Best sellers-worst sellers

[William]

I've bought two of the five "best sellers" and none of the five "worst
sellers". The thing I found interesting was the Silver Shifter story,
and that Riv shelled out the $9k for tooling. Other retailers sell
the Silver shifters, and all of them call them "Dia-Compe Silver
shifters" with no mention of Rivendell. Ben's Cycle sells them,
doesn't mention Rivendell, and copies verbatim Velo-Orange's
description of them. I wonder if Riv gets a royalty when VO or Ben's
sells a set of shifters, or if the $9k just gave them temporary
exclusivity with Dia Compe which has since expired. I have one set of
Silvers, and a stockpile of the original Suntours. It's a great
shifter design, and despite what Chris at VO says, I'd run suntours or
silvers over the Simplex/Mavic ones any day.

[Bruce]

I've tried a number RBW and V-O items. All were less expensive, less sturdily made and less satisfactory than similar goods bought at RBW.  Grant's approach is simple stuff that looks good and works well every time. Chris's approach is affordable repros of classy designs that may or may not work well, but look good doing it.

I agree that the Silver DT shifters used to build up my '95 Road Std are the best working of any that I have tried. Need to replace the flimsy V-O cages tho....

---

From: William <tape...@gmail.com>

[Peter Pesce]

Well, Dia-Compe is openly selling the silver shifters to other
vendors, so it's not like VO, Ben's or anyone are "stealing" them. I
don't see them claiming to have designed or commissioned them, either,
so I don't know what the problem is.
If Riv didn't have an exclusive deal, or it expired, than that was
part of the bargain they struck.
Tektro doesn't sell 556 brakes as "the brake Rivendell asked us to
make."
I think VO recently asked Dia-Compe to re-make one of their "grand
comp" centerpull brakes, and D-C agreed. When that brake shows up
elsewhere, I wouldn't expect it to be called the "VO brake" or the "D-
C brake commissioned by VO" or any other such thing.

I personally have never actually bought anything "made" by Rivendell -
my Sam, Sackville, Mark's rack and MUSA stuff was all made by other
companies, to Riv's spec. (Seems that a substantial part of the bike
industry works this way, and everyone seems OK with it.) Some stuff is
branded Rivendell or a Riv house brand, but the rack, for instance, is
branded Nitto and is available from many other vendors. Maybe custom
bikes are actually made there? I honestly don't know - never been to
Riv HQ and I'm not in the market for a custom.

I think it's great that more companies like Riv - VO, Soma, Herse, etc
are getting great bike parts made (or re-made). The more the merrier,
I say.

-Pete

[William Pustow]

That has been my experience as well.

Bill

Louisville, Ky

[William]

Pete

Who said there was a problem? I just wondered what Riv got for their
$9k investment. Idle curiosity, and zero conspiracy suspicions here.
I worked long enough in the bicycle retail business to be curious
about the business side of these things. Did Riv just shell out 9-
grand as charity to the cycling community? Did they pay the $9k out
of the goodness of their hearts for the privilege of buying shifters
at wholesale, a privilege that every other retailer now gets for
free? Maybe. Or maybe they get a slightly better price, or maybe
they got a window of exclusivity.

VO doesn't make anything either, but they talk to manufacturers and
get them to make stuff, investing substantial funds, and getting
exclusivity on the supply channel. There is no way to buy a VO-
branded product (none of which are made by VO) without it going
through VO's hands. If VO had to pay DiaCompe thousands of dollars to
get them to make that gorgeous centerpull brake, then I'd imagine that
Chris negotiated a way to get paid back on the success of the
product. If Chris paid a ton of money to get that brake re-made, then
as a consumer I'd be more apt to buy that product from Chris than from
a retailer who didn't invest in the existence of that product. That's
just me. I've exchanged a few emails with VO about various topics
like this. The impression I get is that each of these manufacturers
is a little different. Some will eat the tooling for free if you can
convince them that the volumes are there. Some will absorb the
tooling if you financially commit to volume. Others will make you eat
the tooling and provide cliffed pricing to get it back with volume.

SOMA works a little differently than Riv or VO. Everything branded
SOMA gets distributed through Merry Sales. I don't know the details
of that business relationship either. I buy Soma products through
Riv, and through my LBS, but have never bought directly from SOMAs
webstore. I don't know if buying a Soma product at my LBS gives any
money at all to Soma, but again, I'm curious about these things.

[grant]

Over the years it has been my non-policy to not require exclusivity on
any of the widgets we've designed or bought the tooling for. It may
change. The Nitto Stem was originally ours to a point. It was our
idea, and we co-developed it with Nitto, suggesting many of the final
details. Originally it was going to weigh 250g (or so I'd hoped), and
when it got up to over 300g (still not much), we bailed. By that time,
Nitto liked it so much that it bought the tooling itself in Japan
($15,000 USD equivalent), and made the post. It subsequently won an
award that repaid the deveopment and tooling cost to Nitto. Since we
didn't buy that tooling, we don't have any exclusive; but it is not
zero percent influenced by us (and no biggie, but it wouldn't have
even been a topic of conversation had we not made it that).

