Journal on dérailleur

Look: From Ski Slopes to Carbon Supremacy

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The story of Look begins with a broken leg on Alpe d’Huez in 1951 — not on a bicycle, but on skis. Jean Beyl, lying in a hospital bed in the French Alps, conceived a ski binding that would release before your bones did. It was the kind of pragmatic engineering insight that would define Look for the next seven decades: identify a mechanical problem, solve it with precision, then move on to the next impossible thing.

Campagnolo Record Through the Ages

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s something quietly magnificent about holding a Record component from 1995 and comparing it to one from 2020. Both are unmistakably Campagnolo — that particular shade of anodized aluminum, the mechanical precision that feels almost delicate — yet the span of innovation between them is staggering. Tullio Campagnolo founded his company in Vicenza in 1933, a city already renowned for metalworking, and the philosophy he embedded there has proven remarkably durable: mechanical precision as a kind of faith, each component an argument that engineering excellence needs no embellishment.

Campagnolo Ekar: The Gravel Experiment

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Campagnolo announced Ekar in 2021, there was a moment of collective silence in the cycling community. Not scepticism, exactly — more like confusion. A 13-speed groupset? From Campagnolo, the company that had spent seventy years refining the art of road cycling components? A single chainring, no front derailleur? What were they doing?

The answer, as I’ve come to understand through living with five Ekar-equipped bikes in my collection, is that they were asking a different question entirely. Not “how do we adapt our road groupset for gravel?” but “what would a gravel groupset look like if we designed it from first principles?”

Steel Versus Titanium: A False Dichotomy

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ask a cyclist to name the great material debate and he will usually say steel versus carbon, as if the whole history of the bicycle were compressed into that one contemporary argument. I understand why. Carbon dominates the present tense. But in my own orbit the quieter and more revealing tension lies elsewhere, between steel and titanium. They are often presented as alternatives, as if one must cancel the other out, yet in practice they belong to a similar moral world. Both ask to be taken seriously. Both reward patience. Both still make sense when fashion has moved on.

Brooks Saddles: The Patina of Miles

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Brooks saddle, fresh from the box, is notoriously uncomfortable. The leather is stiff, unbending, almost hostile to the rider. This is by design — a fact that separates Brooks from every other saddle manufacturer and explains why cyclists either become devout believers or sceptical outsiders. There is no middle ground with Brooks. The commitment is total, or it’s nothing.

Most of my collection rides on Brooks. Not by accident, but because their philosophy aligns with the bikes they’re mounted on: built for the long term, improving with use, asking the rider to invest in the relationship.

Italian Framebuilders: The Tradition Continues

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a line that runs through Italian cycling like a seam in leather — visible if you look, invisible if you don’t. It connects Ernesto Colnago’s first frames in 1954 to Stelio Belletti’s TIG-welded revolution in 1973 to Sergio Finazzi’s titanium obsession in 1992. Three builders, three philosophies, three materials, one shared conviction: that a bicycle frame is not merely an engineering solution but an expression of its maker’s understanding of what cycling should feel like.

3T Components: Form Follows Function

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of elegance that comes from absolute commitment to solving a specific problem well. 3T — Tecnologia del Tubo Torino, as the Italian brand was originally known — has spent six decades pursuing that elegance from its workshops in Turin. In my collection, their components appear on nearly every bike, and what strikes me about each one is a quality I can only describe as inevitability. You look at a 3T stem and think: yes, of course it looks exactly like this. Not because it’s particularly beautiful in a sculptural sense, but because every visible line appears to serve a function.

Klein and the American Aluminum Revolution

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 1973, while the Italian workshops of Colnago, De Rosa, and Masi were refining techniques that had served them for decades — brazing steel tubes into lugged joints, filing each connection by hand — a chemical engineering student at MIT was asking a different question entirely. Gary Klein wanted to know what would happen if you abandoned steel’s comfortable traditions and built a bicycle frame from oversized aluminium tubes instead.

Why Reynolds 931 Is the Endgame

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of technical perfection that emerges when a material has been refined not for fashion or marketing, but for fundamental engineering reasons. Reynolds 931 represents that perfection — a maraging stainless steel tubing system so thoroughly optimised for the specific demands of bicycle frames that it’s difficult to imagine meaningful improvement.

My Genesis Volare 931 Disc, built with these tubes from Birmingham, is perhaps the clearest technical statement in my entire collection. It says: we have solved the fundamental problem. Everything else is variation.