Vintage and Rare Bicycle Components
Bjarne Riis’ wheels from the 1996 Tour de France
Little weights balanced the wheel perfectly
American derailleurs from the mountain bike boom
C Record Delta brakes
Some of this stuff is hardly a day old, but that doesn’t diminish the museum-worthiness of these fantastic bits of bike hardware. Check out brakes that stopped with style and a lot of hand strength. Wheels that promised high speeds with less effort. Take a look at some notable derailleur designs from the past 75 years. Be amazed by the lengths and expense the average cyclist would go to just to make their bike a little bit more special…
There are wacky designs that don’t work, but keep being tried over and over again (We’re talking about you, oval chainrings and no-nose saddles).
Mid-70s vintage Shimano hydraulic disc brakes
First editions of modern masterpieces
IRD brake a precursor to “V” brakes
Vittoria Margherita shifter
Powercam cranks from 1983
Phillips brake
There are some solid old designs that sat waiting for new materials or even bike styles to turn them into products that could make it in the market. Hydraulic disc brakes for bicycles have been around since the 1970’s. Nobody wanted or needed them as long as rim brakes did a good job. It took fat tires, suspension, and muddy rims on mountain bikes to make discs the preferred stoppers. I think it was carbon fiber rims on cyclocross and road bikes (and the poor stopping performance of cork rim-brake pads) that forced the widespread disc adoption there…
Early Magura hydraulic brake
Hydraulic rim brakes, 1986
Modolo Morphos shifters
The worst.
Roller-cam brakes, a Cunningham invention
Breeze & Angel Hite Rite
On the other hand, there are some neat old bike components that were either leapfrogged by better technology (U-brakes and Roller-cam brakes were supplanted by linear pull V-brakes) or came from ideas that were a bit underbaked. Good examples of the underbaked include the Hite-Rite saddle adjuster, an invention that turned a rigid seatpost into a dropper seatpost. It was priced right and predated immensly popular dropper posts by almost 40 years, but the engineering wasn’t quite there.