why aren't horizontal....
 

dropout bikes made (mass produced) anymore? When I decided to build my fixie, i ended up getting an '88 schwinn. I like the frame, lugged steel and all, but all of the new bikes not specifically made for ss/fixed have vertical dropouts. what caused the shift?
Anyone have any insight?

With derailleurs there is no need to adjust the position of the wheel in the drop outs. In addition with vertical dropouts the wheel can't move forward/back even if the wheel isn't completely secure.

Thank Gios

well, in that case, why were they made in the first place?

I don't know. Maybe older deraillerurs needed that bit of adjustment. Older derailleurs didn't have the tension adjustement that newer derailleurs have.

hmmm, that could be. makes more sense than anything else i could think of. seems odd, though. hmmmm....

Real reason: In the old days, people liked a relaxed "touring" geometry, which allowed for horizontal dropouts. Now everyone wants faster, tighter geometry, which requires the wheel to be closer to the seat tube, which is impossible with horizontal dropouts (because there's no space to slide the wheel into the dropout - the wheel would hit the seat tube). So now manufacturers use vertical ones.

surly cross-check.

best non-custom bike available.

in addition to this, the world is on a big "user friendly" or "plug and play" riff right now. the vertical dropout has some virtues, but i think that the biggest reason it has become popular is that its a simple, brainless, layperson oriented feature.

see the rest of modern bicycle component manufacturing for further examples of this.

thanks, brokenrobot. now you mention it, that seems like it's perfectly true. and i think you're onto something, too, ink.

Horizontal dropouts were necessary back in the day because of fixed gears.

When things went freewheel and multispeed, there wasn't a good reason to ditch horizontals. Campagnolo even came out with a derailleur setup that required that you loosen the rear QR in order to shift. The chain remained on a straight run and the wheel would slide in the dropouts to take up or provide slack. Tighten the QR down and you've shifted. Voila. It wasn't terribly popular as I understand given that there were other--what we would call more conventional--multispeed setups available.

Eventually in the mid-to-late-80s, for the reasons above, the industry recognized that there was some marginal usefulness to vertical dropouts and not much reason to keep horizontals.

why didn't fixed gear bikes just use track ends?

Good question. My answers are entirely speculative, but basically track ends are technically inferior to horizontal dropouts.

They don't work well with fenders and they make the wheel harder to remove.

In a modern setting, they also don't play well with brakes.

My IRO uses track ends :)

I would really like to find a 17 or 18 inch steel rigid mountain frameset with front and back fender mounts and no disk tabs. Do they make that these days and who does it reasonably priced?

Our customers demand them: versatility, ease of use, blah, blah, blah.

We make'm from 1/4" plate, relieved to save weight:

http://kogswell.com/images/do.jpg

The plate is pretty strong stuff.

Shimano played a big part in the popularity of vertical dropouts. Their index system required fairly strict dropout dimensions to function reliably. The rear axle had to be placed correctly in relation to the rear derailleur mounting point. Frame manufacturers found it to be suicide not to produce Shimano compatable frames.

An old Surly 1x1 will do ya' right. Provided you want to go SS as well.

Where is 'Jacarutu/Fondak'?

and the bianchi volpe - second best non-custom bike available (I think the dropouts might be shorter than on the surly)

remember that there were a lot of bikes with hub gearing and/or coaster brakes that needed horizontal dropouts to adjust the chain tension. I figure that once frame builders were used to working with the horizontal dropouts, they didn't bother changing tooling until there was a good reason, which is probably mostly due to modern derailer setups or tight BB/tire clearances.