Originally Posted by
JohnDThompson
Straight-blade forks don't require raking (the operation that puts the curve in the blade). Sloping top tubes allow fewer discrete frame sizes to accommodate a wide range of body heights. Not much savings individually, but if you're manufacturing thousands of frames, it adds up.
Thank you for this excellent post, John. When sloping top tubes first came out they were definitely to the benefit of making fewer size frames. Giant did that.
I'm interested in the term "raking" and "rake". Clearly, the term comes from the yard implement, so one might surmise that the origin of the term in bicycles was the act of curving the fork blades in a way that is similar to the curved tines on a garden rake. Which means that the act of curving the blades, "raking", preceded the observation of the amount of offset created via the bending that we now call "rake" as a measure of that offset. In other words, "rake" and "raking" is the measure of the curve that creates offset.
Which is funny, since it means that straight blade forks have offset, but accurately no rake at all.