Jobst stories
 

I love reading about the late/great Jobst Brandt! Never met him but e-mailed a few times many years ago. He was one of a kind.

https://theradavist.com/conversation...-jobst-brandt/
https://media.theradavist.com/upload...000&quality=75
Tim

I had just sent an email to friends about Bruce Gordon's tires and Jobst Brandt's rides. Then I opened this.

Thanks for sharing!

Reading this makes me fondly remember the best parts of the old usenet newsgroups. Jobst, Sheldon Brown, and forum member oldpotatoe provided a wealth of knowledge to me. Glad one member of that trio is still here providing insight!

Greg

Great article thanks for sharing. He seemed like quite the character and he must have been like 7ft tall or something! That bike is huge. I love the old pictures too from a time when not many people were taking images like we do today with cameras in our back pockets.

That photo must me photoshopped….He is:
Not riding a gravel bike or mtb
Not wearing a helmet
Does not have disk brakes
Does not have electronic shifting
Has tires narrower than 40 mm
Etc….

Major trigger alert to industry types and their sycophants…

Seat posts were short. Saddle to bar drop was not radical. I don't recall him being super tall. However his personality was oversized.

Yah! Let's all drive Model A as well.

I reference this incredible archive several times a week

https://yarchive.net/bike/index.html

Well, he wasn't NBA center tall, but he was stated to be 6' 5", which is still half a foot taller than the average guy. His size meant that he had a lot of leverage to apply force and power, which is part of why he broke a lot of components. And his experience breaking components, as well as his work as a mechanical engineer, gave him good insights on which bicycle designs worked, and which didn't.

He was reported to be 6’5” tall. Rec.bicycles.tech was a great newsgroup back in the pre WWW days. Still amazed he did so much off road stuff on skinny tires while wearing standard leather road shoes!

Tim

The nostalgia about Jobst is funny. It is totally rad that he inspired Tom Ritchey, yes. And he was a very smart guy. But he was also fairly abrasive on Usenet - sort of an ur-forum bad guy. A sampling:

https://yarchive.net/bike/bicycle_industry.html

This was a classic Usenet "archetype" - the sophisticated curmudgeon. I spent a lot of time on Usenet in the 90s and this sort of thing got pretty old after awhile - I did some of this kind of posting myself, but I was a 16 year old kid and didn't know any better.

The other extremely ironic thing about Jobst and the Radavist is that they're dealing in nostalgia for the time these folks lived and and the equipment that they used, but Jobst was famously hard on equipment, and had almost nothing good to say about the bicycle products of the day. My guess is that if he was around today, doing the same thing, he'd most likely be riding a full suspension e-mtb (and complaining on the Internet about that, too).

I met Jobst on a ride once (backside of Mt Hamilton/Mines Rd junction cafe). He was riding solo on the Mt Hamilton loop (a 105 mile ride with 8500' of climbing). Nice person. He commented on my low spoke count wheels. I told him they came with the bike and I'll replace them when they break, which, like he said, eventually did.

He had an engineer's intolerance for bs, which I appreciated:

"The bike industry is low tech and is driven by fads,
personal quirks and marketing."

I cannot help but cringe when looking at someone riding on 25mm tires offroad. seems like there were alot of broken wheels and flat tires back in the day.

My commuter is an old timey cyclocross bike that I have used for riding in these environments with 35mm knobbies, and even then, I made some nasty contact with rocks over the years, so 25mm filetreads mustve been very exciting!

Considering he completely avoided the MTB-trend and was using almost the same vintage equipment on his last ride where he crashed in 2011, I doubt it.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/albu...80221FEF94.jpg

https://mrbill.homeip.net/albums/job...20720-0005.jpg

If he was the same age now. Not literally the same person. But nevermind.

Ok I snorted when I read this.

Well done. :p:p

I appreciate people with strong personality or have strong opinions. We all have our quirks.

I remember him from some wheel building threads scolding people on their ignorance. Looks like he had really long legs and short torso which might explain the tall frame. I am just the opposite.

