The above photo by supertsaar on Flickr reminded me of a conversation I had with Jos Louwman, founder of the well-known Mac Bike bicycle rental company in Amsterdam. Jos rode the same “Pfanntoom 1″ bakfiets to our Oktoberfietsfeest party this past fall and I commented that it reminded me of the casket bakfiets I’d seen recently.

As it turns out there’s quite an interesting story behind the Pfanntoom and the reference to the casket trike was eerily close to the truth. Here’s a rough translation of Jos’ response:

“Funny that you the Phanntoom 1 compare to the casket bakfiets. My friend Henk Pfann (the godfather of the Amsterdam Bakfiets Club) is buried in the box that was originally mounted on the bakfiets. As a memorial we mounted a pontoon from a aquaplane on the chassis.”

It’s also worth noting that the box that was originally on this bakfiets (the one Henk Pfann is now buried in) was in the shape of a book, specifically a bible; Henk and his family were in the book business.

The name Pfanntoom is a word play on the Dutch “fantoom”, the English “phantom” (meaning the same thing) and the name Pfann.

A little more about Henk Pfann on Wikipedia.

The bakfiets chassis under the pontoon appears to be an old Maxwell, a long extinct firm that made some of the best bakfietsen ever. Maxwells often had unusual features including triple main tubes, lovely double chainstays, and a handle built into a rear fender reinforcement. Maxwell was founded in 1914 and continued until 1961 though I’ve never seen a Maxwell bakfiets or transportfiets that looked as if it was built after WWII. The Maxwell name is still in use for a generic line of Dutch city bikes but these don’t have anything to do with the old Maxwell.

Inside the RIH Sport shop on the Westerstraat

I was just paging through the Jordaan neighborhood newsletter and came across a little article by local bike racer Henny Marinus, who became Dutch champion in 1959 for the first time (and probably quite a few times after). Marinus rode a bike from our neighbors at RIH Sport on the Westerstraat, number 150.

RIH has been building racing bikes since 1921, first in a workshop nearby and then within a couple years in their present spot in the Westerstraat. They’re something of a legend in the Dutch cycling scene. No less than 63 world championships and olympic gold medals have been won on bikes built in the little RIH shop. The founders Joop and Willem Bustraan passed the business onto their son Willem Junior whose partner Wim continues to build bikes there. I’m guessing Wim is either semi-retired or uses much of the week to build in the workshop behind the showroom, since his opening hours are quite limited.

As you might imagine RIH bikes are traditional in style. They’re timeless, cleanly made, all lugged steel and I’ve never noticed any oversized tubes in their bikes. A couple times I’ve stopped by to do something our shops don’t have tools for (Italian thread BB taps for example) and Wim has been very kind, asking only a token sum for his time.

More info about the history of RIH
RIH Sport Website

four person tandem in amsterdam, originally uploaded by henry in a’dam.

I can’t believe I’ve never come across this quadruple tandem before. I was parked on the Keizersgracht in the center of Amsterdam and looks as if it’s been there for years.

It’s a sweet bike too: a Gazelle, probably built in the 1950’s or 60’s mostly from bakfiets and transportfiets parts. A few cool details:

It’s also really heavy. I tried to set it more upright for the photo but realized that would have required a helper.

On the Steve Allen show. Very strange to see Zappa at 22 years old and still unknown.

Here’s another classic Amsterdam bicycle child seat, this time true to the Dutch minimalist spirit. Two chunks of wood and a small piece of an old backpacker’s sleeping pad… almost certainly all found in the trash.

The bike’s also worth a look: A well-worn "opafiets" (grandpa bike) at least 50 years old with the front carrier from a baker’s bike.

Note that the handlebar is long gone. In its place the owner has attached a piece of steel tubing to brackets bolted to the front rack. This was quite solidly, if not attractively, performed and judging from the patina it’s been this way for decades.

There are lots of other nice Amsterdam touches:

A few weeks ago I showed off another creative Amsterdam child seat.

There’s a common misperception that the millions of bikes around Amsterdam are cheap “junkers”. Sure, there are plenty of low-quality bikes around the city but they don’t last long. Their parts wear out and break, or they rust badly and then the bicycle quickly becomes unrepairable and gets thrown away… or more often left to rot until the city declares it a “wreck” (“fietswrak”) and carts it away. This actually doesn’t take long at all – usually just a couple months.

