Has anyone yet asked you to build a Di2-equipped bike?
And -- presuming your response wasn't to simply show them the door -- did (or would) you do anything "special" to hide the wires and/or battery?
no one has asked, and if they had, i would be polite as i always am. but my POV re the "kind of thing" is simple. if i can't look at the final product and see an elegant solution, i won't do it. for the electric stuff, and even the disc brake thing, everything i see out there looks cobbled, or jerry-rigged, or still in a prototype stage. there too many thingys stuck on tubes, and weird cable runs for me to feel any of this.
no one has asked, and if they had, i would be polite as i always am. but my POV re the "kind of thing" is simple. if i can't look at the final product and see an elegant solution, i won't do it. for the electric stuff, and even the disc brake thing, everything i see out there looks cobbled, or jerry-rigged, or still in a prototype stage. there too many thingys stuck on tubes, and weird cable runs for me to feel any of this.
I'm glad this subject came up because I have been thinking about it too. The holes I've seen for running wires seem to show up in the highest stressed areas of the frame. Okay, so a reinforcement washer is added or something like that, but it still seems questionable in terms of long-term reliability. Then there's the limitation of the frame - returning it to a cable-pull system would leave a bunch of holes un-filled. The attraction to the bicycle for me was simplicity. I'm not ready for the electronic movement yet - maybe when it goes wireless, but probably not.
CONCORD, NH (BRAIN) Feb 13, 11:00 MT—Richard Sachs — bicycle maker is a new photo book focused on Massachusetts-based frame builder Richard Sachs.
"Imagine a life spying on Richard Sachs as he lives bicycle making. I let the photographs do the talking and the viewer to tell the story. The book has few words yet many nuances to keeps the viewer engaged and looking for the next visual treat," said author Nick Czerula.
Why Hunt and Gather A Trove of Stuff?; Studying the Ageless Need To Amass Collections
By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN
In prehistoric caves dating back 40,000 years, archaeologists have discovered strange curios, including shells and oddly shaped lumps of iron pyrite. They are, the scientists believe, the first evidence of the human impulse to collect.
The practice of collecting has certainly come a long way since. Indeed, today it has become a cliche that virtually anything -- from high art to swizzle sticks -- is being collected by somebody somewhere. The tremendous popularity of auction sites on the Internet has opened a window on a world in which thousands of people are willing to bid for objects that even some of the sellers previously thought were worthless.
What is it that compels people to collect? For years the collections themselves received the most attention. In the 1920's, researchers compiled inventories of them. But more recently the motivations of collectors have become a hot topic among academics as part of an intensifying focus on material culture and consumerism.
Susan M. Pearce, a professor at the University of Leicester in England who has done research on collecting, said the act itself received little academic attention in the past because it is on the cusp of several disciplines including psychology, sociology, history, economics and archaeology.
But in the last decade, she added, social scientists have begun to look more closely at the relationship between people and objects after spending years focusing on the production of goods. She is now supervising graduate students who are researching dissertations on collecting, in the ancient world and now.
If collectors were largely ignored by academics in the past, they have been a preoccupation of novelists, filmmakers and journalists. The popular image they have shaped is often contradictory. Balzac's "Cousin Pons," published in 1847, depicted a collector who does not appreciate the value of his collection and is duped by his wealthy relatives. John Fowles's 1963 novel ''The Collector'' is about a psychotic butterfly collector who kidnaps a beautiful art student.
The title character in "Utz," a 1989 novel by Bruce Chatwin, is obsessed with his collection of Meissen porcelain figurines. And last year's "Orchid Thief," by the New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, is a study of a man so passionate about the flowers that he is willing to risk arrest to obtain and clone a rare specimen.
These books and others portray the collector as, at best, a harmless or pathetic eccentric and, at worst, a malevolent demon. In both cases, the objects collected become substitutes for failed human relationships.
But there are also the rival images of the collector, fostered mostly by the press, as an erudite preserver of civilization, generous philanthropist and wily speculator.
Collectors themselves do not always mind the negative stereotype. "People use 'obsession,' 'addiction' and 'collectaholic' to describe their own behavior in a way they wouldn't if they were addicted to alcohol or drugs," said Russell W. Belk, a professor at the University of Utah who studies collecting.
