Model Railway Forum

i too needed a little runabout, so i bought a hybrid bike from argos, just finished kitting it out with panniers, lights, and got some nice clothing to wear while riding it

Does Hybrid mean it has a motor. The forcast here is for a very hard winter, lots of nasty white stuff. I have a racing bike, not used for 10 years. Think its going to the Charity shop. Looked at motorised bike for Heather, as her friend comes here regularly on one.

yelrow wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 10:16 am Does Hybrid mean it has a motor. The forcast here is for a very hard winter, lots of nasty white stuff. I have a racing bike, not used for 10 years. Think its going to the Charity shop. Looked at motorised bike for Heather, as her friend comes here regularly on one.

Hybrid is a cross between a road bike and mountain bike, mainly suited for commuting, but will handle off road terrain to a degree but not as extreme as what mountain bikes are designed for,

Generally hybrid bicycles started off being stripped down touring bikes with straight bars. Back in the late 1980's when hybrids started to emerge they weren't called hybrid bikes. Dawes brought out a range that they called "Street Bikes" which there were four models from a 6 gear Reynolds 500 bike (Which was very popular at £199 if my memory serves correctly) to their top of the range 531 framed bike costing around £450-500? They were brilliant bikes. Peugeot had also started with their "Concept 18" which looked really cool. I wanted one but was shown the Dawes Galaxy (Touring bike) which I purchased in 1989 and it is still going strong having had many rebuilds over the years.
The term hybrid started in the early 1990's when a few other manufacturers also started making them which also shared the same idea.
It took a long time for hybrids to capture popularity. We must remember that the mountain bike popularity which really took off in Britain from the mid 1980's onwards really took off because they had gears to climb steep hills and what most cyclists thought of off roaring back then was mud tracks (Which one could even take a racing bike on riding on tubulars), so because "Mountain bike" became fixed on peoples minds back then, other more suitable machines like hybrids and tourers, were overlooked. Dont forget that tourers were designed to carry heavy loads on rough roads up steep hills so were very suitable, but most thought "Racing bike" as they didn't understand the differences.
Hybrids, for a great many years were ahead of their time. It took a good ten years of retailers trying to show customers that they would be better off on a hybrid then a mountain bike if one wasn't doing serious off roaring.
Today's hybrids have also developed into almost three different types of bikes. Though common to all are 700c wheels and flat bars, we have some which are basically flat barred racing bikes with racing gears, others which are basically 700c wheeled lighter weight mountain bikes and still others which are basically flat barred touring bikes so the term "Hybrid" today has become very widespread where there's no longer a precise definition of the term.

Some have said in the past that hybrids had a road frame with flat bars and mountain bike gears. While it wasn't too far off what a hybrid was. Road as in touring or road as in racing? They were more tourers then racers if one examines the geometry..... Mountain bike gears? In a few cases yes but generally no. They generally used touring groupsets with the higher speak machines and used budget mountain bike groupsets with the budget machines which most people would buy. The original hybrids generally used triple chainset touring gears, though touring groupsets and mountain bike groupsets were very close in design and to be honest, were often mixed and matched between the two as budget mountain bike rear mechanisms were more universally available as budget touring mechs didn't really exist back then. (Not many tourist cyclists in those days would consider fitting a budget mech to their expensive machines! Most budget touring bikes were actually marketed as racing bikes despite not having racing geometry so the real touring market one knew one needed to buy a costly bike to get something decent. Therefore the market for cheap touring gears didn't exist as budget tourers were fitted with budget racing gears if that makes sense!)

eagle125 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 06, 2018 8:49 am so i had raid my piggy bank a bit more.

Lucky you. My piggy bank died a long time ago...