It's All About the Bike (16 page)

Gravy inspected the hubs at close range, over the top of his glasses, like a gem dealer eyeing diamonds:

I'm noticing titanium axle, medium flange width, beautiful machine work going on here, nice chamfer . . . no holes or nasty edges that might crack in the future, a real nice high polish that seals the metal. Titanium freehub body on the rear hub, much stronger than aluminium, that's good. The bearings feel super smooth. Great set-up. These should last you a long, long time, Rarb. This'll be the first pair of Royce
hubs I've ever built up. Awesome. Now, what tyres are you planning on running on this machine?

I already had the tyres: they were Continental Grand Prix 4000s. I'd been to the factory to see them made a few weeks earlier. I chose Continental simply because they had never let me down. Riding round the world, I always tried to run two Continental
Town and Country
tyres on Mannanan. In extremis, I'd settle for one on the rear. They were the toughest tyres by, well, a town and country mile.

The small, medieval town of Korbach in central Germany is dominated by the factory (located on Continental Street) in the way towns in Lancashire were by mills in Victorian times. A vast red-brick chimney rises to meet the sky. On the morning I arrived, a Stygian grey haze hung over the buildings. The air was cold. The factory was dark. I felt like I'd walked into a scene from a Sherlock Holmes novel: not inappropriately — Arthur Conan Doyle was a keen cyclist and Holmes boasted of being able to identify ‘forty-two different impressions left by tyres'.

The sunshine piercing the gloom came in the shape of Hardy Bölts, my guide for the day. Straight-backed, tall, lean and tanned, he was another specimen exemplifying the physical benefits of life spent on a bicycle. Hardy had raced as a pro, both on the road and the mountain, before joining Continental. Flashing a fine set of white teeth, he clasped my hand and swished his ID card to open the gates.

‘You know the nickname for Korbach?' he said. ‘Rubber Town. And how about that smell, the smell of heated rubber? It never goes away. Like a bicycle saddle, you get used to it after a while.'

The people of Korbach have had long enough to get used to it. Continental, now one of the largest global suppliers to the
automotive industry, employing 150,000 people in eighteen countries, began making bicycle tyres in Korbach in 1892. It's a manufacturing record that spans almost the entire history of the pneumatic tyre.

John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinary surgeon resident in Belfast, invented the pneumatic tyre in 1888. A doctor had advised cycling for the health of his 9-year-old son, remarking that the activity would be all the more beneficial if the jarring from the rough granite cobbles on the city streets could be reduced.

No doubt the entire cycling population would have then concurred. Comfort was something no one expected or sought from cycling. During the boom in velocipedes — known with good reason as ‘boneshakers' — tyres were made of solid iron. By the time the Rover Safety bicycle was introduced in 1885, tyres were made of solid rubber strips and tacked or glued to the wheel rim. It was an improvement on iron; even so, a simple bike ride could still rattle a man's molars free.

Dunlop tacked sleeves of linen to the wooden wheels of his son's tricycle and inserted crude, inflatable rubber tubes with a non-return valve and filled them with compressed air. It was like having a flexible cushion strapped to the wheel. It worked. Dunlop christened the word ‘pneumatic', patented the idea and began small-scale production in Dublin. The first advertisement appeared in the
Irish Cyclist
in December 1888: ‘Look out for the new Pneumatic Safety (bicycle). Vibration impossible.'

At first the tyres were expensive and quick to puncture. Though the reduced rolling resistance clearly made the bicycle faster, the bulging ‘bladder-wheels' or ‘pudding tyres' as they were called, met with hilarity and derision in Ireland. In 1889, an Irish journalist rode a pneumatic-tyred machine from Dublin to Coventry, one place where the bicycle had never been a laughing matter. In a year, every racing cyclist in the country had pneumatic tyres. After
two years, the Dunlop factory relocated to Coventry. Six years after that, the business was floated for £5 million.

