About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provoking imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
Ebykr celebrates the classic lightweight bicycle: essays, timelines, tech specs and images preserving the great marques and the people behind them.
Duralumin is not a bicycle marque in the usual sense. It is the trade name of an age-hardened aluminum alloy,…
Stronglight is one of the enduring names of French cycling componentry, though its own history folds together two separate companies…
Bridgestone is best known worldwide as a tire giant, yet its bicycle story runs from tabi sandals in the 1920s…
Bicycle companies faced a historical deletion around the time World War II hit, as the prevalence of automobiles and weight of war became overwhelming for manufacturers and racers alike. It was through this same period of hardship that North London’s Hetchins emerged…
Cycles Alex Singer began as one man’s answer to bad roads and long distances, a tiny Paris-area atelier built on the conviction that a touring bicycle should be designed entirely around the rider who will use it. What started as a shop…
Long before it became a byword for the durable, elegant aluminum fenders that seem never to die or go out of style, the name of Lefol passed through the fires of revolutionary Paris, the golden era of French cyclotouring and two world…
Since the dawn of competitive bicycle racing, Italian frame builders have produced some of the world’s most painstakingly crafted machines, and of all the Italian brands desired by bicycle aficionados, vintage Masi bicycles turn up high or even highest on the list.…
A De Rosa frame begins and ends with a single conviction: that steel, and later titanium, aluminum and carbon, can always be coaxed a little further toward perfection. From a teenage apprentice bent over a Milan workbench to a family firm building…
Born from postwar scarcity, Holdsworth grew from a home-based cycling-apparel venture into one of the great names in British lightweight bicycles, a company whose reputation was built quietly by a committed husband and wife team long before its racing pedigree with Campagnolo…
Very few names carry the same quiet authority in a modern bike shop as Cinelli. Born from the restless mind of a champion racer who traded the peloton for the machine shop, the marque built its reputation not on marketing but on…
Nearly a century before swoopy modern wonderbikes claimed aluminum frames and quick-disassembly travel bikes as innovations, Pierre Caminade had already built them. Working from a small Parisian atelier, Caminade pursued an obsessive, self-driven programme of aluminum-magnesium frame construction, componentry and marketing under…
The first Bridgestone I encountered was in 1994, the last year the company sold bicycles in the USA, when I bought an RB-T after a long search for a good touring bike that could be used for commuting — and which I…
Carlton Cycles, founded in Carlton, England in 1896, built wide-tired roadsters before a mid-1930s pivot toward racing and club machines gave rise to one of Britain's most respected, if still under-recognized, lightweight marques. This timeline traces its rise under the O'Donovan family through a 1960 acquisition by Raleigh to its eventual wind-down.
André Maury built his reputation in the shadow of better-known Parisian constructeurs like Alex Singer and René Herse, working first from the 15th Arrondissement and later under the corporate banner of S.E.C.T.A.M. His fillet-brazed frames and quiet technical innovations, including a 1948 threadless stem decades ahead of its time, mark this timeline of French cyclotouring's golden age.
Joseph “Jo” Routens ranked among the greatest makers of randonneur, cyclotouring and cyclosportif bicycles in cycling history, distinct from contemporaries René Herse and Alex Singer for his unwavering commitment to the everyday cyclist. This timeline traces his competitive and manufacturing legacy from the Brevet de Randonneur Alpin through his eponymous marque, anchored in Grenoble, France.