Why did headsets change from 1"to 1 1/8"?

[Vegan1]

Speak for yourself.

I guess you have

What I'm saying is in my experience having a bit of paper does not mean an awful lot.

Just saying.

 

[hoopdriver]

What I'm saying is in my experience having a bit of paper does not mean an awful lot.

Just saying.

Or it can mean a great deal - it all depends, doesn't it?

 

[Vegan1]

Or it can mean a great deal - it all depends, doesn't it?

Having just looked at the syllabus - not really.

 

[hoopdriver]

Having just looked at the syllabus - not really.

That was hasty. I see you put a lot of thought into it.

Perhaps you'd be best to stay off the motorbike after all

 

[Ajax Bay]

a bit like theory meeting real world, and real world coming out on top

So what sort of headset are most bikes made with nowadays? I wonder why the industry has not reverted to 1" steerers? [I don't know the answer btw, but maybe it's because the 1 and 1/8" A-headset is a better engineering design - as proposed/explained upthread.] Contrast this with the reliance the industry has placed on engineering when developing the variety of bottom bracket designs, up with which many have to put (not me - I'm on square taper).
PS I have not got a C&G Certificate in bicycle maintenance (or a PhD - allusions to other threads).

And you're a theoretician.

@Yellow Saddle - take that as a compliment, in addition to any practical expertise you might have developed over the years.

 

[Drago]

The only reason anything ever changes in bicycle design is because every manufacturer wants to catch the wave of a trend and coin it. If they can create that trend and get to the top of the pile then so much the better.

That a few of these innovations do genuinely bring benefits seems to be merely incidental.

 

[hoopdriver]

I agree

Solutions to problems that didn't exist, rarely cropped up or at least were hardly ruining the pleasure of a ride for the overwhelming number of cyclists

 

[Yellow Saddle]

A plain bearing is one without balls or rollers - a typical bronze or brass bushing type bearing.

A modern Aheadset bearing is a special cartridge bearing with a special feature: it can move a bit in its seat in the head tube. Normal cartridge bearings are box-shaped in cross section. These are chamfered on the outside (inside too, but for another reason) so that the entire cartridge can move like a ball-joint inside the seat.
The problem with the older system was, as I explained upstairs, that with the small movements produced by steerer flex from hitting small road obstacles (at the level of road roughness), the balls didn't roll but fretted over small distances. These distances are too small for the balls to replenish themselves with grease from rolling. Once the grease is pushed out of the interface, they essentially rubbed around dry - steel on steel.
With the plain bearing now taking up that movement, the balls don't move until called upon to steer. Hence their longevity. These new bearings almost never fail fail notching and are usually replaced because of water intrusion and rust.
It was an extremely clever design and A-Headset enjoyed a patent on it for 25 years. The patent was owned in its latter years by Cane Creek but nowadays it is open and in the public domain. During the patent's run, it was poorly copied by Chris King who thought it could run around the patent by eliminating the inner chamfer by simply making the bearing slip-fit over the steerer. However, this caused movement that quickly cut a notch in the steerer, no matter what material it was made of.
Chris King always denied the problem with its stolen design but as soon as the patent ran out, all CK headset bearings magically developed inner chamfers as well.

 

[Drago]

Am I the only person that thinks CK headsets are priced out of all proportion to their 'quality'?

 

[si_c]

Am I the only person that thinks CK headsets are priced out of all proportion to their 'quality'?

No.

 

[Yellow Saddle]

Am I the only person that thinks CK headsets are priced out of all proportion to their 'quality'?

Same goes for all CK products, not just headsets.

 

[Blue Hills]

I've never had my house flooded, but my many years of personal experience still don't add up to a good reason to eschew contents insurance

Hardly a good or parallel example to be honest.

 

[froze]

Well there have been several people just on this one thread - me included - who have not had problems with 1" headsets, and by the sounds of things our total combined years of use would be well over a century and many thousands of miles.

Your argument sounds a bit like a statistician who points out that the average man has 1.99999999 legs - which is true, of course, when one averages in people with one leg or none, but this figure, however accurate, does not represent real world experience.

You're not going to win, these are people who neglected their stuff and blame it on an "inferior" design. I use to race for 10 years on 1" inch headsets as did everyone I knew, and never saw a headset fail. Even a neglected 1" headset is pretty tough to fail!

YELLOW SADDLE, you said this: No, steel wasn't the problem, it was the small tubing. Size matters far more than material. Look at the original Cannondale aluminium frames. They were extremely thin, yet stiffer than steel in that particular application. Going from 1" steel to 1 1/8" aluminium make the steerer much stiffer. I read that last part wrong and thought you were talking about headsets which is what the subject was about, and the way you worded in mislead me when I read it too fast, sorry.

 

[MichaelW2]

Why are internal headsets a good idea, but internal bottom brackets a bad idea?

 

[Yellow Saddle]

Why are internal headsets a good idea, but internal bottom brackets a bad idea?

I am not sure either of the two had been said.