About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provocative imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
Maxi-Car did one thing and did it better than anyone else: make great bike hubs. The marque is a braid of three separate French houses that include a Lyon artisan who patented the application of demountable annular bearings to the…
Idéale saddles were made at Pont-Saint-Pierre in the Eure for just over a century, first by F. Tron & Cie and then by Tron et Berthet, and for much of that time they were the leather saddle a French rider…
Step back into the workshop of Spécialités TA, the small Clamart firm whose duralumin chainrings and cranksets carried some of the biggest names in cycling for over 70 years. This gallery gathers the company’s period advertisements, catalog pages and technical…
A reference guide to the Idéale saddle and clip lineup, covering model number, category, top material, rail material, size, weight and technical notes for dozens of historic models. Use this table to identify, compare and date saddles from the Idéale catalog.
Hobbs of Barbican built its reputation on Albert Hobbs’ conviction that “a cycle is as good as its frame,” and the timeline below traces the company from its 1930 founding through wartime relocation to a brief 1970s revival. Along the…
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…
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 program of aluminum-magnesium frame construction, componentry and…
Bayliss-Wiley Co. Ltd. was a highly respected designer and manufacturer of bicycle components for nearly a full century, ahead of its time as inventor of the world's first cassette hub in 1938 and bespoke supplier to British cycling and automotive companies alike. This timeline traces its corporate lifecycle through motorcar production and changes of ownership to its 1969 fade into Renold Chains Ltd.
This feature article provides an unprecedented visual window into the industrial soul of the Idéale brand, presenting rare archival photographs of the F. Tron & Cie and Tron & Berthet facilities and the generations of artisans who defined them. The images trace the company's journey from its hydraulic roots at a former wool mill to the height of its mid-century power.
The history of Idéale is a century-long narrative of industrial perseverance and technical mastery that transformed a modest Parisian stamping workshop into the emblematic brand of the French saddle. Founded in 1890 by Jean-François Tron, this timeline traces its pursuit of extreme lightness through Duralumin and Titanium chassis and its racing pedigree under Marcel Berthet.
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