It’s too bad, reading the latest Knothole entry on the Rivendell
website, Grant appears to be stressed out, probably about that legal
case he refers to in RR 43. (It would be funny, considering that a
gaggle of lawyers are working feverishly, perhaps even referring to
“lawyer lips” in their written arguments—except it’s not that funny
when someone is getting dragged into court over something that was
made diligently 20 years ago.)
It is ironic that he would get tied up in something like that. He has
been a proponent of bicycle safety, although he doesn’t necessarily
call it that. It is implicit in the design of his bikes that there is
always a “factor of safety” built in, in other words they are if
anything a little over-built, so that failure of the bike or one of
its parts won’t cause an injury. That’s really one of the main
distinguishing features of his designs, compared to other bikes you
can buy. When I am descending at high speed on my Rivendell, I often
think to myself, this is dangerous but it is nice to know that I am on
the best possible bike for this purpose. In all of Grant’s
“velosophy”, whether it is about bigger tires, steel forks, riding
styles, you name it, there is always an unspoken understanding that
safety is one of the fundamentals.
It’s too bad but that is the way things go sometimes; someone who
dedicates a lot of their life to protecting something gets accused of
neglecting it.
{I guess the legal point is whether Lawyer Lips make a bike safer, and
even if they do whether a bike without them is safe enough. It all
gets very complicated because Grant is the expert on these things, and
he may not have thought that Lawyer Lips made a bike safer. [The ones
on the bike, not the ones on the lawyers.] But as an employee of
Bridgestone, it sounds like it wasn’t even his decision. The RB-1 was
advertised as a racing bike, so it was designed to get the wheel off
quickly. For Pete’s sake, he even had an article on how to use the
Quick Release in one of the Bridgestone catalogues. What else could he
have done? Surely the operator of any vehicle has to take
responsibility for ensuring that the wheels are fastened on as they
were designed to be.[Maybe Grant should get his own lawyer independent
of the Bridgestone lawyer?(After all, he was acting in good faith as
an employee and stood to gain nothing whether or not lawyer's lips
were used. Awww, what a mess.)]}
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