VICTOR SINGLE LOOP.
The [Chilion frame] is of wood, with steel connections, and built of solid rods of seasoned second growth hickory, oak, ash or maple, and the connections are made of aluminum-bronze of a special composition, which the makers think is a metal lighter and tougher than steel. The wooden rods are rivetted to the connection with phosphor bronze rivets. The principle of the joint is similar to a shovel handle, and it is here to be noted that no one ever yet saw a shovel handle work loose. The makers claim that no shocks or vibration will affect the frame, because the wood fibre absorbs the vibration, and that the frame will stand up under treatment which would ruin a steel frame, it being impossible to bend, crush or buckle the wooden rods, and that should the frame be broken repairs can be made at a fraction of the expense necessitated by the steel frame.
While all this may be true, somehow or another the wood frame has not caught on, and we are still in the “steel age” of cycle construction. The coming of the gear case has evidently caused the makers of the [Racycle] to adapt their frame to it. They have, therefore, produced a frame in which the gear case is an integral part of the frame, since the frame of the gear case consists of a loop of D-shape tubing brazed on and made part of the frame in place of the rear fork on the chain side, which is thus dispensed with. They claim that this gear case also adds greatly to the strength of the entire frame.
THREE CROWN FRAME.
The makers of the Andrae make their entire frame out of tapered gauge tubing, which is 18-gauge at each end for two inches, then tapered to 22-gauge through the intermediate portion, while the exterior surface is uniform in diameter. They make the following claims for this:
“At the very inception of cycle construction, cycle engineers were aware that a straight tube of uniform thickness was not right when made up into a cycle frame, as such a tube is apt to be thin at the connections because of the operations of filing a brazed joint and cleaning it by the use of a sand blast before going to the filer. The consequence is that a thin tube, when brazed and cleaned up at the joints, may be cut away to a mere film at some portions of its circumference, and so made liable to break under a very light portion of the load which the tube at its original thickness could safely sustain. Until the idea of tapered-gauge tubing was conceived, mechanics were forced to use the ordinary tubes and had no means of reducing the total weight of the frame without at the same time reducing its strength, because the only lighter tube obtainable was one thinner in every part, and it is not considered safe to make a braze on tubing much less than 18-gauge in thickness. The tapered tube avoids all this and gives a distribution of metal perfectly adapted to the manufacture of bicycle frames, as all structures designed to bear the maximum of a load with the minimum of weight must have their long members of varying thicknesses of metal.”