Coolwall April 2011 - Cannondale

Agreed pre 94/95 - very, very cool. I still remember the first time I saw one (in a bike shop in Holborn) in the late eighties - I was completely amazed when I picked it up to see how light it was - this is what made me pay well over the odds for my mint M2000 a few weeks ago.

Post 94/95 - Not so much, but then there is very little I like from after that time - just showing my age!

cool cannondale

back when i could spring outta bed and the gang would spend every sunday morning bashing around northumberlands forests still hungover i craved cannondales but they were beyond my meger bubget. fast forward 20 years and hey presto i, ve got two, but it takes me ages to get out of bed now, never the less the old gang is getting back together in august to once more assult the badlands ot the coquet valley, the ravens looking like the weapon of choice


cheers all cannondale owners out there.

drew

Allways will be super cool to me I would literally stand in Hardesty cycles (home of the mountain bike ) for half an hour just staring at there super v 4000 and then I saw a photo of Missy in Sierra Nevada in 97 riding on just the rim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp-yrpA6FEw

thats exactly where i saw them, we are talking about newcastle are,nt we.

cheers drew

Nah the little shop in Boro it was right in the middle of Dickens car park.

I just posted pics of my DH4000 in the gallery

Used to like them way back when they were innovative, but they really gave up on that in the 90s and started to turn out generic 'me too' bikes with little in house design.
They were masters of taking ques from old or other peoples designs and making them their own:

Headshock: basic copy of the Actiontec and Browning system except relian on a huge headtube
Coda hubs: Sachs rebranded
Coda discs: Sachs rebranded
Coda cantis: Dia-compe
Coda brake levers: Dia-compe
Coda 900 cranks: Magic motorcycles/Alex Pong rebranded
SPDs/Pedals: Wheelgo rebranded
Killer V was a very old frame design used by Raleigh in the 30s/40s so not really innovative:



Similarly the dual chain DH bikes had existed in many forms prior to the C'dale one, none the less is was well put together and looked good

I loved the really early stuff up to the early 90s (like the 24/26" bikes) and they do deserve credit for the looks of their alloy frames. I did like their DH stuff in the mid 90s when they tried interesting bits and had some cool riders like Missy and Myles but after that and the bankruptcy they just focused on safe, dependable bikes that could easily get lost in a crowd, but bring in the money.

A bit like Klein, I would like to say cool because of the early work, but uncool because of the latter stuff. I will sit on the fence.

pete in response------

with exception of the "actiontec" fork sharing the same monoshok design as the "headshok", isnt that really where the similarities end...???

The internals of the two forks were completely different, and dare i say it, the headshok was a 10 fold improvement, both in its performance and life expectancy..? I understand your point they do look very similar, but i think what helped Cannondale build their first HeadShok was the air spring contained in the head tube. It features a lock out and slides on 4 sets of needle bearings.
this was in 1992, action tec released there fork without any of this in 1991, action tec had 44mm of travel cannondale had 50mm,upgradeable to 60mm.

perhaps it was a case of the "ideas good", but how can we make it useable, and affordable for a production range of bikes...? not just a frame and fork package with a retail price of $1000.00

what are your thoughts on this..? i wonder because of the similarites.... did the actiontec company, have any contact with cannondale at this point in time, even if only on a consultancy basis..? were there patents for each fork design..?

can anybody shed any light on this, as pete says the similarities, are certainly evident.?

For me, the fact that cannondale made this system a usable alternative to telescopic forks, and brought this to market and accessable to the worldwide consumer base.....is cool.
It was inevitable that eventually telescopic forks would become better(less flexy). But the cannondale route,(although never a personnal favorite of mine) did offer there own in house alternative to outsourcing, from U.S brands manufacturing in the far east.

And whilst i agree i dont think that product branded coda, Manufactured by other companies is at all cool, it is certainly my first memory of a company choosing to do this, on this scale, and thus breaking down the the strangle hold that shimano had at the time.
(and whilst this is expected to be profit related, as others have suggested.) The truth of the matter is, the consumer expected to see shimano!!! ....SHIMANO held the cards and dictated price etc, perhaps due to profit/availiabilty/lead times etc, cannondale saw the need to create there own brand name/image, to negate the the shimano issue, and make effective changes in mid production run with out having to bere the effects of the global giant/brand leader shimano....???

For sure, this became common practice for many many manufacturers, and is rife today..my case in point... Trek owned and branded Bontrager components? trek do not manufacture every product labelled bontrager, but they do outsource to other far east manufacturers, that they can dictate too, rather than, the manufacturer of "said" component dictating to them.

Im still not sure if i would call this cool, but from a business point of view, it did set a precedence, and i suspect help with cashflow and aid in fast Manufacturing spec changes, and also help with lead times from build date to shop floor.

Many companies had their own 'in house' parts long before cannondale and many did it far better. A great example being Trek who's Matrix brand was visible on bikes long before c'dale did coda, and they did it with far more style: cooks cranks rebranded as matrix, answer handlebars with the same branding treatment, they used grafton brakes and bullseye hubs on their top bike at the time, even their rims like mount aero were mavic beaters. Likewise Kona, amongst others, had many in-house parts in the form of their headsets, brakes, brake levers and so on.

As far as Shimano having a stranglehold, no one ever expected shimano on their bikes until the mid to late nineties when Suntour and Campagnolo finally gave up. Go back to the late eighties and Suntour was the group of choice. Diacompe were the brake of choice in the early nineties, SRAMs grip shift eclipsed most of shimano's push-push shifters, sugino cranks were the most common cranks on bikes such as Specialized, Marin and Kona in the 90s, either as themselves or as cranks like the Strongarm or WI crank.

The mid nineties was a time rife with buying licensed parts from other companies: Kona with Curve, Marin with White Industries, Avid and WTB. C'dale went down the route of rebranding existing (often easily available) products as Coda rather than using the original name. Personally they missed a trick with Magic Motorcycles as that name had far more appeal than Coda, and I'd rather have dia-compe SS-5s than the coda branded ones!

With regards the forks, the headtube suspension fork is even older than Browning, Actiontec or Headshok. Alex Moulton used them years or decades earlier. No doubt many of the ideas in the three mountain bike forks come directly from the Moulton forks, negating many patents due to the age.

As far a 10 fold improvement, that only came after a 10 fold length of time on the market. The early ones were bad; poor performing, poor durability and high cost as well as huge cost for proprietary parts such as the needles and the Klein like bearings. In fact if you look at the Action-tecs with their coil/oil internals, it took Cannondale years to ditch the elastomers before realising that Coil/oil was the way forward.

pete_mcc":1vifwpqi said:

Many companies had

Personally they missed a trick with Magic Motorcycles as that name had far more appeal than Coda

Click to expand...

That said I do have a set of Coda 900s in the garage, although a little elbow grease removed the offending logo!