I am a recent subscriber of Bicycle Quarterly. I had thought about subscribing for a while, and two things about the newest issue made me pull the trigger. One was the write up about the Bilenky 650B tandem (dude, I want one). The other was the article about shimmy. I know Jan Heine has a reputation under some sections of the big tent of cycling, and I was interested to hear what he had to say. I expected by now somebody would have started a thread about the shimmy article, but it is towards the back. My Samuel Hillborne is the first bike I've owned that has a pronounced tendency to shimmy when riding no- handed. I'm not the most experienced rider. I've only had 30 or 40 different bikes in my lifetime, so I don't have nearly the experience Jan does. I hoped to gain a greater understanding of the problem and maybe do something about it on my Sam.
Unfortunately, I found the article almost entirely unsatisfying. The Cliff-notes synopsis is: "I don't know what causes shimmy, nor does anyone else. Here's what several oldschool guys said about shimmy. They were wrong. I can't take a bike that doesn't shimmy and change it into a bike that does shimmy. Even though I don't have any ideas about the causes or the solutions, you should absolutely swap your headset to needle bearings if your bike shimmies and hope for the best, even though I don't know if it will help, and maybe will make it worse" Now don't get me wrong. I don't understand shimmy, but I came to the article with the attitude of student. The only other articles I've read on the topic are Sheldon Brown's (RIP) very brief glossary discussion and the Jobst Brandt article. For Jan to put the single word "Shimmy" on the cover, and to title his article "What Causes Shimmy?" suggests that he knows something. The article content itself suggests to me that Jan might not know any more about shimmy than any of us. That's not necessarily a bad thing: I'm convinced it's a complex problem. But I'd almost rather see a person in a pedagogical position of leadership to say "Hey, I know a lot, but I don't understand shimmy. Here's some anecdotal observations I've made. Here's some anecdotes I've heard, but haven't verified." and just end it there. Since I'm growing convinced that there might not be anyone who really understands shimmy, I'm going to run some experiments of my own on my Hillborne to attempt to understand it more. Since that bike, in it's current state, shimmies willingly when riding no-handed at 15mph on a smooth flat road, I think I have a decent baseline and reasonably reproducable test environment. I'm going to try several (numerous?) things, and I'll at least try to take better than normal notes, and see if I can learn anything. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
