The Bicycling World, Vol 54, No 8
Articles in this issue
- The Cycle Manufacturers' Association's largest-ever meeting, held in Chicago on 14 November, OK'd eight more jobbers including J. M. Smyth & Co., Lyon Bros., Charles Broadway Rouss and Salt Lake Hardware Co., and fixed the next meeting for 16 January at the Knickerbocker Hotel, New York, during automobile show week.
- The Consolidated Mfg. Co. has taken space at the Grand Central Palace show opening 1 December, making seven motorcycle makers booked; the Yale will show a more powerful motor, improved grip control, new tank, new muffler and a new cushion fork.
- Fire at A. G. Spalding & Bros.' New York store spared the bicycle department, but the water used to fight it rusted some sixty bicycles, which will be sold at a fire sale on Monday.
- The Reading Standard Cycle Mfg. Co. lists two 1907 R-S motor bicycles and a motor tandem: Model C with the 2 1/4 horsepower Thor motor at $210 and Model A with the firm's own 3 horsepower engine at $225; Manager Sherman details its cut-out-less muffler, sight-fed saddle oiler and 51-inch wheelbase frame.
- The Hydraulic Pressed Steel Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, has begun bidding for the bicycle sprocket trade under general manager James H. Foster, formerly of Parish & Bingham.
- The Emblem Mfg. Co. of Angola, N. Y., will include a motorcycle in its 1907 line for the first time, using the Thor 2 1/4 horsepower motor and other Thor components.
- A Winona (Minn.) paper reports an unnamed manufacturer scouting a site in the town to which to move his motorcycle factory.
- Expiry of the fifteen-year Canadian clincher patent — retained by inventor Thomas B. Jeffery rather than the G & J Tire Company — throws the Dominion open to American clincher tires; the U.S. patent No. 454,115 runs to 13 June 1908 and the diagonal-bead patent No. 558,956 to 28 April 1913.
- The Tribune and Stormer were accidentally omitted from the Pope Mfg. Co.'s weekly Bicycling World advertisement, and rumours at once began that the two brands had been discontinued.
- Cold-weather advice against lighting a bonfire or using a plumber's torch under the carburetter; the only proper method is to swathe it in a cloth dipped in hot water and well wrung out.
- Flooding the cylinders with kerosene matters chiefly for the piston rings: oil hardening in the ring slots costs compression, and in a cylinder out of true can cause a break.
- An Experienced Repairman tells a Bicycling World representative of a rider who condemned his two-cylinder machine as junk; dead cells, a contact breaker out of adjustment and inlet valves gummed by two cupfuls of dumped oil were put right in half an hour for $3.50.
- Leader urging riders to learn the frame number stamped by the maker, the one mark that identifies a bicycle after it has been remodelled, re-enamelled or stolen.
- Leader arguing that over-specialised training makes a high-class drudge, quoting a manufacturer's desk motto that the trained man must still be directed by someone able to judge rightly.
- A full-page composite photograph, patched together from many smaller pictures, reconstructs the 8 October crash at the Velodrome Buffalo, Paris, in which Pernette skidded on the wet track and Contant rode the barrier, killing two spectators and gashing two women.
- World's champion Darragon beat "Bobby" Walthour in their three-heat match at Paris on 4 November, taking the third heat by 4 1/2 laps in 20:03; Walter Rutt broke the 10-kilometre record in 13:25.
- Sidney Martin, a young farmer of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, rode the eight miles from Harpster on a motorcycle in 12 minutes to beat a Hocking Valley express train by two minutes and win a wager.
- Axel Johnson, sent penniless from Bridgeport, Conn., by an evening newspaper, reached Chicago with 1,416 miles on his cyclometer and must ride home within a set time, living by selling photographs of himself.
- The Bay City Wheelmen team of McLaughlin, Cushman and Daggett won the fifteen-mile unlimited pursuit in 51:00 at the new five-eighths mile Golden Gate Park track, San Francisco; twenty riders went down in a spill in the two-mile handicap.
- The Garden City Wheelmen opened the Pacific coast roller season at their San Jose clubhouse on 10 November, beating the New Century Wheelmen by 6 3/5 seconds; W. C. Waibel rode two miles in 2:25.