Dunlop himself never profited greatly; he died in 1921 with under £10,000 in his estate. In fact, he hadn't invented the pneumatic tyre, though he believed he had. Another Scot had patented the idea (for carriage wheels) in France and the USA in 1846. Nevertheless, Dunlop's pneumatic tyre came at a critical point in the development of road transport and played a crucial role in the birth of both the motorbike and the automobile. For the bicycle, it was the last piece of the jigsaw. The steering system meant you could balance on two wheels in-line; the diamond-shaped frame and same-sized wheels made the machine strong and safe to ride; the drivetrain made it efficient. And, finally, Dunlop made the bicycle comfortable. It was perhaps a development as important as the arrival of the Safety itself. The pneumatic tyre made the bicycle popular.

‘We start here,' said Hardy Bölts, ‘with natural rubber.' Huge carpets of thick rubber were being sucked on to rollers above our heads and heated with chemicals to make a black, gloopy porridge. It was like something out of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. As the porridge was squashed flat between rows of great drums, it spluttered and popped like a witch's brew. The noise was terrific. Close to the rollers, it was hot. The workers with heavy gloves and beads of sweat edging their moustaches, grunted at us.

‘Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 358 days a year, these machines are rolling. For one week only each August, everything stops,' Hardy said.

Further down the production line, multiple layers of nylon thread were spinning off spools and being pressed and bonded into the hot rubber sheets: ‘The finer the nylon, and the higher the threads per inch or TPI, the better the tyre,' Hardy said as we watched the finished, rubberized tyre casing being stored in giant rolls at the far end of the factory.

The sensory assault was over. On the second floor, where the bicycle tyres are manufactured, the environment was more equable. The first thing I noticed was how many employees were female.

‘There are many steps in the production of high-quality bicycle tyres that just can't be done well by machines,' Hardy said. ‘Many of the jobs are fiddly and sticky. They involve small parts. Women have smaller hands . . . and they are more skilful.'

The most delicate part of the process was the assembly of the tyre itself. I watched a woman roll a strip of casing material on to a wheel and add two beads of steel wire. The machine then folded this single ply over twice, before she added an anti-puncture strip and, lastly, a piece of tread. The ends were sealed together. A sticker to show who had made it was added and the tyre was hung on a hook behind her. The whole operation took forty-five seconds.

‘If you or I try this,' Hardy said, ‘then everything is flying through the air. Every tyre has to be made like this, by hand. It is checked again and again. Every tyre has to bring you safely down an Alpine pass at 90 kph [55 mph].'

A high-speed ‘blow-out', when the tyre bursts spectacularly with the sound of a gunshot, is one of the things road cyclists fear most. If you are dropping like a stone down a mountain road, you
can be thrown from the bike, leaving the gods to decide your fate. The one dramatic blow-out I had that still gives me flashbacks was in the Fergana Mountains in Kyrgyzstan. I was coming down from a pass on a gravel road, on a loaded touring bike. When the hairpins finished, and the road opened out before me, I let the brakes go. At full tilt, the front tyre — a cheap Chinese-made tyre I'd bought in the market in Kashgar — blew. The bike slid briefly, then the handlebar jack-knifed and I was off. Somehow, the bike was propelled into the air. As it came down on top of me, the teeth of the chainrings scalped the side of my head.

A few hours later, I reached a farm on the road — the first settlement I'd seen all day. Blood congealed with dust covered the side of my face. My shirt was shredded. Looking like a cross between a cage-fighter and a Sadhu, I leant my bike against the gate and walked up the path. Children and women scattered, shrieking. The farmer, a barrel-chested Kyrgyz man with taut, mongoloid features, appeared from the shadows with a pistol at the end of his stiff arm. I tried a few words of Russian. No reply. Then his eyes flicked past me to the gate, and my bicycle. The pistol arm fell limp. The leathery brown skin on his face re-set to a broad grin. Ten minutes later, I was eating kebabs and yoghurt as his wife sponged blood from my head. I had the bicycle to thank for my salvation: it was the last time I would ever grace it with a cheap tyre.