Much of the new academic research contradicts the idea that collecting represents aberrant behavior. Both Ms. Pearce, working in Britain, and Mr. Belk, working in the United States, found that about one of every three people in both countries collect something.
Mr. Belk said that his research did not include collections of records, CD's or photographs, which would categorize virtually everyone as a collector. He defines a collection as a coherent set that is filled in a systematic and continuing way. In addition, items that enter a collection are taken out of use, or they are used only on a special occasion. But a collection does not have to contain objects only. Bird watchers can be seen as collecting their sightings, and a Don Juan can be viewed as collecting sexual conquests.
The surveys found that collecting is split evenly between men and women and cuts across all socioeconomic classes. But it occurs only in developed countries in North America, Europe and Asia. Ms. Pearce believes that collecting gathered momentum after the Industrial Revolution in England in the early 1800's spawned the modern consumer economy. Few collectors ever make a profit from their collections.
"If 33 percent of people are doing it, you can't really call it peculiar," Ms. Pearce said in an interview. "These people have cars, children, homes. They all live normal lives. It's not a symptom of weirdness or deviance."
She admitted that there were extreme examples of obsessive collectors but then, she observed, extreme behavior can be found in any large community.
The studies found that people collect for a variety of reasons, like creating a sense of self-worth, establishing an identity or striving for a sense of immortality. "We are creating a small world where we feel secure," Mr. Belk said. "We can succeed because we have defined success narrowly enough."
He pointed out that collecting actually increased during the Great Depression in the 1930's. Even jobless collectors could feel that they were doing humanity a favor by preserving something.
Brenda Danet, a sociologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, conducted a study of collecting among adults in Israel in the mid-1980's. She and her colleague, Tamar Katriel of the University of Haifa, concluded thatpeople who collected were "striving for a sense of closure, completion and perfection."
They identified five strategies used by their subjects: completing a series, filling a space, creating a visually pleasing display, manipulating the scale of objects, and aspiring to perfect objects, as in restoring a vintage car to mint condition.
Werner Muensterberger, a New York psychoanalyst, claims that the root of the collecting impulse comes from the collector's attempt to use objects as a salve for emotional pain experienced in childhood. Just as a child fixates on a toy or blanket as a source of comfort when parents are missing, he explains in his book "Collecting: An Unruly Passion" (Princeton University Press, 1994), so, too, the objects in a collection become a substitute for that absent emotional support.
The poster boy for Mr. Muensterberger's theory (though he is not mentioned in his book) is the fictional Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 movie classic "Citizen Kane." Heir to a mining fortune but ripped away from his parents as a small boy, Kane becomes an obsessive collector as an adult, stocking Xanadu, his palatial estate, with thousands of objects. But he dies pining for his boyhood sled, the symbol of his lost childhood.
"Repeated acquisitions serve as a vehicle to cope with inner uncertainty," Mr. Muensterberger writes, "a way of dealing with the dread of renewed anxiety, with confusing problems of need and longing."
Ms. Pearce of the University of Leicester, however, called Mr. Muensterberger's book "awful." She faults it for reinforcing the stereotype of collecting as a form of deviant behavior.
But Mr. Muensterberger, who is an expert on African art and has several pieces on display in his New York apartment, said in an interview that his theory did not mean that every collector was a neurotic, though he believes the impulse for neurosis comes from the same place. "There is an unneurotic side to collecting: the search for knowledge, the sense of taste, the need for accomplishment," he said. "That can border on the obsessional. It can become deviant."
Oddly, of the many historical examples cited in his book, Mr. Muensterberger skips over one that would appear to be significant. Sigmund Freud was an ardent collector of ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, amassing a collection of more than 3,000 objects before his death.
The collection was clearly important to Freud's work. He displayed the items only in the two rooms where he saw patients and wrote, not in the family quarters. When he was forced to flee Vienna after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Freud sold his library of books but made sure that his antiquities collection went with him to England. The position of each piece in Vienna was carefully noted, then recreated after the collection arrived at the Freuds' new home in London.
