MTB Innovations

[Kell]

[stupidquestion]

Can someone explain the physics of the Biopace rings to me?

I had some on my '88/89 Tufftrax, but I could never understand how they were supposed to work. In my head, the number of teeth are all that should matter, and the 'flat spot' in power from one leg pushing to the other leg pushing is not made any less so because the diameter reduces.

[/stupidquestion]

Back to the innovations though, I think the reason we saw so many different ideas was because the companies were small and didn't have huge R&D deprtments. So rather than think of an idea, build test bikes, and then not produce the crap ones, the general public was the R&D dept. So they'd test them on buyers to see if they worked or not.

Conversely the reason you don't see wild things in the road cycling world so often is that the sport is well established and many of the brands will either have already tried them too long ago for most people to remember, or they tested them properly and didn't release the bad ideas.

For example, those rollers on the first page that use the canti-brake wire to pull. It shouldn't take a genius to work out the major flaw in that design. Clearance issues when your tyres are caked in mud. Maybe fine for dusty American trails, but never going to work in the UK.

 

[danson67]

The Decelerators were, in the context of the time, more a solution to fitting v-brakes to a bike built with the fittings and levers for cantis. Once frames and levers specifically for v-brakes became available, there was no specific need for the roller/cable solution.
As for tyre clearance, it isn't much worse than a v-brake cable or canti straddles.

All the best,

 

[Kell]

The Decelerators were, in the context of the time, more a solution to fitting v-brakes to a bike built with the fittings and levers for cantis. Once frames and levers specifically for v-brakes became available, there was no specific need for the roller/cable solution.
As for tyre clearance, it isn't much worse than a v-brake cable or canti straddles.

All the best,

I beg to differ.

Versus

 

[danson67]

Yeah..fair enough. It all depends where you set your straddle cable. They all give worse clearance than a disc brake with high frame bridges.
The point is that they were designed to give better braking than cantis (debatable), to fit frames made for cantis, were never made in large numbers, weren't the original direct pull brakes, and were never seen again, so can't really count as a major MTB innovation as per the OP anyway.

All the best,

 

[jimi911]

Yeah..fair enough. It all depends where you set your straddle cable. They all give worse clearance than a disc brake with high frame bridges.
The point is that they were designed to give better braking than cantis (debatable), to fit frames made for cantis, were never made in large numbers, weren't the original direct pull brakes, and were never seen again, so can't really count as a major MTB innovation as per the OP anyway.

All the best,

These are considered cantilevers, not v brakes. You might be thinking about what came after this - the Marinovative Stop Lite, which is arguably the first direct pull brake (or Bontrager ... Likely spawned within months of one another) and certainly the first production linear brake. Either way, the Decelerator is in that timeline and the fact that it was made by an 18 year old in 1988-89 is pretty cool. Interesting story on Ben Capron here:

http://mombat.org/MOMBAT/BikeHistoryPag ... ative.html

I'm sure he regrets not getting those patents ... Tough having a million $dollar idea in your teens.

Nice guy BTW ... Still in the industry working for Specialized