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