| Re: Needed new bike design
On 24 Jan 2007 08:39:55 -0800, "landotter" <landotter@gmail.com> may
have said:
>The bravery of the American casual cyclist is certainly lacking (My
>neighbors were amazed that I rode errands in a drizzle yesterday), but
>that's not the reason we don't have full chain case bikes. It had very
>much to do with the weight of imported bikes and the law (duty I
>believe). A full chaincase put a lot of bikes right over the limit.
>That's the reason my rod brake Raleigh Tourist has a hockey stick
>chainguard and not a case.
The regs were doubtless devised carefully; I have no doubt that the
limits were established at just the point at which the typical non-US
bike would be over the low-tariff limit. Of course, there are many
ways to address such an obstacle, but the obvious one in this instance
was to simply acknowledge that US riders didn't care about a full
chain case anyway, and delete the non-feature to save weight and cost.
(Not that it weighs that much, really; the one on my Puch isn't much
more than a pound.)
If full-case chains were in demand in the US market in the era when
bikes were still made here, rest assured that Murray, Huffy, Schwinn
and Columbia (among others) would have commonly provided them. That
they didn't is ample evidence of the absence of demand in the
marketplace...and it wasn't a matter of weight on a bike that already
weighed 40 lbs, as plenty of them did in those days.
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