Hillborne vs Hillborne

[Thomas Lynn Skean]

(those hoping for Spy vs Spy are going to be disappointed)

Two frames. Two years. One size. One maker.

One owner.

Both my green Hillborne purchased this year and my orange Hillborne purchased in 2010 are 60cm Waterford-made canti-studded double top tube studies in joy, comfort, and usefulness. Both have and/or will serve as commuting, recreational, errand, and camping bikes. Both share five cockpits between them (#6 awaits the "late May" of the Bosco) running the Nitto-RBW handlebar gamut.

However, I thought the differences in the frames themselves somewhat interesting. So I submit for your perusal some trivia regarding the differences between Samuel O. Hillborne (2010) and Samuel G. Hillborne (2012):

• seat tube bottle cage bosses are lower on green; this means more clearance for a water bottle below the undertube, which I like. This may prevent me from storing my lock on the seat tube (like I always have on orange) due to chainring interference on green. But I don't think I would do that on green anyway. In fact, I'm thinking of making orange like green in this regard; the lock stored on the downtube works nicely.

• on green, fork dropouts are RBW pointy style, have two eyelets each, and have a litigation-mitigation prong, as opposed to plain-ish round un-pronged-or-lipped one-eyeleted on orange; this means slightly less trickiness to mounting the platrack or low-rider rack, which I like... and even-more-slightly more hassle taking the front wheel off, which I don't like. But I'm not compelled to break out the file yet.

• orange has a brazed-on rear brake cable hanger whereas green came with a separate one suspended from the seat tube collar bolt; in a sense green is a "downgrade" here, though to me this means that green has less stuff I don't care about (I use linear pulls), which I like in the abstract and could not care less about in practice

------

I have ridden orange thousands of miles and green a few hundred. They feel the same. I really can't tell the difference. Both are wonderful. Near Perfect For Me. (Through careful consideration and much mulling I have scientistically determined that my "Perfect Bike" is in fact a 61.125cm Hillborne. It would ride exactly like my 60cm frames do but would have less exposed seatpost and stem. And I could still straddle it, uh, "safely".)

I should note that my 2010 orange Hillborne was a *very* early model of its kind. It might even be the first of its sub-species, though I've never verified that. Whether "first" or merely "early", though, other owners of 2010 DTT orange Waterford Hillbornes might find differences between mine and theirs. *That* would be interesting.

Yours,
Thomas Lynn Skean

[Seth Vidal]

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Thomas Lynn Skean
<thomasl...@comcast.net> wrote:
> (those hoping for Spy vs Spy are going to be disappointed)
>
> Two frames. Two years. One size. One maker.
>
> One owner.
>
> Both my green Hillborne purchased this year and my orange Hillborne purchased in 2010 are 60cm Waterford-made canti-studded double top tube studies in joy, comfort, and usefulness. Both have and/or will serve as commuting, recreational, errand, and camping bikes. Both share five cockpits between them (#6 awaits the "late May" of the Bosco) running the Nitto-RBW handlebar gamut.
>

Pictures, or it never happened :)

-sv

[Thomas Lynn Skean]

Good point. I'll get some side-by-sides up tomorrow.

For now, here's some slightly outdated info on Samuel The Orange:

http://home.comcast.net/~thomaslynnskean/cockpits/

[Thomas Lynn Skean]

Some pics, including the contrasts:

http://tinyurl.com/6n5pyce

Yours,
Thomas Lynn Skean
(turns out it happened after all!)