Other Riv designed Nitto stuff: Nitto always asks if it can sell to
others, and what we want in return, and I always say yes and nothing,
not because I'm nice or dumb or both, but because I want to see Nitto
stuff out there in other places, too (to help Nitto, not to help
others, but that's not a bad thing, either). So things like Moustache,
Noodle, Mark's, various racks...we don't hoard for us. I don't know if
that's all the stuff, but it's some.

"Designing" something for Nitto isn't like designing a Jaquet for Bill
Blass or something. It's more like a gruffy bikey guy getting an idea,
sending in a really crappy sketch, and having Nitto get the idea, fix
it up, and make it beautiful. I don't mean to understate the
inspiration, but the work is in making it strong and beautiful and
accurate, and Nitto needs no help in that. RIV's strength is not my
design abilities, but my connections.


Silver Shifters: Same deal. No contract ran out---I said YES, but
recently told D/C that we wanted to develop a line of Silver parts,
and so no more selling direct to other guys. So now if others buy them
they'll get them thru us. I think it would be nice if they'd associate
us with them, but it's OK.

Ruffy-Tuffy type tires: Others sell these. We bought the mold for the
checkerboard tread (in the case of some) and it cost about $5,500. We
have three molds: Ruffy/Rolly....Fatty Rump...JackBrown. We allow
Panaracer to sell to others, with the agreement that we get a dollar a
tire, paid quarterly. Sometimes they forget and we forget for a couple
of years, and then we get a check for $2,300 or so.

SOMA San Marcos: Our deal there is we get $6 per frame SOMA imports. I
designed the geometry and OK'd the tubing (they said it had to be
Tange Prestige, and there's nothing wrong with that). We provide the
lugs, crown, and bb shell. They picked the dropouts. The fork has a
bigger radius rake than we put on ours, but the offset is RIV's, and
how it fits and rides and what tires it fits is RIV's. So is the
kickstand plate!!!
There are microthings I'da done differently if it was purely ours,
but in collaborations you get along and keep the big picture in mind,
and I think it's a killer bike. We have the samples here, they ride
fantastically, and I can't imagine how they cannot sell a few thousand
a year. And yet, the first order is small, which makes me think holy
cow, what bike on any dealer's floor can even compare? But outside our
bubble I know things are different.
I've written a note to SOMA's dealers about why it's good and how to
sell it, but my influence is minimal in that world---maybe dealers
who even know about Riv or me don't like me, for some reason, I don't
know. But the first order of AMOS bikes includes the three 700c
sizes---54, 59, 63---and if I told you how few they've ordered, you
wouldn't beli15ofeacheme. We're taking 5 of each, leaving not many for
their 3,000 dealers.

Simplex retrofriction shifters (named for its unique mechanism, not as
a marketing label) were nice looking and could work really well. The
cable groove diameter is only 14mm, which means they don't wrap much
cable, which means you may have to move them 165 degrees to shift
through the range. It depends on your derailers. I raced with them,
and rememeber one race where maybe my cable was a bit slack or
something, and I was moving them 180-degree PLUS. I remember thinking
"I need a slot in the end so I can push them past the cable."
The small groove diameter was ideal for 5sp or 6sp freewheels, and
meant a big "trim window", for super easy friction shifting. But it
meants slightly slower shifts, no big deal. Their last hurrah was the
BORAF time trial in which LeMond came from 50 seconds behind and beat
Fignon by a few seconds. It was a great moment for downtube friction
shifters and steel frames. The scarcity of Simplex shifters makes
people want them more and more, but all commercial interests and pride
and personal weaknesses aside, I'd still rather shift the Silvers.
They both have the "easy pull, hard push" feature, but they get it in
different ways. That's the main thing.

[PATRICK MOORE]

Grant: keep making good things and being generous with them.

Retrofrictions: That weird '03 Curt derailleur gofast (now a very nice
fixie commuter) with removeable left dt shifter boss (I ran it as a
1X10, but ...): I very happily and comfortably shifted 11-23 and 12-27
10 speed cassettes with that using an old 8-sp era Dura Ace rd;
surprisingly good: better, in fact, than the Silver BES shifts an old
8 sp XT rd over a home made 7 sp cassette on my Fargo. (Still, the
Silvers are better than SunTours and those were pretty good.)

Why don't you make a nice, supple 559X28 or 30 mm tire ....?

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--
Patrick Moore
Albuquerque, NM
For professional resumes, contact
Patrick Moore, ACRW at resumesp...@gmail.com

[William]

Very enlightening, Grant. Thanks for that.

A broader Dia-Compe Silver group sounds really intriguing.