I'd describe him more along the lines of not suffering fools gladly. When he started posting on Usenet there was plenty of foolish ideas being bandied about, the kind often referred to today as "bike shop lore". For example, at the time bike shop customers were commonly being told that steel bikes get "soft" with age, that reducing spoke tension made wheels more comfortable, that road tires required tread patterns for traction, etc. He wrote the book, "The Bicycle Wheel" in response to all the gobbledygook being passed around about how wheels work and how to build reliable wheels (and yes, all the principles in the book apply to today's wheels). And yes, he wasn't shy about calling people fools if they posted bogus information as if it were the truth.

Back then frames were taller than they are today. In those day, nearly all bikes had horizontal top tubes, and people only looked for an inch or so of standover clearance (on road bikes). Today most frames have sloping top tubes, so standover heights are much large today. Also, handlebars in days past typically had round bends and deeper drops, so stems were higher than they are today with modern ergo bend compact handlebars.

That's a nice looking Ritchie frame he's got there!
Looks like it's set up as half step gearing too.

And he finally adopted indexed shifting and SPD pedals!

Tim

Here's the thing, you can be educational to people without being a d*ck.. but all too often, folks (esp in forums) think they have to beat their chest and declare "I'm right and you're an idiot if you don't agree with me!".. (and I'm sure I've done that as well BTW, on here probably)

I know nothing about how this guy interacted with folks, but as soon as someone starts to come off with a " I know way more than you and my way is the best way" attitude, most people will tune out and the message will never be heard.. and then you're talking just to hear yourself talk..

It's been a rough 40+ years of learning this, but I've figured out, for me anyway, that people's perceptions ARE their realities, regardless if we think they are correct or incorrect.. if you want to change someone's reality, you have to be kind and patient..

at least that's how I try to look at it (and sometimes I actually succeed.. :) )

You're right, you never did interact with Brandt. If you asked questions, or said, "I don't know", or "this is what I've heard", he would be patient and cordial. But when someone made an erroneous assertion and boasted that it was true (especially if it had already been disproven), that's when Brandt would lower the boom. Brandt wasn't always right - but more often than not he was. If he said something, you'd be wise to strongly consider it.

Someone who simply doesn't know something isn't a fool - a fool is someone who has been shown evidence that disproves their belief but believes it anyway. That's who I was referring to when I said that Brand didn't suffer fools gladly. I'm sure Brandt knew that we wouldn't change the mind of the fool - he just wanted to make sure that the fool didn't mislead others.

People feeling the constant need to lower the boom on the Internet is basically what ruined Usenet. :)

and that's when you're just talking to hear yourself talk (or for the sake of your sycophants) IMHO.. and if I was in earshot, I might be less likely to take it seriously when someone has a "lower the boom" attitude.

I'm pretty sure that's a Peter Johnson (RIP) Frame, one of the great bay area frame builders who almost never built frames...too busy custom machining new cam shafts for 60 yr old Ferrari 250 GTs or some such. His workshop was some a sight to behold, the campy toolbox being the least interesting thing in it.

Some people need to have the boom lowered on them. Take for example, Rush Limbough, and other spreaders of misinformation.

My wife and I ran into Jobst in the Mid Peninsula open space one Saturday, we were riding MTB and of course Jobst was clearing out a trail from deadfall on his road bike. 95 or 96. Exchanged cordialities. Worth noting in the Rad article that he never broke his Ritchey bike. I still say, that even though my body type does not lend itself to their (road) geo, the Ritchey's I have (Ascent) and had (multiple road/cross) are the best riding bikes to me.

I'm not sure what he would have thought about ebikes, but he didn't like mountain bikes. He didn't like them because he basically had all the trails to himself in the old days, then when mountain bikes/biking took off, he experienced closed trails and access problems to private property, etc. A lot of the good trails he rode suddenly became off limits. I asked him once why he didn't ride a mountain bike, or at least a bike with wider tires, and he explained that on his rides there was a lot of pavement riding in comparison to dirt, and a heavier bike with fat tires would have slowed him down. Gravel bikes didn't exist as a genre at the time, but bikes like the Bruce Gordon Rock and Road did. The trails he rode in the Santa Cruz Mts were fairly smooth (not rocky) so he could get by with road with tires.

this is good stuff BTW! I would only add that "evidence" and "disprove" can be really subjective (unless a scientific fact, but the "right way" to ride a bike doesn't usually have much of that)..

