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!

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

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

[Andre Jute]

You're such a knowledgeable fellow, John. I'd forgotten the "Kipper", thought it is so nasty that forgetting it is no loss. Now that I'm old and only want hear about fine weather to cycle in tomorrow, doubly so.

[John Saxby]

Thanks for your kind words, Andre. We're in accord on the matter of fine weather -- with the only winds being tailwinds -- right now, no trick names required :-)

Enjoy your cycling on what I hope is a sunny weekend.  Kinda sticky here -- temps around 30 - 31, and humid.  We need a thunderstorm to clear the air and to give us some rain. 

I'm doing maintenance on my Raven in the cool of my basement workshop, checking nuts & bolts & chain tension, and changing my brake pads. I'm prepping the bike 'cos in mid-June I head west by train for a 3-week Tour des Montagnes. I'll begin near Jasper in Alberta, and head S and W to Montana, Idaho, a bit of BC, and then through Washington state to the Pacific Coast.

[Andre Jute]

Fantastic trip, John. May the wind be behind you and all the hills run downwards for you. I'm looking forward to the photographs.

On Thursday a pedal pal and I, on one of our familiar loops through the lanes, were plotting to link two of them by a hard piece of road so as to avoid the dangerous narrow bit on the main highway that links them more obviously. It's a sad comment on our public roads that we'll tackle several nasty long hills rather than ride a few hundred yards on a piece of public highway. The irony is that I spoke to the engineer in charge of rebuilding that road, and she told me, "We're not widening it so as to preserve the natural beauty between the road and the river." Great aspiration, madam, but nobody gets to see it because we can't get there, and the cars, all with one person in them, grimly concentrating on the car in front, whizz through the tight bends at 100kph.