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Here are a few cool TT bikes.
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I wanted these Suntour shifters back in the day. Prelims to the brifters era.
 

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Some of the rarest vintage racers has two rear hubs if the rear drivetrain blows out. When I mean rare, I mean more rare than any other bike on this thread.
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I really can't find a modern bicycle component that wasn't invented 100 years ago or more. We have new materials but the ideas were there long ago. Solid tires, suspension, double butted spokes, thin walled steel tubing, dropper seat posts, 27.5 wheels and fat bikes, It's all old stuff. My friend has a very old hub with straight pull spokes, now thought of as the latest and greatest. Here is a 120 year old straight pull hub picture I robbed from the net.
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I've seen a lot of Kickstarter type things that I suspect were started by people researching old bike patents from the turn of the last century and reintroducing them with a (sort of) slick video featuring the most attractive female friend they can convince to help them out. The early history and the things people tried out with limited communication, tools, and materials, are some of the things I love most about old bikes, guns, and powered vehicles. The amount of stuff that was thought up way before most people would think is staggering, it's just that practical manufacturing, materials, and sometimes computer controls had to catch up to make them viable. There's also a lot of crazy stuff which is always entertaining, or things that seem crazy until realizing that from the perspective of their time, they weren't as outlandish as they appear today (for the latter, I'm thinking of the Le Rhone rotary engines which seem so ridiculous, but made sense for a brief period).
 

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