Archive for the ‘Antique/old bikes and history’ Category

Transportfiets race in Bussum, 1933

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

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?

Amstel, work cycle

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.

Italian City Bikes

Friday, January 9th, 2009

italian-city-bike-sardinia

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:

  • rod brakes with the handles running through the handlebar
  • single-speed with freewheel
  • 35-622 tires
  • newspaper clip on the handlebar
  • hopelessly puny wheel lock etc
  • 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!

    umberto dei italian city bicycle

    Hand-made: 1925 films of the Gazelle bike factory

    Sunday, October 19th, 2008


    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:

  • how the frames are soldered, aligned, finished and painted
  • how the unitized handlebar/stem are formed from sheet metal
  • how the famous Gazelle chainrings (with jumping gazelles) are formed
  • how the hubs and headsets are turned in the lathe
  • how the parts are nickel plated…
  • 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:

    Oldtimers bakfietsen

    Friday, July 18th, 2008

    oldtimers-bakfiets.jpg

    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.

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

  • as an open container
  • with a closed box where the hinged lid also functions as a signboard
  • with a tall canopy
  • 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.

    Old Dutch Bike Photos from Andre Koopmans

    Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

    old fongers military bike with small wheels and spare tire

    I came across an amazing collection of beautiful photos of classic Dutch bicycles. Included are old bikes, very old bikes and extremely old bikes. There are many sharp images of interesting features and details that have long since disappeared and been largely forgotten such as Fongers steering locks and Simplex suspension forks. Also fun for me are the nearly 100 year old images found on glass plates in the Fongers factory. If you love classic bikes or even timeless modern city bikes this photo album is a must see.

    I’m a sucker for specially purpose-adapted bicycles so the 1898 Fongers Military bicycle (above) is my favorite of the bunch. Not only is it separable (or folding? – the joint is in the middle) it has a shoulder strap, leather cases filling the frame openings, a spare tire holder and a special chain and chainwheels with a tiny pitch.

    Simplex Bicycles in Indonesia

    Friday, February 8th, 2008

    Simplex kruisframe fiets in indonesië

    I can’t read Indonesian so I can only hypothesize about this site about pre-WWII Simplex bicycles in Indonesia. Simplex was an Amsterdam bike maker that made some of the best bikes of this period. That’s significant considering that the Dutch bikes of this era were probably the best city bicycles ever built. Seventy years later here are still quite a few of them on the streets of Amsterdam… and apparently also in Indonesia.

    So why would there be so many old Dutch bikes in Indonesia? Simple: Because it was a Dutch colony until the 1945 to 1950 Indonesian war of independence. It seems pretty unlikely that all those pre-war Dutch bikes were imported after the war so I’ll assume they were initially brought there by the pre-war Dutch colonists. Regardless of the history its still strange for an Amsterdammer to see all those lovely old Simplex bikes with palm trees in the background and the details described in a text I can’t understand. Well at least I can understand many of the technical terms because they seem to have adopted the Dutch words for many bicycle parts. A couple examples:

  • priesterrijwiel = priest’s bicycle or cross-frame, since the lower top tube allowed riding in a frock.
  • kruiseframe = same as above
  • rem tromol cycloïde = Simplex’s drum brake hub with special “Cycloïde” bearings
  • lampu = headlamp
  • Historical trivia:

  • The cross-frame (“kruisframe” in Dutch) WorkCycles uses is based on a Simplex design you can see on the Indonesian site.
  • Simplex began in 1887 in Utrecht but moved to Amsterdam in 1896. Their factory was situated on the Overtoom, in the Oud West neighborhood where I live. Our home was built the same year. This was then a new neighborhood in Amsterdam, just past the Jordaan. The Jordaan is now a highly desirable neighborhood of charming old houses, canals and stylish boutiques. Back then it was a mixture of industry, shipping and working class housing.
  • In 1952 Simplex merged with Locomotief, another of my favorite old bicycle makes. Locomotief also made lovely bikes such as their ladies cross-frame which the WorkCycles Kruisframe step-through is based on.
  • The 60’s were tough years for the Dutch bicycle industry. After a number of fusions and changes Simplex and Locomotief were taken over by Gazelle who from then on just used the names for cheaper “B-quality” bikes.
  • Death on Wheels: een zeer bijzondere bakfiets

    Thursday, January 10th, 2008

    bijzondere doodskist bakfiets

    Vanzelfsprekend. Wat meer kan ik zeggen? Gespot in Utrecht, het is niet helemaal zeker of het ooit echt dienst zag of het een grap is… of gewoon een gemakkelijk manier om een gesloten bakfiets te maken. “Ja, ik had deze bakfiets frame zonder bak en deze doodskist zonder dode mens…”

    Hier is een link naar de doodskistbakfiets.