The earliest pneumatic tyres had to be glued on with rubber solution. At the end of the 1880s in France, the young owner of a struggling rubber factory, Edouard Michelin, was astounded to learn from a cyclist with a puncture that he had had to wait an entire night for the glue to dry, after he'd repaired the inner tube and re-stuck the casing. Soon after, Edouard introduced a detachable tyre — the ‘changeable'. Any cyclist could now repair a puncture, without glue, in fifteen minutes.

Edouard's brother André was the marketing brain behind the business. Having treated the French professional cyclist Charles Terront (more of him in the next chapter) to a bibulous luncheon in Paris in September 1891, he had the famous racer sign a contract to ride the Paris—Brest—Paris race on patented Michelin changeables. Terront won, by eight hours. André strolled among the 10,000 fans at the finish on the Champs-Elysées, handing out brochures that read: ‘We have every reason to believe that the bicycling public will say of our tires, “An improvement? — No, a revolution!”' In truth, the revolution was Dunlop's, but the changeable soon developed into the ‘clincher' — the type of tyre most of us ride today. The steel beads with which the woman had assembled my Continental tyres, became standard. Like Dunlop, Michelin became a household name.

Remarkably, the tubular style of tyre that has to be glued on is still used today, mainly by professional track and road cyclists. Of course, the pros have a team of mechanics to deal with the messy business of fixing them to rims and repairing punctures. Tubulars are favoured for their marginally better shock absorption and road feel. ‘And they are a little faster,' Hardy said. He should know — he rode in the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España on Continental tubular tyres.

We watched a woman use a sewing machine to finish a tubular tyre. She carefully stitched the inner tube inside the rubberized cloth casing, blew it up, checked it over by eye and hooked it on the rack behind her. It was, again, highly sophisticated handwork. ‘It's a small but important part of the business. We want to keep the pros happy. Perhaps this tyre is for Mark Cavendish's bike,' Hardy said.

The final part of the process to manufacture my clincher tyres was vulcanization, the technique invented by the American Charles Goodyear in 1843. Natural rubber is sticky; it deforms
under heat and becomes brittle when cold. By heating it together with sulphur, the rubber becomes durable, elastic and stable, rendering it waterproof and winter-proof. Without the vulcanization process, we'd still be riding on bicycle tyres made of iron.

‘See the raw tyres — they are your tyres, Rob — they are going into the oven. They have no form and you could pull apart the tread and the casing with your hands. But after three minutes inside the machine, at a temperature of 160°C [320°F], the vulcanization is complete and the tyres are indestructible,' Hardy said.

We were standing at the end of two rows of sixty machines that took one tyre each. They were closing and opening continuously, at different times, belching steam. Each one contained a negative mould with different tyre treads. Three men walked up and down the rows, placing raw tyres into the maws of the machines and hauling vulcanized tyres out. One of the men nodded at me. We walked down to meet him. He spoke to Hardy in German and handed me a pair of industrial gloves. ‘OK,' Hardy said. ‘Any minute now you can pull your two tyres from these ovens. They'll be smoking hot, and ready to ride.'

Placing the hubs on the couch between us, Gravy flipped open a clipboard. Both hubs were 28-hole: both wheels would have 28 spokes. All things being equal, the more spokes a wheel has the stronger it is. But more spokes do mean more weight and increased aerodynamic drag. It's about finding a balance, then. The conservative approach, for the ultimate in reliability, would have been a 32-spoke rear wheel for me, Gravy explained, but as I weighed only 165 lb, we could easily build in strength to compensate, with the rim and spokes we chose.

Step one was choosing the rims. Clearly I wasn't going to be allowed the lightest rims. I wasn't going to choose them anyway.
I hadn't come to California to get a set of super-light special race-day wheels: I'd come for a set of everyday riding wheels. My primary concern was strength, not weight.