February last worked on Jan 22
January 30, 2026 – Grant Petersen
That was a contender for a Bridgestone poster in 1992. Long story, but Christopher Wormell (google him) ultimately won the deal. Somebody here found this trial about a year ago, and now I like it. I wasn't so hot on it then. It's about 12 x 18.
I found out recently that the artist is famous, and is "still with us.)
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I am always constantly extremely amazed at everybody's talent and skills and all that. In all fields. I am seriously so untalented. I know what I do and can do, I'm OK with that and sometimes happy with it to a small extent, but it's nothing like this, and this, in its own way, is better.
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In the past few years I've noticed many many aftermath-of-a-bombing photos where the only sign of life is a bicycle rider. Always a steel bike, and this one looks...not bad.
John sent me the Robert Frank post WWII photo. London, 1953.
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I was LEAFING THRU our 1996 catalog, which brought back many a terrifying fear-memory about our survival, and I thought I'd fill up some bandwidth here with some phone-shots of assorted pages. Little has changed, content-and-approachwise:
Gertrude Stein was an odd duck in the 1920s in France, and she wrote a book called How to Write. It was all "automatic writing," a kind of neat, confusing, babbling, fascinating style that uses real words in a way that makes it sound like she swallowed a pint of LSD. I put this in a few Bstone catalogs, too. I used to always spell catalog catalogue, but then I started to feel it was pretentious, like spelling tires tyres and gray grey. British ways. I have nothing against the Brits (more against 'mericans these days), but I've gone back to catalog, no biggie, nobody cares.
Fewer than one in two million people who wear and like wool know these details.
Illustration by John Segal, still friend, still artist.
Inside back cover. I always liked this feeling.
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Ten Years after that, in the 2006 Rivendell catalog. To show you how stubborn we are:
The bottom two are normal.
on the facing page is pro-friction story:
Anna's now 31 1/4. I'd write this differently now. It's still all true, but I think it makes too weak of a case for friction shifting. And friction shifting with the OM-1 is basically so much a cinch that your gramma could do it on a bad day. Grampa probably, too.
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We are "close" to a Silver front derailer. Close means a year. The only front derailer we sell now, the Microshift Marvo, which we call the Skeleton Key, is as good a front derailer as any ever made, and it's inexpensive. But there were THINGS about 20th century front derailers that were tidier, less bulky, more metal, and mechanically simpler, and--seemingly--with no drawback. The hell of it is, modern front derailers are made for indexing, and front indexing is the least necessary thing on earth. And to ACCOMMODATE front indexing, the internal mechanism has to be complicated in such a way that it bulks up and makes ugly the outer part.
We ENJOY the irony of putting great-working but somewhat atrocious-looking front derailers on our bicycles, but it is less than ideal. The prototype shown here is...a prototype, and things will change:
Today is MLK day and we're closed but I came in to look for something I've lost, and then I got to working on this. In a few days we'll have the prototype and will put it on a bicycle and measure some things.
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Neighbor carfixerguy Scott makes sculptures out of car parts. The kiddie shopping cart isn't a car part but another carfixer guy in the same building gave Scott the cart, and Scott used it as part of this. It's now in front of our showroom. The mom's eyes are big round magnets I "had lying around."
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Sometime maybe this year or next, on some bike, and not out of need but want, a new fork crown (RC-07, meaning RivCrown No.7). Based on the Heron crown we had in the late 1990s. ROUND blades, 24mm diameter. Track bike blades, traditional ones at least, were 22mm round, but track bikes don't have front brakes, which cause the blades to flex back and forth. So normal steel blads, on our bikes, start out as 24mmØ, and get ovalized to 28mm x 20mm. It's a smart shape. But there's something special--maybe because they're unusual--about the look of round blades. Will has had a Heron crown on his desk for months, and it finally got to him, and he wanted a duplicated. Bu we wanted better clearance with fatter tires, so we spread it out; then added the bat-wings we put on most of our other crowns.
We'll decide later what to put it on. The tooling costs only $3,200, and the crowns cost us $15 each. Painting a crown, with the masking for creaming and all, adds another $30 or so. This is one reason our bikes cost so much and don't look like this:
You could put any modern brand on the downtube of this, and it would be believable. It's just a different style, popularized and demanded by racers and racer-emulators.
=====Fancy fun bike news below===
We've been working on a front derailer. Two different ones. This here will grow into one of them, and if the other doesn't work as well, it'll be just this one. We specified the details and handed it over to Microshift to do the hard stuff. We weren't sure they'd want to take it on, and if they did we expected a prototype in six months, but apparently they dived into it, because this came in the mail today, Jan 21. I don't know who this deep-bikey stuff appeals to, but it's fun for us.
We are testing something with the lever arm. The lever-arm length:parallelogram length is a pretty interesting topic.
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I remember when this happened. It was a big deal:
"Saddles are personal" and we all want max comfort, but this puts some of that in perspective. Imagine what she'd have given to have had a wad of rags, duct-taped on the top of the seat post, to sit on. Even temporarily. Riding 49 miles without a saddle, in a high-altitude race, no less. Well...I was impressed then, and today when I was telling some of the guys about it, I had it as ten miles. Off by 39. The race had 7,500 feet of climbing. There's also a Cindy Whitehead famous skateboarder, also blonde, not her.
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We got in our Saddle 182.55 today, Jan 26. It's the dream cheap Chinese saddle, made really carefully to our specs (Will's and mine), and with the least earth-scorching plastics the maker could get its hands on. Our insistence. No cows were killed, etc.
Anyway, given what Cindy Whitehead could do saddleLESS, and given all the design features---good width for fairly upright riding (wider than B.17, skinnier than B.68), and the dip, and the groove, and the bag loops...this should make your short-list if you're a vegan, if you carry a saddlebag, if you want to minimize ED or numbness or for women, "fold-crushing", etc. Minimize the carnage, in other words. No saddle is as comfortable as a wooden bench or a sofa or any chair in the world, but as an component that intervenes between you and the seat post, this one is excellent.
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Maybe you saw this on Instagram already?