[Smitty-A-Go-Go]

Yes, A Silver group sounds great. I was in a LBS today and they had a NOS XTR reverse action rear derailer. I have a friend with a reverse action (is the appropriate term "low normal"?) derailer and it instantly makes sense when I ride his bike. I would have bought the XTR today but it was overwhelmingly tough-guy ugly. As I'm standing there looking at the derailer... I thought to myself "I wish somebody would make these that looked reasonably normal."  I remember Grant writing something recently that he asked Micro Shift to make a reverse action rear but no dice. 

[Jim Thill - Hiawatha Cyclery]

I have a really nice older series (m953) XTR low-normal derailleur. At the Twin Cities bike swap last weekend, probably 100 bike geek types fondled it and wrinkled up their noses because it was "reverse action". I like low-normal derailleurs, but most bike geek types are too jaded to even consider the concept. As Grant said, many of us are in a "bubble". That bubble, for the most part, is invisible in the broader bike business. And, frankly, the broader bike business is invisible to many of us!

[newenglandbike]

I have low-normal derailleurs on a couple of my bikes.     So much better than high-normal IMHO.   

[Steve Palincsar]

On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 06:32 -0800, newenglandbike wrote:
> I have low-normal derailleurs on a couple of my bikes. So much
> better than high-normal IMHO.
>

Fine if:

- you have them on all your bikes
- you never have to change back

If either of those two conditions is false, you are so screwed.
Especially so since, as I understand it, they've been discontinued.
That means at some point you *will* be forced to change back -- at which
point, as I said, you are so screwed. By screwed I mean confusion as to
the correct means to upshift or downshift.

I've been through all this before, with front derailleurs. I used to
use backwards-acting SunTour front derailleurs: SL, CompeV. I changed
back almost 20 years ago, and even to this day once or twice a year I go
the wrong way and end up shifting to the big ring when I meant to go to
the granny.

If you try to mix within the fleet, you will suffer constant confusion
and will blow shifts by going in the wrong direction all the time.

High normal works perfectly well. Any improvement would be trivial at
best, in my opinion, and couldn't begin to compensate for the mental
confusion these ass-backwards rear derailleurs cause.

[William]

Rats!  I'm so screwed and I didn't even know it.  For both reasons.  Here I was in the bliss of ignorance.  No longer. 

3 reverse action bikes + 3 normal action bikes. 

Lots of things confuse me (lots and lots).  Shifting a rear derailer is not one of them. 

[Earl Grey]

I am hoarding the last silver (painted) low normal XT derailers. They
are decent looking, work great, and can be had pretty cheap. I think
low normal is a great idea. I don't think you necessarily need to have
the whole fleet set up the same way, IF you use different shifters
with the different derailers. FWIW, my mtn tandem has a high normal
derailer, a flat bar, and rapid fire shifters, and it causes no
confusion with my low normal, friction-shifted bikes.

Gernot
Chiang Mai, Thailand

[cyclotourist]

I have had low and high normal RDs on several bikes at the same time
and lived to tell the tale!

I'd use some more low-norm but I seem to have inadvertently acquired
quite a stash of XT high-norm.

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--
Cheers,
David
Redlands, CA

**
“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an
America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s
the America I love.”

[PATRICK MOORE]

I always got confused with my low normal, tho' it shifted beautifully (even if, often, in the wrong direction). I suppose I would eventually have gotten used to it except that the other derailleurs I had were high normal and this fact screwed up the learning curve.

A matter of taste and personal mental capacity, I suppose.

[Steve Palincsar]

On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 07:29 -0800, Earl Grey wrote:
> I am hoarding the last silver (painted) low normal XT derailers. They
> are decent looking, work great, and can be had pretty cheap. I think
> low normal is a great idea. I don't think you necessarily need to have
> the whole fleet set up the same way, IF you use different shifters
> with the different derailers. FWIW, my mtn tandem has a high normal
> derailer, a flat bar, and rapid fire shifters, and it causes no
> confusion with my low normal, friction-shifted bikes.
>

Yes, I should have noted that.

[Steve Palincsar]

On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 07:23 -0800, William wrote:
> Rats! I'm so screwed and I didn't even know it. For both reasons.
> Here I was in the bliss of ignorance. No longer.

She left the web, she left the loom;
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

[rob markwardt]

If you don't keep the brain thinking it starts to not think...I think
I heard that somewhere. Keep the synapses snapping by putting on
reverse front and rear der. and by switching the brakes from right to
left. Great fun until you have to do the "U turn" as you head up the
big hill due to a shifting malfunction.

Rob "Many U Turns" Markwardt

[Marc Schwartz]

I remember reading in an old Riv Reader that Charlie Cunningham regularly "writes backwards" to this same purpose.

Marc "chewing gum and walking at the same time" Schwartz
________________________________________
From: rbw-owne...@googlegroups.com [rbw-owne...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of rob markwardt [robm...@hotmail.com]
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2012 10:14 PM
To: RBW Owners Bunch
Subject: [RBW] Re: Best sellers-worst sellers

--

[William]

Tennyson was always a couple steps more confusing than shifting. I never felt so screwed with Tennyson though.