This is either a rant or a lament, or both. In an earlier post, I covered the decline of Moulton sales in the 1960s, and how Moulton ended up selling out to Raleigh. What I only realised last week, when stripping down a very late series 2 bike, was how much these bikes were cheapened, de-specified and generally made worse over the years. Continuous improvement was not an objective (except for addressing a few known warranty issues like cracking forks and seat tubes) but improving the bottom line certainly was.
Series 1 bikes are generally well-specified and you can see Alex Moulton, the engineer, in some of the design touches. The adjustable lower rack strut, the lightweight tubular racks, the curved rear swingarm that gives a good bottom bracket height, the high specification Deluxe model, the Dynohubs seen on so many early bikes.
All these gradually disappeared as the accountants took charge. The Deluxe became largely the same as the old Standard, losing its alloy components and eventually even its chromed mudguards. The Standard itself was dropped, probably because they couldn’t make it any cheaper. The rear rack was made from stamped U-section steel and no longer fine tubes. The rear rack stays were just brazed permanently to the frame, and the rack was only fastened by one clamp instead of at four points. The series 2 swingarm presented an opportunity to fit an ugly dynamo bracket at the rear for a cheap bottle dynamo. Unforgivably, the straight series 2 swingarm completely messes up the riding experience. Unless you are extremely tall, you can no longer get a toe down at traffic lights, and the frame angles are steepened, making the already-twitchy steering more so. If you change a curve to a straight line, the dropout ends up in a different place: 3/4″ lower, it happens. Couldn’t they have fixed that with a dog-leg or an offset pivot hole? In engineering terms, it’s a schoolboy error.
So the late series 2 is a sad relic of the bike that took the world by storm in 1963. What about the Mk3? Well, I’ve never ridden one, but its reputation is of a solid but stupendously heavy and slow bike. The rear triangle is a predecessor of most of the modern spaceframes, and avoids the bending loads that did for so many series 1 rear ends, but it’s not elegant and adds a lot more dead weight. Plus Raleigh, in their arrogance and desire to find cost synergies, switched to in-house components, meaning the dead-end, obsolete 26tpi threading for the bottom bracket. Good luck finding a NOS BB when that gets pitted or worn.
I don’t really talk about Moulton Minis, but Raleigh did something even worse there. The Moulton Minx was a well-brazed iteration of the Mini with the usual 7/8 scale front suspension. Then Raleigh changed it to the Moulton Midi, which was a hunk of junk. The front suspension was totally omitted, with a longer headtube below the main spar where the bellows would have been. Now, a “lazy F” frame design is not especially strong or stiff, so guess what happened? They mostly cracked or bent due to the unabsorbed shock loads from the front fork. If you see one for sale, run in the other direction.
Fortunately, the modern bike industry, at least at the “enthusiast” end of the market, does seem to have embraced continuous improvement in specification and performance, although maybe things aren’t built to last as long as they used to. I suppose that’s why we see price rises of 10-20% a year.
As a final thought, I recently bought a used bike from a trader who also works in procurement and product design for the airline industry. Out of interest, he costed out all the parts needed to assemble a low-end bike of the type sold in Halfords for around £200. The actual value of the frameset, wheels and components was less than £20. Goodness knows how low Raleigh could have gone with the Moulton, if they hadn’t given up on it in the early 1970s.
Moultons and other endangered species 