The Blade in the Fork in the Road
A few months ago, I confessed my odd obsession with forks -- and how a nice fork with the perfect taper and bend was a rare and beautiful thing.
Today, I noticed that good ol' Dave Moulton has a nice article about how forks are manipulated and bent by the framebilder. (Dave, like me, is not a fan of the straight blade. To my eye, a bike with a straight-blade fork is like a woman without hips; sort of boyish and unfinished looking. Check out some of Dave's beautiful forks, which I would rank right up at the top with my favorite Ciöcc and Cross-Check forks.)
So the question for Dave, which I hope he'll drop into the comments section as he does now and again, is this: Are fork forms constructed with a single brake point? Or are they themselves a curved form? I suspect they come in both flavors, because you see plenty of forks that seem to have not so much a tapering curve as a single change in angle -- truly an ugly thing, and just as repellent as a fork with too much rake.
Tags:
forks
1 comment:
I’m not quite sure I understand the question; the form I used was curved slightly greater than the finished fork blade because the blade springs back after bending. They come in all kinds and different curvatures, most framebuilders make their own as I did. Some of the larger manufacturers make a straight fork the bend both blades simultaneously in a fixture as the final operation when the fork is otherwise finished.
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