About Ebykr
Ebykr celebrates classic and vintage lightweight bicycles through provocative imagery and opinion. Ride along with us.
A practical guide to dating an Idéale saddle — why there is no date code, what the initials on the badge tell you, which models arrived when, how the alloy stamps and the rodée main mark narrow the window and how to date the paper.
A practical guide to identifying and dating Mafac brakes — why there is no date code to rely on, how the Racer's arm markings changed, which models arrived when and how to read Mafac's own three-digit lever code.
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…
A 650B randonneuse built to exhibition standard in 1948 by Cycles de France of Saint-Etienne, and the two Daniel Rebour plates that put the marque on the page.
Idéale saddles were made at Pont-Saint-Pierre in the Eure for most of the 20th century, first by the Tron family, as F. Tron and later Tron et Enfants, then from 1928 by Tron et Berthet, and for much of that…
Origins: From Cabinetry to Duralumin Spécialités TA is one of the most remarkable paradoxes in cycling history: an absurdly small company that has held global fame and respect since 1947. It has never employed more than a handful of managers…
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…
From a front-wheel-drive experiment that never reached production to a crankset still made six decades after its debut, the history of Spécialités TA is the story of a tiny French workshop that chose to do a few things better than…
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.
Duralumin is not a bicycle marque in the usual sense. It is the trade name of an age-hardened aluminum alloy, developed in Germany and adopted across a cluster of French manufacturers who saw in it the same promise materials engineers…
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