Nobody's to blame because--of a lot of things, but there aren't any bad guys here--there's a Blagh post about it, and it's true. Nobody's any bit shady and everybody's friends. It's just a tiny situation that we're using as an excuse to make a pnewbar that will be ours a thousand percent. Another part of this involves, as sounds and concepts with definitions, "disingenuosity" and "originality" and "honesty with the world" — not to make it into an intellectual deal when it doesn't need to be that. I can explain that all without being master of the explanation or goofing off, it's simple. I know that Rivendell has had an influence, and you can't HAVE an influence without immediately being somewhat copied and spread around by distant friends of former first cousins and colleagues. It would be weird/inconsistent/greedy/disingenuous to believe in upright bars and comfort and baskets and thinking hey friends give it a shot...and then funking out when they do, and either the original bits and pieces or a near miss version of them shows up here or there and got there through somebody else. RBW has to survive (well, it's a goal), but not at the cost of that kind of grumbling. When I recognize something that we pushed along and it's on a bike in a cheap alley, I swear it's a thrill. A RIV'd-out crummy, I mean, or an improved/made-over anybike.
Originality is impossible, so what we do is modify or refine existing designs, whether modern or more than a century old. From riding bikes constantly and not overthinking but letting the prize thoughts surface, some things change. Handlebars of a hundred years ago had a higher batting average than today's bars, and -- in my opinion -- some of the bars we're working on and have done are where they need to be to be fantastically supremio--but there will always be dissenters. There are honest dissenters with different points of view, and there are dissenters on principle, who automatically don't like popular things that work well. Anyway, it's hard to be original, but we try to refine things in a good direction. There is nobody in the world who can make bars like NITTO. In the the early summer of 1994 before it was settled that NITTO would be making handlebars for RBW (which wasn't a business yet, I was still at Bstone)--I wanted to secure the shape, so I sent it to the one US handlebar maker at the time. Scott, maybe, but I don't remember. I do remember talking on the telephone to the engineer guy, and he had the bar right there (I'd sent him the drawing and a sample), and he asked, into the mouthpiece but directed in awe at the air and not me, "How do they get that curve? It's impossible to do it that well." NITTO has made impossibly beautiful handlebars since the McCarthy years, during the time of the Beats and hippies and moon landing, and it's unlikely there's an American tube bender who can do that or is willing to. There are some amazing CNC bending machines now, though. If you supply them with the data, they can copy it. Then it becomes a matter of how INTO it they are, and where you'll (or we'd) be on their customer list. We matter to NITTO, and we're loyal to NITTO because of it. Bicycles matter to NITTO, more than they'd matter to a CNC tube bender business in SoCal or Ohio. Good business means sticking *with* until there's a good reason not to, and bad business is constant price-shopping everything because you're really ashamed of selling toy transportation and you have to elevate your station in your head by making it about numbers. We're messing around with rax, too! Hooboyoboy! This is a great group. All of the comments. I wish we could have a big food and bike party. The BLAGH is not a sign of me retiring. It's just because sometimes somebody else posts a BLUG that warrants starying up for a few days, and that's sometimes a bottleneck for me. I had, at one time, six posts behind the bottleneck, and they were becoming irrelevant and aged, so I blanked them out and got the BLAGH. I haven't given up on the BLUG, but the BLAGH is where I feel comfortable being looser, because it's just me and I don't have to worry about embarrassing the others. On Thursday, December 15, 2016 at 12:45:21 PM UTC-8, lum gim fong wrote: > > Maybe it is time for proprietary MUSA bars to avoid Amazon, et. al. > undercutting sales? > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