Along with the unfortunate but unavoidable disposable, modern bikes are also an amazing number of remarkably old bikes. These bicycles, 30, 50 even 70 years old aren’t pampered and regarded as classics (though some could be considered so). No, they’re just somebody’s trusty transportation, often having been in continuous service for a couple generations.

That’s amazing when you think about it: 20 or 30 kilos of steel, rubber, leather and maybe some plastic “overbuilt” to such a high quality standard that it can reliably carry several or many times its weight for a service life unthinkable for most products. It’s an incredible material efficiency and all the more fantastic considering that these bikes live outdoors in a cold, wet climate. All of the bikes in my photos have rust, but it’s mostly the dark brown (sometimes beautiful) patina of quality steel; It forms an oxide layer after the original paint or chrome has been worn off and then doesn’t corrode further. This is partially because the steel has few internal impurities so it doesn’t rust from within. That’s the nasty kind of orange rust that’s impossible to stop and will quickly kill your bike.

This is also a lesson in the importance of simplicity. More complicated products simply have more things to go wrong, require more service and are more likely to someday be declared irreparable. Note in these photos how few of the bikes have gears or hand brakes. Vestigial frame mounts for rod brakes are common though I don’t see any in these photos. Nor is there much “design” to be found here. Many are lovely bikes but there’s no pretentiousness or design just for design’s sake. This also plays are role in durability: things that go out of fashion cease to be maintained.

The accompanying photos are just of bikes I happened across over the last two weeks, mostly on Thursdays (that’s papa day) while walking around the city with my five month old son Pascal. The newest bikes in the photos were made in the 1960’s and the oldest probably date back to the 1930’s. Most Dutch bikes stayed approximately the same through this period and the differences are only of concern to the the enthusiast and mechanic. Unfortunately very few of the bikes made after this period and virtually none of the bikes from the 1980’s to the present will last nearly as long as these.

It’s specifically this timelessness and durability that WorkCycles strives to achieve. It’s an uphill battle though, given the unavailability of certain parts (a good coaster brake hub…), customers expecting features such as multiple gears and hand brakes and a modern world economy of cheap products made with inexpensive materials and overseas labor. We’re working on it and continually making improvements.

Bas of www.transportfiets.net, (that’s trans-port-feets-poont-net for english speakers) turned me onto this super little video. It’s genuine film footage from a 1933 race in Bussum (near Amsterdam) on baker’s and butcher’s bikes. Back in those days most transport bikes had fixed wheels (“fixies” you young folk) and like all those modern-day urban hipsters on track bikes, these bikes had no brakes either. There’s a difference though: A transportfiets weighs an easy 50kg, and that’s before it was loaded down with 50kg of meat. The wheels alone weigh a good 10kg each. Can you say mo-men-tum?

I have a handful of old “transportfietsen” in various states of disrepair and disassembly. They’re glorious machines; Very simple but so solidly made that they put all other bicycles to shame. Riding them is a great sensation. It takes a while to get up to speed but once all that mass is rolling there’s no stopping it.

These bikes were employed by practically every baker, butcher, milkman and other business in the Netherlands from perhaps the 1920’s until perhaps the 1960’s, when cars and delivery vans became affordable for small businesses. Keep in mind that the Netherlands was quite a poor country through modern history until the 1960’s. The bikes were ridden by delivery kids, much like pizzas are now delivered by annoying kids on mopeds with boxes on the back.

Note also that the Dutch Transportfiets predates the similar format but rather esoteric and much lighter duty French “porteur” or “veloporteur” by decades. Transportfietsen were also made in quite large quantities which partially accounts for the remarkably large number still on the streets, considering that the last of them went out of production in the 1970’s. Of course the fact that they were quality built like tanks also helps.

Transportfietsen were made by hundreds of firms, small and large and most of them look essentially the same: double top tube, huge front carrier fixed to the handlebar and (large) front axle, generally no rear carrier or parking stand. Pre-WW2 examples all had 28 x 1 3/4 wheels and usually fixed wheels. Later both 28″ and 26″ wheels were used and most were made with a single-speed Fichtel & Sachs Torpedo coaster brake hub. Parts such as chains and sprockets, forks handlebars, cranks, pedals etc were all bigger and stronger than on normal bicycles. I have never seen an old transportfiets originally equipped with gears or a front brake.

