The Carlisle Manufacturing Company, in order to give increased drop to the hanger, are producing a cycle having a thirty-inch rear wheel. The makers of the Rambler are making a man’s heavy-weight roadster having thirty-inch wheels both front and rear.
CRESCENT
FLUSH JOINT.
The makers of the Clipper show a variation of the three-crown construction, inasmuch as they do not use the continuous one-piece rear fork construction, and use what they call a blade reinforcement straight tapered rear fork, the rear forks being brazed to a lug which forms part of their patent elliptical truss crank-hanger, and they claim that through this construction they have sufficient clearance for a tire as large as 1⅞ inch, that a front sprocket as large as twenty-five tooth can be used, fitted to a 4⅜-crank axle, with ball races three inches apart, and with tread 4¾ inches over all. They claim that this method of construction is an improvement over the old method, where in order to get a tread less than 5⅜ inches the rear forks must be bent, which prevented properly reinforcing a vital point and consequently weakened the frame. They also claim that under the old method the crank bracket would have to be extended, a process which is undesirable because more length must be added to the chain, and the wheel base must also be lengthened, thus adding weight without strength; also that there was a coming demand for larger tires and sprockets, neither of which could clear the forks of a wheel with forty-four-inch wheel base and straight forks, both of these last being, for good reasons, mechanical features of no little value.
The [Keating frame] curves the diagonal stay just before it reaches the crank-hanger and the Racycle also show one model of this style.
In the Luthy frame the diagonal stay instead of being brazed to the crank-hanger bracket is brazed forward of it, on the lower main tube.
COLUMBIA FORK
CROWN.