L. A. W. Bulletin and Good Roads, Vol 27, No 9
Articles in this issue
- Prof. R. C. Carpenter of Cornell reports tests showing the Overman Wheel Co.'s new Victor Straight Line Sprocket runs at 98.1 per cent efficiency and resists the wet-sand fouling that cripples ordinary chains, gathering several members' shop tips alongside.
- Editorial by Sterling Elliott arguing that, far from being a passing craze, public interest in the bicycle grows each spring as machines improve, opening another cycling season with enthusiasm undimmed.
- Editorial reprinting John Frick's paper to the Morris Club of New York, which declares scheduled Sunday club runs a failure and proposes rendezvous registers at six suburban centres so members can pick up one another's trail.
- Good Roads feature contrasting two towns—one in Connecticut spending $2,000 a year on forty miles, another in New York raising $650 for ninety miles—to show how the money system of paid road labour yields well-drained, crowned highways.
- Member No. 6,436 disputes earlier advice on chain lubrication, recommending graphite and vaseline, and recounts mistreated machines and a rider who tore his tube by filling a valve with oil after mistaking a benzine repair.
- Illustrated installment tracing the early English safety bicycle from H. J. Lawson's lever-driven 1876 machine through the Facile, Xtraordinary, Pony, Sun and Planet, and Dutton designs and their geared driving mechanisms.
- F. H. Averill muses that the soft black-earth roads of the Illinois corn prairies might be surfaced with chemically treated cornstalks where stone and gravel are too costly to haul.
- A New Yorker counsels a Connecticut wheelman, newly delighted by Metropolitan macadam, to forsake marriage and devote his life to carrying the gospel of good roads to the benighted sons of Connecticut.
- An English trade leader explains his bitterness toward American wheels and tubing, blaming earlier swindles and the crushing American import duties that block English goods while American makers profit by Britain's free trade.
- Member No. 145,179 warns that resting the leg's weight on the ascending pedal, especially in hill-climbing, makes one leg lift the other's dead weight and wastes considerable energy.
- Good Roads article tracing New Jersey's macadam roads from the first in Essex and Union counties to a system of State aid now drawing applications from nineteen of twenty-one counties, with a proposed tax rebate for wide-tired wagons.
- Good Roads note on keeping winter highways passable by removing stone walls and bunk fences, laying small Christmas-tree-sized trees to catch drifting snow, and using snow rollers like those shown in the Dec. 21 Bulletin.
- Official matter listing the 1897-98 League officers under President Isaac B. Potter and Secretary Abbot Bassett, the state-by-state division Chief Consuls and Secretary-Treasurers, Renewal List No. 8, and the membership application and renewal blanks.
- Division News consolidating notices from the Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, New York State, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania divisions—including Illinois Chief Consul Arthur's drive to double 3,800 members, Maryland's two wheelmen appointed to the Baltimore Park Board, a Pennsylvania hotel-swindler warning, and local consul lists.
- Chairman Albert Mott's notices of 1898 sanction rules, professional registrations (Orlando L. Stevens, Floyd A. McFarland), suspensions and reinstatements, transfers to the professional class (John S. Johnson, Dan Daley), district reassignments, and sanctions granted to clubs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and elsewhere.
- The state-by-state list, published under Article III of the Constitution, of 304 applicants for League membership received up to March 4, 1898, grouped by division and club.
- Replies to members' inquiries on cycling the Erie Canal tow-path, raffling off a bicycle, dog-bite liability in Massachusetts, cracked tires, and a request for photographic prints for the Bulletin.