Have a look around transportfiets.net for tons of examples, including a number of bikes in restoration and also lots of old archive photos and catalogues. Bikes like this will never come back so it’s great that some enthusiasts are keeping them alive as examples of the values of another era.

I’m experimenting with posting through Flickr here, thus the rather ugly format. Some tinkering is still needed. While I’m at it I’ll just comment that though Flickr is popular, its interface totally sucks. I find it very annoying to use.

Anyhow, I just returned from a super two weeks of holiday in Sardinia with Kyoko and five month old Pascal. We toured much of the island, both on the coasts and also in the very quiet and rural inland. Its a beautiful place, with especially warm, friendly people, great food and an amazing history spanning thousands of years.

I took hundreds of photos but found just one notable bicycle in Sardinia. I spotted this simple city bike in Bosa. How its owner rides it is somewhat of a mystery considering that Bosa is built on the side of a mountain.

On the return trip I came across this very luxurious city bike displayed in a glass case at the airport gate. Though much fancier the basic format and components are the same:

The bike in the display case is from a firm in Sicily called Montante. Their luxury city bikes seem to sell for about €3500, judging from what I could find on the Internet. At least that’s what the super fancy one with matching leather bags cost…

I also know of Umberto Dei bicycles, very similar in style to these and also quite high-end. I’m sure there are at least a handful of others but these types of bikes don’t generally get exported.

Below is a picture of a Dei. Note just how old-fashioned these bikes really are. Not only do they still sport rod brakes, but they also even have cottered cranks. I love old bikes, but I don’t miss cotters!

2007: Azor aluminium frames being hand-welded

I recently spotted some bullshit about the difference between “hand-built” and “hand-made” on some site or blog promoting somebody’s bikes, or maybe it was just a blog comment. Huh? I’ve been designing and making (often pretty nice) things with my own hands for many years and have always used “hand-built” and “hand-made” interchangeably. Furthermore when it comes to bicycles, they’re mostly built with quite human labor intensive processes: Steel and aluminium frames are generally soldered, brazed or welded at least partially by hand, finish work is manual, and assembly is mostly performed manually on an production line of some sort. This is true for the bikes of small and large producers.

Certainly all of our (WorkCycles) bikes are made this way. Most of our city bike frames are hand built/made in Belgium. Some are hand built/made in Holland and China. Ironically enough the frames made in China are the most consistently straight and best finished. So much for China bashing.

The notable exception to our “hand-made” (or was it “built”) rule is the Bakfiets Cargobike frame which is built/made by a (very sophisticated) robot in a factory in South Holland province. The robot bends and miters the tubes and then welds them together. All of our bikes are assembled and finished by hand… though the mechanics do utilize machines such as a headset press and seat tube reamer to work more efficiently. Will the manual labor police disqualify them from being called “hand-made” for this?

Anyhow this is all just a long introduction for a fantastic film from 1925 somebody put up on You Tube (in two parts). Its called “De Avonturen van Piet” (The Adventures of Piet) referring to Piet Pelle, a promotional cartoon character of Gazelle. Between Piet’s adventures of taking his Gazelle bike to the North Pole we see a proud overview of the workings of the Gazelle Bicycle Factory. Amongst other processes:

The commentary is all in Dutch but you’ll get the idea of what’s going on: they’re hand making bicycles… or are they “building” them. Who cares! Its fun to watch.

1925: Gazelle frames being hand aligned

There’s a more complete version of the Gazelle factory video here but it doesn’t seem to have any sound.

Oh yeah, here’s Piet Pelle of Gazelle:

We actually built these classic “bakfietsen” for “drop” (licorice) maker Oldtimers this past winter but didn’t have a chance to get pictures of them in action until recently. I saw one being loaded up near Dam Square in Amsterdam last week and it reminded me to put them on the blog.

The concept is pretty straightforward: Old fashioned costume and bakfietsen to promote old fashioned candy. Each weekend they bring one or more of the trikes to a Dutch city, load it up full of free samples and wander around the city center and shopping streets.

[Show as slideshow]

The bakfietsen themselves can be quickly set up in a number of ways to suit different purposes:

More info about these and other special purpose utility bikes and trikes can be found here on the WorkCycles site.

After delivering the bikes we received a huge box of the various flavors of Oldtimers drop. Its really yummy stuff but I have to admit that we got a bit “dropped out” after consuming about half the contents. One can only eat so much licorice.

Action photos from Face the Public, the field marketing firm behind the project.