By the time I took up bicycle racing (early fifties), just about all racing bikes (including my own) had 27" wheels (or, at least, that's what they were called). This may very well have been a hard-metric value (possibly either 68.5 cm or 69 cm). More likely, though, the rim diameter was a hard-metric 64 cm. The cross-sectional tire height, in my case, was 2.4 cm (advertised as 15/16"), yielding an effective wheel diameter of 68.5 cm (allowing for an approximate 1.5 mm depression in the concave surface of the sprint rim).
As an irrelevant but interesting aside, some of us also had the same number of spokes for both wheels (36), rather than the usual 32 front and 40 rear. As rims were sold in pairs, this allowed us to have two spare rims to rebuild whichever wheel was damaged in an accident and still have a spare that was good for either wheel. (This was more common in the rest of Europe than it was in Britain.) Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator] > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > Behalf Of Joseph B. Reid > Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 17:19 > To: U.S. Metric Association > Subject: [USMA:20963] Re: Oops... Finally, the Canondale story > > > Marcus in USMA 20950 displayed intense misdirected emotion. The British > bicycle industry has from its beginning been totally non-metric. > The usual > tire diameter was 28" or 26" with a 1-3/8" cross section. I believe > European manufacturers have copied some of the imperial > dimensions, such as > chain link length. > > Marcus wrote: > > >If you surf www.cannondale.com and the specific URL (among others...): > >http://www.cannondale.com/bikes/02/cusa/model-2TR8.html > >you'll notice the following reference under "fork": > >' TIG-welded chromoly, 1 1/8" (SIC) ' > > > >What made me fume is the fact that such dimension (diameter) has always > >been hard metric in this industry (road bike) - 28 mm in this case. Yet, > >these guys are doing the same thing the computer industry is doing with > >the 3 1/2" floppy size crap. > > > >I sent them an e-mail to ALL their customer support links (you can easily > >get them by looking under contact us or something like that in their > >website) and this is what they responded (the representative in Europe, > >BTW!...): > > Joseph B.Reid > 17 Glebe Road West > Toronto M5P 1C8 Tel. 416 486-6071
