I was out riding The Red Randonneuse this morning.  That’s a laudable thing to do; especially considering that I began and ended the ride in the driveway thus ensuring that I did not participate in the escalation of the price of oil by making it even more scarce.  

    While I was riding, I thought about important stuff.  Thinking important thoughts about important stuff is one of the ways I like to occupy my time and bicycle riding time seems like good time for thinking.  I also like to read about important things that people with important thoughts have considered and written about -- fiction or non-fiction, but I do very little of that while riding my bicycle.  Today, I was thinking about bicycle forks and about an article written about forks in which the writer made an amazing discovery.

    There are basically three shapes at the upper end of fork blades used in forks where the blades are brazed into the fork crown.  One of those shapes is round and these are used in forks for track bikes.  You will sometimes see round top fork blades used on a road bike fork, but round fork blades are not considered suitable for road bike use because they allow too much fore and aft movement of the wheel when the brake is applied.  

    The other two shapes are oval and the reason for the oval is to resist the above mentioned deflection when a brake is applied.  Theoretically, a round blade should be more rigid laterally and better suited to the stresses bicycles suffer on the banks of an oval bicycle race track while an oval fork blade will lose something of its lateral stiffness, but gain fore and aft stiffness.  It’s always a trade off in any design so while a round blade might be stiffer in a turn an oval blade should be stiffer under braking.

    As to the oval blades, there are two ovals.  One is the Imperial Oval and it is longer on the long axis and narrower on the short axis than its sister, the Continental Oval.  The astute reader, the one who has read lots of important stuff, will have no doubt assumed that the Imperial Oval was the choice of the British and the Continental Oval was chosen by the rest of Europe.  That’s sort of true, but there never was a clear division.  While it is true that Reynolds, an English bicycle tube maker, came up with the Imperial Oval and Columbus, the Italian competitor, liked fork blades with the Continental Oval, Reynolds was popular in Continental Europe and Columbus made some blades with the Imperial Oval, too.  Nevertheless, Reynolds and the Imperial Oval go together as Columbus and the Continental Oval go together.

    In the article I read, the writer/tester hung some big pop bottles from the handlebars of different bicycles and measured how much the forks deflected.  From this test, he determined that the Imperial Oval makes a better fork.  

    Now this could have been very good news for me because I have a pretty good collection of fork blades with the Imperial Oval.  The trouble is that no one has made a fork crown for Imperial Oval forks for a long time; probably partly because Reynolds hasn’t made any fork blades with the Imperial Oval for an equally long time.  In the long, hot battle about which oval makes the best fork blade, Continental won out.

    Now back to the important thinking I did this morning.  While riding The Red Randonneuse through different kinds of turns, I thought, “This fork sure seems pretty top notch. I wonder if I could test it to see if I am just a prejudiced builder or if it really is a good fork?”

    What I needed was an objective test and that’s when it occurred to me ( By the way, I have an old Grateful Dead song going in the background and Garcia just sang, “Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been.”  And I’m thinking that’s kind of prophetic.).  Anyway, it occurred to me that when I make a fork, I like to ping it and listen to the tone.  They make wonderful, big tuning forks.  

    It turns out, conveniently, that I built two forks last week and I have another two in the shop. So when I came home, I      got out the tuner I use to tune my ukulele, set the forks up one at a time in the vice, and pinged them to determine what note they sing.  Are you ready for this?  

    All four forks made an A.  There was a straight A.  One A sharp, and two A flats.  Nina tells me that A sharp is usually called B flat, but I’m not hearing any of that nonsense.  This was an objective test.  I had no idea what the results might be.  So the results are incontrovertible fact and I am not a prejudiced builder.  All four forks sing an A.  So there you have it, Continental Oval fork bladed forks earn an A rating.