Categories: The Bikes

Does a Bike Have a Soul?

Colnago Master. Photo: Cicli Berlinetta

Does a bike have a soul? I can’t make that argument, I don’t think I do either, actually. But we do invest a lot of emotion, pride and dare I say love in our bikes. We form emotional bonds to inanimate objects all the time. My favorite old dead car had to sit in the driveway for another year falling further into rusty disrepair before I had it towed away. On an American call-in radio show Car Talk, a caller asked if the engine was a car’s soul and if the car had a new engine put in, did the car lose that soul? This led to a discussion of where else its soul might be and I was more than amused to have them suggest the soul resides in the headliner of the interior.

My Merlin, with its recently discovered hairline crack can’t go into a dumpster when finally put down. It would be like throwing your dog’s corpse into a dumpster. Hopefully there is a market for alloyed titanium and it can be recycled, re-smelted, reborn as a (gasp) golf club. Or does it go over the mantle? Or out to stud? Or a desperate last ditch back alley surgery?*

Do pros bond with their bikes? They can’t, they are on new bikes every other week. There would be a lot of weeping at the service course if they did.

I’m not quite in the market for a replacement but I could be heading in that direction and it brings me to conundrum number two: what are you buying when you buy a new bike? In the old days if you lusted after a steel Colnago Master you ended up with a steel bike made in northern Italy. You were buying into an Italian artisan fantasy aided by the fact that the coolest professional you liked rode a Colnago. Many years ago a American friend did just that and found out the Colnagos shipped to the USA were made in a second Italian factory, more the apprentice shop. My friend’s Colnago’s rear dropouts were misaligned by almost a centimeter, rideable but not the Italian ideal. Ernesto was not working on his bike. Truth be told, all these bikes were made on some sort of assembly line made by underpaid possibly bored workers. What coming out of a factory isn’t?

Now if I want a Colnago, there is a very good chance it will be made in Taiwan on an assembly line by underpaid possibly bored workers. The same factory will also be knocking out Giants and Scotts. The good news is the rear dropouts won’t be out by a centimeter. They will be close to perfect. My point, if I have one, is the euro-fantasy part of this is gone.

If you need your frame to have a soul there is still hope. I’ve been lucky in that my last two bikes were made in shops I actually walked in, looked at the racks of tubes, spent a little time breathing the air in there. My steel bike was built in a one man shop, a standard 60 cm frame but built for me for $350, a sum at the time which was outrageous to the non-velominati. My Merlin was second hand but I went to the factory and spent some time there helping to restore its luster and put on new decals. If bikes had souls they would be imparted by the builders who put a lot of effort and some love into transforming some uncut tubes into something as fantastic as a frame. The soul might still be there in the small shops like Cyfac in France or Moots in the USA where the person who selects the tubing might be the same person as the one who joins the tubes and worries over that frame’s details. But they don’t have souls or spirits, do they? Native Americans believe inanimate objects do. If a rock does, if a stream does, maybe a bike does. Or more likely I’m full of it, a frame is just a hunk of carbon or metal and it’s all a matter of design, execution and price.

If your Colnago EPS is built in Italy it would be in this place. Does this add or subtract to the euro-fantasy?

*the little known bottom bracket-ectomy, where the old BB is milled out and a larger BB 30 is neatly welded in, voila, ridable bike!

Gianni

Gianni has left the building.

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  • This article speaks to my, uh, soul on many fronts.  Firstly, I've long maintained that ANY Italian bike running anything other than Campagnolo is anathema.  A Colnago running Dura Ace?  I wouldn't even give it a second glance, let alone think about swinging a leg over it.  Back in the day, when I was a mechanic, if you brought you DeRosa with Shimano 600 in to be worked on chances are I rubbed my nut sack on your bar tape.  I think the opposite is equally true.  A 3Rensho with C-Record track hubs?  That would be weird.  It goes without saying that any American brand (Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, etc.) has Carte Blanche when it comes to gruppos.  I really wanted a Campag Record equipped Trek 760 (in beaujolais) back in the 80s.  My current bike #1 is treading a kind of twilight zone.  It is a Look 586 running SRAM Red.  I justify running an American gruppo on it because there are no modern French components worthy of such a fine bike.

    Secondly, I desire to become one of those one man shops that Gianni speaks of.  Over the winter I will be running power out to my little detached garage and insulating/sheetrocking it to transform it from the glorified storage shed that it is into a workshop to propagate my 50 year love affair with the bike.

