No, no, no, Franki-boy. You don't understand human psychology and you never will because you're now too old to learn anything. The biggest marketers with the biggest, most professionally operated advertising budgets, don't care about people like you: they're going to scoop you up anyway in the second or third phase simply by excluding all their competitors in what you're pleased to call your mind. They spend millions on PR and advertising to gain some critical mass of *opinion formers*. Then they spend tens of millions to show people like you a celebrity endorsing their product. But the main job is done with the first few million. The rest, the tens and hundreds of millions, is spent on repetition to people like you, who need everything hammered into their heads a hundred times before they grasp it.
Almost everything that is on your butt and in your fridge, house and garage, and definitely everything that you aspire to, I or someone I trained, or someone just like us, put there. I know we're in your mind, and that you know we're there, because you keep telling us smugly how modestly you live, how you try to resist the consumer society, starting with your small house. Unfortunately for you, all that back to basics, resist the big spenders crap, all of that too was generated by my people. Resistance is futile: we get you coming or going but we get you. One more point: there's nothing humble about the way you live (and that your personality betrays every day): it's just another idea a set of opinion formers (the Catholic Church, masters of manipulation) put out there for losers like you to pick up and run with as if it were their own idea.
Ande Jute
I dunno why I bother explaining (now watch the tenth-raters make their cheap cracks about my sig line)
On Friday, January 31, 2020 at 7:47:53 PM UTC, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 1/31/2020 12:31 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 31, 2020 at 8:47:13 AM UTC-8, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 1/31/2020 10:21 AM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 31, 2020 at 12:48:29 AM UTC-8, Tosspot wrote:
On 31/01/2020 05:35, Frank Krygowski wrote:
Returning to the pivot spread: There was a time when some companies
sold plates to connect the front end of a (front) cantilever's pivot
screws, to prevent that motion. I don't remember such a thing being
sold for center pull brakes back when they were popular, but it
would probably be more useful on that type of brake.
These things?
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bi...booster+plates
Yup. http://www.velo-pages.com/main.php?g...serialNumber=2 The Spence Wolf Cuptertino Bike Shrine version that was popular in the late '70s early '80s.
Huh! I hadn't seen those.
With Scott/Mathauser brake shoes/pads. All these kludges were intended to produce braking as good as a Campy NR, begging the question of why one didn't buy NR -- or even the Shimano equivalent.
Well, then as now, people bought the brakes that were attached to the
bike when they saw it on the showroom floor.
Most people are not connoisseurs. They're more affected by advertising
copy than by finely perceived differences in performance.
What advertising copy? If you were buying custom-modified Mafac brakes from Spence Wolf's shop, you were a connoisseur -- albeit one who marched to a different drummer. Spence was also responsible for launching Phil Wood and one of my favorite bikes of the era, Caylor. He then went with a lot of the PNW builders -- Merz, Rodriguez, Erickson -- and Lighthouse bikes by Tim Neenan of Santa Cruz who brought us the original Stumpjumper. Spence was kind of the Gertrude Stein of bike shop owners. I don't know if he had anything on the showroom floor that was an OTC bike.
These days, just to get advertising copy, you have to be a little bit of a connoisseur and subscribe to Bicycling or VeloNews or some other bicycle publication. The only way I know about bikes is because of my son and friends who are in the business. It is much less common to buy a bare frame these days and you are tied to a lot of OE equipment -- often proprietary -- for better or mostly worse. A lot of parts are also fit only for the showroom, like wheels. They are just bike stands on mid-fi bikes and even somewhat high-end bikes. Back in the day, a nice bike had nice wheels. You can spend $4K on a bike that has disposable wheels.
"What advertising copy?" Sheesh! The advertising copy that got them to
look at the Trek, or Giant, or whatever bike they lusted after in the shop!
IOW, you missed my point entirely. First, most people did not go into
shops looking for customized Mafac brakes. Most people never heard of
Mafac brakes. Most people (assuming they wanted something fancier than a
Huffy) went into a Schwinn shop, and the sophisticated ones went into a
Raleigh shop. They looked at the in-store catalogs and saw "Powerful
centerpull brakes!" and thought "Gosh, those centerpull brakes sure are
powerful." A few of them even wandered in here and said "Centerpull
brakes are more powerful than sidepulls" and got reamed by Jobst. Remember?
By and large, people buy what they're told to buy. Today people are told
"disc brakes are SO much safer!" in part because manufacturers are
putting disc brakes on so many bikes. So people who never had a problem
with any caliper brake won't buy a bike without disc brakes.
But the industry survives on churning. Perhaps the next churn will be
direct mount brakes. Maybe _Buycycling_ reviews (ghost-written by
manufacturers?) will begin saying "Direct mounts stop just as well and
are lighter and more aerodynamic." Maybe articles will snark about noise
and short disc pad life and bent rotors. Maybe touring articles will
talk about being stranded in the Himalayas and having to re-bleed discs
using only yak spit. And manufacturer's catalogs will say "Sleek,
aerodynamic direct pull brakes!"
If that's the way it goes, people will wander into shops and say "You
mean _all_ your bikes have _discs_?? This is 2023!!!"
--
- Frank Krygowski