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pics from wayback
Bill C:
Audax
Brevet
Commutour
Cyclosportif
Exp
Nemesis
Nomad
Sherpa
xTc
Joe B:
I still ride one of those. Its had a rather fine respray mind.
Hear are two photos taken in completely different conditions.
in4:
I enjoyed looking at those, thanks for posting. It got me thinking of those names for Thorn models that never made the cut or are yet to be mused upon! I did think of the Thorn Thrust but decided that sounded too much like an adult movie 'actor' Perhaps the Thorn Mistral? But then maybe that has too many overtones of a wet weekend in France. Thorn Expresso if a fixie city model is ever considered
(shudder!) Lastly how about the Thorn Pamir for a fully loaded Thorn that'll go anywhere :)
Andre Jute:
No more, I beg you! I'm suffering bike porn overload!
--- Quote from: in4 on May 20, 2016, 02:38:21 pm ---It got me thinking of those names for Thorn models that never made the cut or are yet to be mused upon! ... Perhaps the Thorn Mistral? But then maybe that has too many overtones of a wet weekend in France. ... Lastly how about the Thorn Pamir for a fully loaded Thorn that'll go anywhere :)
--- End quote ---
Mmm, there was a Maserati Mistral model, very beautiful Frua body, on which I once tried to trade in my 3500GT, but the dealer wanted too much for the Mistral, considering it was only another 6 cylinder car...
The Mistral, as anyone who has ever been caught in it can tell you, is a miserable wind that blows only to spoil your holiday. But Maseratis of that age didn't stop there. There was also the Khamsin, a miserable wind ditto, the Ghibli, ditto ditto, in fact used twice by Maserati, for a later smaller model as well. But the fact that these winds were miserable didn't seem to register on the buyers, or cut into sales. They probably just saw them as romantic names.
As a sometime man in a grey flannel suit, I therefore pronounce that Meditterranean winds would make very fine bike names for Thorn.
Brilliant idea, sir.
John Saxby:
Jeez, Andre, I'd nearly forgotten all those windy names that clung to the Maseratis. Lovely foreign sound in the mouth, for sure, but as you say about the Mistral, there's a serious tension between form (the name Mistral is evocative to most people, I'm sure) and content (the first-hand experience of the Mistral).
This opens up the question of Names You Don't Want on your bike. "Harmattan" would be one -- hot, dry, and full of sand :-(
Another would be the Ciperone, a cool damp wind from the SE which sweeps into south-Central Africa from the Mozambique Channel. (Ciperone has a hard 'c', BTW.) You probably know of Laurens van der Post's book, Venture to the Interior, his account of hiking on Mt Mulanje in SE Malawi, and on the Nyika Plateau in the NW, due west of Livingstonia on the lake. The Ciperone struck on Mulanje with hard cold rain in May, causing a catastrophe in van der Post's group. Its name has an exotic ring to it, but it's a bad-ass wind. I had a sorta-brush with it in 2006, when with our daughter Meg I did a 6-day traverse across Mulanje. Just as we were finishing our trek, the ciperone arrived overnight, and when we woke, the mountain was clothed in cool damp mist. Happily for us, that's all there was: we had no more than about 30 m of visibility as we made our way down the mountain, and Meg was cool enough to say, "No worries, Dad -- this is like hiking in Scotland!" I wrote some trail notes on that trek, but though several people found them valuable, they never really took off as van der Post's book did. I guess we'd have needed a catastrophe for fame and market impact, but I'm very glad we didn't have one...
Then there's the White Squall of the Great Lakes, especially Lake Huron. More catastrophe. Stan Rogers explains the problem, poetically as always:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ4ddAgykfk
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