    General rule of thumb:  Jens Voigt is the definition of soul as it pertains to bikes - Lance Armstrong is the Antichrist.

  • @Nate

    @brett

    @Nate

    @brett

    I don't think you can reduce it to material "” rather, it's a function of material x builder.

    For sure, some carbon bikes have soul, that's why I said ti and steel have more...

    I think it comes down to being handmade verses coming off some assembly line...its the imperfections that give it character. Still, I love my molded R3 as much as any bike I've ever had or seen - and to my eyes it certainly inspires me to sit and stare for hours.

  • @frank

    @Nate

    @brett

    @Nate

    @brett

    I don't think you can reduce it to material "” rather, it's a function of material x builder.

    For sure, some carbon bikes have soul, that's why I said ti and steel have more...

    I think it comes down to being handmade verses coming off some assembly line...its the imperfections that give it character. Still, I love my molded R3 as much as any bike I've ever had or seen - and to my eyes it certainly inspires me to sit and stare for hours.

    Mrs Engine wants to know if the front wheel is resting where it is for a reason.

    She has just bought a bike and now feels that she knows stuff.

  • Was this the video you were trying to embed Mikael.

    Cipo does James Bond... although they manage to make it rather dull. I think the bad guy is Dutch (or Belgian, perhaps).

    I was amused by the downhill sequence. All they had to do was wait until he got to the first uphill and he would have quit.

    FILM BOND from Mcipollini on Vimeo.

    The embed button seems to work Frank, nice...

  • "Does a bike have soul?" Hell yeah.

    Especially when you go for a full custom build by one of the icons of British frame building.

    This says it all......

    And here's the finished product...

    Along with perhaps my favourite bit.....

  • @ChrisO

    Was this the video you were trying to embed Mikael.

    Cipo does James Bond... although they manage to make it rather dull. I think the bad guy is Dutch (or Belgian, perhaps).

    I was amused by the downhill sequence. All they had to do was wait until he got to the first uphill and he would have quit.

    FILM BOND from Mcipollini on Vimeo.

    The embed button seems to work Frank, nice...

    David Beckham wishes, in his wildest dreams, that he was as cool as Cipo.

  • @frank

    @Nate

    @brett

    @Nate

    @brett

    I don't think you can reduce it to material "” rather, it's a function of material x builder.

    For sure, some carbon bikes have soul, that's why I said ti and steel have more...

    I think it comes down to being handmade verses coming off some assembly line...its the imperfections that give it character. Still, I love my molded R3 as much as any bike I've ever had or seen - and to my eyes it certainly inspires me to sit and stare for hours.

    Frank, I almost wrote you for this photo before I posted this article. This photo says it all. Can we love our inanimate objects? Yeah, here we are. "Come on up on the bed with daddy and lets watch us some Tour"

  • @meursault

    @frank

    Bikes, like people, have good days and bad days. Sometimes they behave, sometimes they misbehave  - like when you wear out a cassette and the chain starts skipping and you want the throw the little fucker in the ditch.

    Word, I nearly Millarcoptered mine, for this exact reason. If I had more knowledge and experience, I would have realised the problem, so...

    Yeah, I'd worn out my 11 cog, and was very frustrated to have to ride home in my 12T, or my "climbing gear" as I normally call it.

  • @Cyclops

    This article speaks to my, uh, soul on many fronts.  Firstly, I've long maintained that ANY Italian bike running anything other than Campagnolo is anathema.  A Colnago running Dura Ace?  I wouldn't even give it a second glance, let alone think about swinging a leg over it.  Back in the day, when I was a mechanic, if you brought you DeRosa with Shimano 600 in to be worked on chances are I rubbed my nut sack on your bar tape.  I think the opposite is equally true.  A 3Rensho with C-Record track hubs?  That would be weird.  It goes without saying that any American brand (Trek, Specialized, Cannondale, etc.) has Carte Blanche when it comes to gruppos.  I really wanted a Campag Record equipped Trek 760 (in beaujolais) back in the 80s.  My current bike #1 is treading a kind of twilight zone.  It is a Look 586 running SRAM Red.  I justify running an American Gruppo on it because there are no modern French components worthy of such a fine bike.

    All this coming from a guy who rode a BMX bike with Campa hubs, which makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Pot, kettle, mate. And the Apostle Museeuw disagrees with your view on Italian  steeds with a Groupsan.

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