Coolwall April 2011 - Cannondale

I dont understand it Al. There is some conflicting reasoning in your posts.
It is cannondale that has ALWAYS been very conservative in terms of rear suspension. single pivot, simplicity..
You can see consistent philosophy from the beginning till today. Although now its probably totally different company.

BTW you just cant compare Cannondale with Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz does very nice bikes but thats it.
The only important thing they did was to buy rights to VPP at some point.
(smart move, THATS the fashion you are talking about)
Otherwise SantaCruz never had anything (really interesting) to offer.
Without VPP (and ties to MBA that shamelesly pushed them for so long) they would be maybe out of business.
At best they would be one of the smaller brands like Ventana, Elsworth, Titus.

Obviously they are cool, doesn't mean you have to agree with everything they have done!!

Never liked the long rear drop-outs on early models!!

Hate the single side front shocks!!!

Still cool though!

Re: cannondale,,,,

al":xpqbe3jv said:

I'm not only changing my mind on the cool vote but I'm also going to change my football team to Man United cos they win everything.
They are realy cool.

This being cool is great!

Click to expand...

cool as tapas

My cool vote has been placed. My first 1988 M500 cannondale cracked but only after a council gritter lorry drove over it with me on it. :shock: I came out relatively injury free but the bike was a write off.


I have three cannondales since then and not one of them have cracked and they have all seen plenty of use off road.

Also this model came as standard with the aerator pump seat post, that is frickin cool!

Click to expand...

One day I'll get around to rebuilding my Aerator. Looks intact, but all the innards are in a manky rusty pile in the shed

The Malcolm":ar22bdka said:

My first 1988 M500 cannondale cracked but only after a council gritter lorry drove over it with me on it. :shock: I came out relatively injury free but the bike was a write off.

Click to expand...

my first dale ended up wrote off but uncracked too, after a car pulled out onto as i was flying down a straight stretch of road at around 30mph........i was smashed to bits, bike held up quite well, i actually stuck a spares set of wheels on it when i was fit and it rode again......though was still a scrapper.

Cool

Voted cool

The first time I saw one I couldn't take my eyes off it and had to go over to investigate

The smoothed joins are really cool - laborious effort went into those

First Aluminium bike I ever saw was a 'dale such massive tubes and such a light bike! (SM500)

They have won loads of stuff and also made some downright quirky stuff like the lefty so they aren't just safe and dull

- However

Not so interested in any later stuff though, they seem to be losing their individuality

They should have kept themselves apart from Spec/Trek/whoever and stayed all US made. I reckon the brand allure from that kind of strategy, properly marketed, could sustain that and the necessary higher tag on each bike...

C'dale switched to fugly bikes in the early 90s. The opening post shows it perfectly 1 cool C'dale vs. 4 fugly uncool C'dales. So even i own a cool one ;P i say uncool.

The selection of pictures John made on the first page makes me think of anticannondale conspiracy