Over the many years I’ve seen a lot. One recurring class of oddities is the syndrome of “The Man with an Idea.” This is characterized by an individual who is in the grip of an obsession. It’s an idea (usually a silly or bad one) that just won’t let go. Where do these come from? What perverse muse afflicts some people with grand and idiotic obsessions? Why does an otherwise sane individual suddenly order 45 tones of boulders delivered to the front lawn? What possesses someone who has no knowledge or talent to suddenly take up beekeeping? And why, oh why are so many of these afflicted individuals struck with ideas involving bicycles?
When I was in high school there were, in my small town, two brothers of some repute. The Goodsons, George and Jack, were famous (some would say notorious) for their tinkering and escapades. Their family owned a junkyard. That was significant.
One of their more brilliant (and sort of successful) projects involved a Volvo 132 sedan. The car had a completely blown engine. There was another crashed Volvo in the yard at the time. George and Jack combined parts. But it wasn’t enough to just re-engine the intact car. No! They equipped the thing with two transmissions. They cobbled it together with one gearbox behind the other. Among other things this gave them a car with four forward gears in reverse. I leave it to the reader to imagine the resulting silliness.
After leaving high school, Jack went into the Marines, but George stayed in town. He drifted into cycling. That was odd enough at the time, but not odd enough for George. He was far ahead of his time, and possibly operating in a parallel dimension.
George was fascinated by the idea of using bicycles to move things around. He was also, as the previous story might indicate, intrigued with gearing.
George was the first dedicated utility cyclist I ever met. Most of us had bicycles as kids. Some of us had continued to ride into high school, for transportation and for fun. (Bashing around in the woods on old cruisers certainly counted as riding and as fun.) After graduation a small contingent of us discovered road cycling, and road racing. We bought ten speeds and raced them, and rode them around wherever we could. George was one of us. Remember this was the late 60s. Kids riding road bikes in tight clothes were already considered an odd bunch. But even in that crowd, George was a bit odd.
George had read an article somewhere, about using bikes for utilitarian purposes. The magazine he read extolled the virtues and benefits of using the bike to go places, and to haul stuff around.
One other piece of background is needed. This all took place in, and around, the town of Staunton, VA. To put it mildly, Staunton is not flat. The town is, with the possible exception of a couple of stadiums and Gypsy Hill Park, all hills. Big hills. Big steep hills. We used to joke that our swim team was terrifically strong because they had the only uphill pool in the world. Terrain like that complicates the act of cycling, and makes the process of carrying anything on a bicycle a huge challenge.
George’s Monster started out as a cruiser. It was not the result of some grand design, but rather the product of an evolutionary process. The bike started out as a non-descript cruiser. (George deemed road bikes as too flimsy for his purposes.) At the time a lot of guys were using old cruisers as “paperboy specials.” (I did this myself for a time.) But that wasn’t enough to satisfy George.
He started out by managing to graft the drivetrain from a ten-speed onto his cruiser. That meant he had to find a way to mount hand brakes to the thing. Add a rack and some Wald baskets, and… presto! …a cargo bike is born.
Except the gearing wasn’t low enough to help haul the heavy beast up a steep hill.
What to do? Add more gears! The task would have daunted a lesser individual. There just weren’t a lot of driveline components available at that point in history.
George persevered. He adapted things. He cobbled. He made things with the turret mill, and lathe in his father’s machine shop. He welded bits and pieces to the Monster. The chainstays grew longer. Frame parts failed and replacements were welded in, with reinforcements. Eventually there were a lot of gears available. There was a double chainring up front, a mid-drive to step that down and feed a three-speed hub. The hub was mounted on a bracket, and had an output gear welded to it instead of a wheel around it. The output of the three speed turned a chain that went to a rear cluster and another derailler. More and more equipment went into the contraption, in the search for ever lower ratios.
At one point there was an insane combination that would actually cause the bike to move in reverse! And more, George taught himself to ride it that way. But there were other problems.
The thing is, there is a practical limit to how low a bicycle can be geared. At some point the rider is spinning the cranks madly, whilst the bike is barely moving. This makes for instability. At the same time, there is an energy cost to turning all that metal in the complex driveline. George solved that problem set too. He dismantled an old kid’s bike and converted the 18-inch wheels into a pair of spring-loaded, retractable stabilizer wheels. (Training wheels in other words, but ones that could be folded up away from the ground for descending and higher speeds.
Did I mention that the “Monster” grew more and more cargo space? Did I also neglect to point out that the thing, with all the gears and gadgets, with it’s myriad of levers and knobs, was so heavy that it took two grown men to lift it? Add cargo and the thing approximated the mass of a medium tank. It went up hills all right, albeit slowly, but it went down them like a rocket sled. So it grew more brakes too.
Shortly before I left that part of the world for larger adventures, George traded the Monster to someone for a battered and nearly worn out Harley. The last I heard he was in the process of building a Harley Davidson powered experimental airplane. I wonder if it can fly backwards?
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