There is a lot to this. A handful of guys coming through the Santa Cruz Mountains (how many square miles?) once in a blue moon was not a problem. Several 1000 every weekend quickly became one. The various parks and open spaces quickly adopted regulations and limitations, rightly so.

Also here: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/

and http://www.faqs.org/faqs/bicycles-faq/

This is classic! :D

I lived and rode in Bay Area in the '90s and early '00s, and interacted (mostly online) with folks on wreck.bikes... The terrain is different there than a lot of other places, that's for sure; that and the prevailing culture at the time were instrumental in allowing the kind of experimentation that lead to the development of MTBs, for example.

One of the issues that Jobst would bring up regarding MTBs is the attitude a lot of those riders brought with them, and how property owners would react to that. Not that people were necessarily super-open to bikies traipsing through private property to begin with, but it was less threatening and off-putting with skinny-tired road bikes, as opposed tractorized aggro-sleds. Yes, you can "dominate" the terrain that much more with full suspension and fat tires, but the ethos doesn't necessarily help expand access.

Jobst also objected to throwaway culture and noobs with more money than sense (dot-commers), whose ability to afford shiny new things for the sake of them being new / different / expensive drove out the more mundane, practical, and economical products.

Jobst also applied good engineering judgement, which is rare in the bike industry, on account of it being too small to attract top materials and mechanical engineering talent versus, say, the automotive, aerospace, energy, and other industries.

I never had any personal interactions with him, but from what I've read (most notably, Ray Hosler's books), I always got the sense that he's good engineering sense was always tempered a little bit by some machismo. That he tended to look down on advances in cycling technology that made the ride too "easy" for riders he didn't deem worthy. Even something like gear ratios--the man supposedly pushed a gigantic gear, even up some of the toughest climbs, but I think you've seen in more recent years that having easier gear ratios is not just a way to make weak riders survive, but also keeps strong riders at a cadence where they can be more efficient. For his preference for downtube shifters. Integrated shift/brake levers an amazing technology for new riders, allowing them to feel more confident shifting because they don't have to take their hands off the bars. I know I never would have been able to get my wife into cycling with me if we were still living in the downtube shifter era.

Doesn't mean he was off-base in everything--if we look at where bicycles and components are today compared to 40 years ago, we can clearly see there where a lot of improvements just waiting to be made, but his engineering focus seem to be limited to what would serve his own preferences better. And he seem to have little regard for the side of engineering that dealt with how humans actually interact with the bicycle.

I often get a similar feeling about Tom Ritchey, talking about good product design as if he's never tried to put a saddle on one of his one bolt seat posts. And for being an "innovator" in mountain bikes, he sure did innovate some terrible geometry.

There are a ton of challenges with trail access for diverse user groups in the Bay Area - a lot of them have to with the use of charged language like "tractorized aggro-sleds" and the hate and fear that come along with that, along with a sense of entitlement felt by certain extremely vocal equestrian and hiking groups.

These ideas have strangely persisted in the "progressive" NIMBY-ish SF Bay, though thankfully other places are far more welcoming, and a great trail access culture for all has been built up in places like Tahoe, Oregon, Washington State, and many other places, where all user groups are considered and interests are balanced, without having to bring victim-blaming into the equation.

No one has mentioned that his bike has no water bottles or mounts for them.
I find that particular 'quirk' very interesting. Tom talked about how he knew where every spring or brook was all through the hills where they road. But what would it hurt to have even a small bottle just in case? It isn't just for drinking, it can cool you off or flush out some road rash too... Sound like a stubborn German to me ;)

someone mentioned machismo above.. ;)