On Thursday, January 29, 2015 at 7:11:35 AM UTC-7, blakcloud wrote: > > > > My final thought is the name of these bikes. The convention is using just > two words to describe bikes, road bike, mountain bike, kids bike, racing > bike, downhill bike etc. High Performance Upright Bikes certainly is a > mouthful and I am thinking is there a way to describe the bikes in > essentially two words or three at the most? Maybe dropping one word to > Performance Upright Bikes would be somewhat of a compromise. Maybe others > can chime in. > > I was kind of thinking the same thing. If your goal is to proselytize and convert other people's thinking, you're going to need to quoin a much catchier name for the category. Detractors will certainly have plenty or derogatory nicknames: "old man's bikes," "sit-up-and-beg bikes," "Dutch-heavy," "Townies, " etc. Not sure what that might be, though. Being a bit tongue in cheek here, because I can't think of anything better myself, but it needs to capture your imagination the way "gravel grinder" or "monster cross" do. Something like "couch rockets," or "comfort speedsters," or "ergo-racers," or "enthusiast cruisers... encruzers?"
And you're going to have to spend some effort explaining (or referencing others who can explain) WHY such bikes should be taken seriously as "performance" machines, and why it's not as simple as slapping some upright bars on a light bike. Explain why building and setting one up properly requires a completely different mindset - all the way to frame geometry. Even in this group, where you're preaching to the choir, it's hard to verbalize those things. For instance, when Patrick was having trouble with the handling of his Rambouillet recently, and he was determined to start from the assumption that his saddle needed to be located exactly the same, relative to the bottom bracket, as all his other bikes, I found myself completely unable to explain why he needed to let go and do something different. How do you explain that the "performance" aspect is achieved by retaining the *same*, body angles and position that people are used to (and emotionally invested in), and which provides the most efficiency and power - but that this position is somehow "rotated" - so that the seat may be set back further, and the seatpost extended less, and the handlebars higher and closer, etc...? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