- Six-day entry blanks and individual contracts now forfeit all prize money for riders detected in combinations, and for teams that let the race fall below 2,000 miles in the 142 hours; Urban MacDonald and Charles Schlee have signed as a new team.
- Chairman Douglas of the F. A. M. Competition Committee has appointed R. H. Nickerson of New York an official handicapper, to bring more system to motorcycle handicapping.
- George E. Holt and Lester R. Creutz write from Dublin of 300 miles awheel in Ireland — the coast road from Belfast to Glenarm, the walk over the mountains from Cushendall, the Giant's Causeway, McKinley's ancestral cottage near Dervock, and crowds that forced their Reading Standards indoors.
- The Electric Wheelmen of Reading, Pa., elected Clayton C. Ludwig president, Edward Winters vice-president and Neff H. Rhode treasurer, captain and race committee chairman for the ensuing club year.
- Professional six-day men are selling the wearing of club colours at $50 to $60 a pair, one club having paid $200 and lost its sweaters besides; the Roy Wheelmen have circularised metropolitan clubs urging them to pay no cash, and will field Georget, Petit-Breton, Vanoni, Vanderstuyft and Stol.
- A writer in Cycling defends all-year riding against the fair-weather cyclist, arguing that mudguards, poncho and a frozen road beat shivering at a football match or lounging in a billiard room.
- A roll-call of where the old racing men went: Tom Cooper worth over $100,000 in Detroit telephone stock, Earl Kiser with an artificial leg at Pittsburg, Barney Oldfield famous in automobile racing, "Major" Taylor living on his winnings at Worcester and Zimmerman fishing at Point Pleasant.
- W. H. Wray, Jr., of Brooklyn won the three-mile motorcycle race at the Quaker City Automobile Club's Point Breeze meet in 3:53 3/5 on a two-cylinder Simplex, after a protest that its engine was rated at six horsepower was overruled.
- Second-hand dealers in San Jose, Cal., keep cycle stealing profitable; a boy named Manfre rebuilt A. E. Carter's stolen machine piecemeal through Davis Brothers and other shops, and the dealers presented him with a new high-grade bicycle rather than face warrants.
- A cyclist who swerved to avoid a little girl ran onto a barbed-wire fence and had his nose so nearly split along a barb that the surgeon closed it with two silver clasps.
- At Waverly Park, N. J., on 10 November, Bob Hunter on a 14 horsepower French pacing machine beat J. W. Ward's two-cylinder Indian by 100 yards over three miles in 4:05.
- An enterprising English chimney sweep now carries his soot bags in a trailer behind a motor bicycle, succeeding the Ayrshire sweep still working the Irvine-Troon road by tricycle.
- Thomas W. Davis, the octogenarian bicyclist of Peoria, Ill., sent the Bicycling World a section of chain run upwards of 20,000 miles with a coaster brake, against the 11,000 he ever got from a fixed wheel; the worn blocks show the rivets through and 3/64-inch of end play.
- An English trade warning that condemned lap-welded locomotive fire-tubes are being redrawn into cycle tubing for the "cheap and nasty" class, along with soft low-carbon German tube; file and vise tests are given for detecting them.
- Argues that the surest measure of a dealer's honesty is how far his conscience lets him profit by a customer's mistake, and that a conscience stretched often enough ceases to restrain him at all.
- Castor oil and sweet oil bake onto valves, piston head, rings, combustion chamber, muffler and timing gears; neither gasolene nor kerosene will remove the deposit, so cleaning means dismantling the engine.
- A Continental compound of gelatine, glycerine and chromic acid, injected into the inner tube in a fluid state and seasoned hard, is claimed to double tire mileage and end punctures, though it is heavy and needs special mounting machinery at depots in every large town.
- Patent 835,564, a vaporizer or carburetter with a two-part hollow-sphere shutter-throttle, to Chas. D. Shain of Rockaway Park, N. Y.; and 835,808, a tire with knitted fabric reinforced along its sides, to Henry T. Bragg of Yonkers.