John Forrester, who teaches the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and has written several books on Freud, believes that collecting was integral to the development of Freud's theories. In an essay in "The Cultures of Collecting" (Harvard University Press, 1994), he noted that Freud began collecting in 1896, after the death of his father, which Freud admitted was a traumatic time in his life. Mr. Forrester then goes on to note that Freud also collected dreams, case studies and Jewish anecdotes.
"The late 1890's was the most significant period in Freud's development of psychoanalysis," Mr. Forrester wrote, ''which was founded upon the idiosyncratic collections he established at that time."
Mr. Muensterberger said that he did not include Freud in his book because he did not know enough. Freud very rarely wrote about his own collecting, he added. "It must have had a very significant undisclosed meaning to him, which we can only guess at," he said.
Or perhaps, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a collection is just a collection.
Good article on collecting. Happy Birthday, ya big lug.
Haha, I said lug.
Tim
if RS is a big lug...hey that makes toots an OOS lug.
best hoarding, er collecting show on tv (there are many): American Pickers.
i'd offer up b-day wishes as well, but i done done that twiced already today (that's hillbilly for btdt) and i don't want to wear him out, he's got a show to pack up fer.
The collection was clearly important to Freud's work. He displayed the items only in the two rooms where he saw patients and wrote, not in the family quarters. When he was forced to flee Vienna after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Freud sold his library of books but made sure that his antiquities collection went with him to England. The position of each piece in Vienna was carefully noted, then recreated after the collection arrived at the Freuds' new home in London.
The story of Freud's flight from Vienna isn't very well known. Marie Bonaparte of France, who was his patient and then a psychoanalyst herself, essentially bought Freud from the Nazis for what would currently be about $2,000,000. Because the edicts of the National Socialist government established that Jews were not legitimate people, their possessions were deemed the property of the Fuhrer, so in order for the Jews to leave, they had to pay off the debt they had incurred. Through a long series of negotiations conducted largely by his daughter, Anna Freud, a price was set and Marie Bonaparte paid it. All of Freud's antiquities from Egypt were certified as copies (if I remember correctly) so they had no real value and were allowed out of the country. However, the price for getting Freud's four sisters out of Vienna was too much, so they were left behind and were later deported to Terezin, Treblinka and Auschwitz where they were killed. The outward appearance is that Freud traded his sisters for his collection of antiquities, but that's not correct. The National Socialists had created a situation in which a group they maintained were without value as a people, the Jews, could be simultaneously too valuable to be allowed to leave the country, as was the case with Freud's sisters. Thus getting the antiquities out when one could not get the sisters out became a form of revenge, albeit one weakened considerably by the death of Freud's sisters. Freud himself was extremely ill with cancer of the jaw, and he only lived a year more after arriving in London.
Hey richard, this might be a stretch, but do you have any info about a big ol track frame you made either in 1979 or 1980 ?
I bought the frame+fork on ebay about 2 years ago, and it shipped with some handwritten info either from you or someone at toga bike shop in nyc.
65cm seat tube, 235mm head tube, cinelli BB, metallic green paint, no decals except a tiny campagnolo sticker way down on the seat tube.
Here are some pics of how it's built up now. PURISTS BEWARE it's not a true velodrome setup by any means. This bike actually gets ridden on the road so AYHSMB.
I'm just curious, about the actual year it was made, whether or not this is has been re-painted, or any other potentially interesting trivia regarding the origin of this frame. THanks atmo
got a serial number?
it's on the bb shell as well as the fork steerer.
Originally Posted by asdfghjkfdsa
Hey richard, this might be a stretch, but do you have any info about a big ol track frame you made either in 1979 or 1980 ?
I bought the frame+fork on ebay about 2 years ago, and it shipped with some handwritten info either from you or someone at toga bike shop in nyc.
65cm seat tube, 235mm head tube, cinelli BB, metallic green paint, no decals except a tiny campagnolo sticker way down on the seat tube.
Here are some pics of how it's built up now. PURISTS BEWARE it's not a true velodrome setup by any means. This bike actually gets ridden on the road so AYHSMB.
I'm just curious, about the actual year it was made, whether or not this is has been re-painted, or any other potentially interesting trivia regarding the origin of this frame. THanks atmo
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Re: Richard Sachs Cycles
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