Quote:
Originally Posted by Road Fan
That thread of 650 is still going on, with lightweight, compliant smooth-tread tires, kinda like big, soft donuts. Gravel was not the point, but the increased smoothness of this style of tire/wheel probably attracted many grey haired roadies to the pebbly side. The industrial-scale growth we see on the "commercial" gravel side is one thing, but the French-style and faux-French style was based on a resurgence of randonneuring.
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Gravel
was the point to a large degree. The high mountain roads of western Europe mostly weren't paved back in the day. That's why Jan Heine's affinity for the old French bikes is easy to understand: there are sprawling networks of unpaved (and sometimes quite rough) national forest roads in the Pacific Northwest, with mostly paved roads in the flat-to-hilly low lands, resulting in very similar demands on bike design.
It's not just the tires. The demands of mountain gravel riding are why the mid-20th-century randonneuring community at the time also drove considerable development in brake design, notably with cantilever brakes and later dual-pivot calipers. And it's why those bikes often featured cranksets with very small BCDs, like the 1934 Stronglight 70mm 3-bolt bolt circle that was soon adopted into the old Rene Herse cranks (and recently revived as the new Rene Herse cranks).
Nobody was calling those old randonneuring bikes "gravel bikes" back in the day because "gravel bike" hadn't been invented as a marketing term yet. But they were gravel bikes.
The 42mm 650b tires that Jan Heine sells are named after an unpaved mountain pass. The intent has always been that they'd be competent for mixed-surface use.