threads shunted from one subforum to another when things aren't as clearly defined.
Friction-era and Indexed-era C&V, while a clear delineation, has its overlapping years (depending on company and position in the lineup) in the mid-'80s, and there is considerable thread volume dedicated to this decade of bike for many reasons, one being that they're still available to buy and build.
Is this the beginning of trying to figure the future out? 50 years from now, a 2021 bike will be C&V by age qualification, like much of what we've seen happen here. Like any or many new endeavors, coming to a concise and clear definition of a new category (in this case) takes a little bit of time and thus evolves into more or less its final form.
Early/"classic" era of STI/Ergo bikes (7-10 speed, the silver/polished ones)--say 1990 to ~2010/whenever Dura-Ace 7900 debuted--is an era not particularly well-known in general, and certainly not by me, as far as models go. I know the tech pretty well as I've used it, minus SRAM (dagnabbit). Catalogs can get iffy here, and production of Very Tall bikes during this era, outside of Cannondale, is essentially zero.
I do see credence to the starting of a subforum of bikes that have their origin in the '90s and '00s, as that group and those riders/owners, like before, will only grow. Would I migrate over old threads from C&V to this new one? Only if the bikes were demonstrably of that era to begin with. Updated C&V bikes, like my beautiful-yet-heretical creations both past and present, would remain or be "grandfathered in." Maybe the C&V and Early Era Brifter subforums have year delineations to help those new to bikes? Tough call--this is a "What do we want the future to be?" moment for sure. Live and in...pixels!
So that will be the question: does C&V split off to preserve era definitions, or do we become the Grupetto for all bikes 20-25 years and older?