Jobst Brandt and the Bicycle Wheel

In the mid-’90s, I lived in California, around the Redwood City/Los Gatos area. My first job after graduating from college was at a company called Avocet, which the bicycle riding enthusiasts among you will recognize as a bike accessory manufacturer. Seats, tires, shoes, cyclometers, skiing altimeters, stuff like that. We were even the first distributor of the Clif bar. It was a fun job. I don’t think the company is around anymore, they were always hanging on by a thread.

I commuted (on bicycle) from Redwood City across the Dumbarton to Newark, next to the marshes every day. It was about 12 miles each direction. A great way to get your blood pumping in the morning.

One of the projects I was tasked with was to bring to life a product that had been started, but not finished. It was a tensiometer for measuring the tension in bicycle spokes. Devices like this had existed for ropes on sailing ships, but this one was specifically meant for bike spokes. There have been many copies since.

Avocet was owned by brothers Bud and Neal Hoffacker, who also owned the glitzy Palo Alto Bicycles – a shop that would just make you drool and swoon if you appreciate high end racing bikes. Palo Alto itself is the home of Stanford, and a magnet for the rich and beautiful as well as high tech business.

The brothers befriended Jobst Brandt, an American son of German immigrants with a decidedly European sense of cycling style. He studied engineering at Stanford, worked at Porsche, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and HP. These last two were local to the Avocet offices.

With his engineering experience and interest in cycling while living in the Palo Alto area, it wasn’t long until he started feeding the Hoffackers ideas for new products, some of which became Avocet’s most popular and memorable, such as slick tires, cyclometers, and the Avocet touring shoes, which I owned as a teenager.

Jobst was an outsized character. Even if he hadn’t been 6’5″, his voice boomed, his confidence could be confrontive, and the range of his stories and/or knowledge (sometimes it was hard to tell the difference) was really just astounding. 

His fame probably came from his initial participation on dial up USENET, the 80s/90s version of what would eventually become internet discussion forums. He kept a ride log, and worked out bicycle related engineering problems. The ideas he developed in some of these writings were the basis for his Bicycle Wheel book. He put equations and engineering principals to the dark art that is bicycle wheel building, among other topics.

The Bicycle Wheel had been in the works for a long time, but it was published by Avocet. You can still buy it.

I remember the first time I met Jobst was at the Avocet manufacturing facility in Newark,  We were working together on getting his design of the Avocet tensiometer manufactured. I didn’t know at the time what kind of legendary character Jobst really was, although I had heard some stories. In the world of cycling, and in particular cycling science and product development, he had developed a bit of a cult following of those who loved or hated or were merely amused by him.

Somehow Jobst avoided tearing me to shreds during our talks, but it might have been more out of pity than respect. Actually, I started off our meetings by flattering him a little, and now that I think about it, that might have had something to do with why he didn’t find my ideas stupid and amateurish.

After having some parts manufactured and inventorying everything, I worked with some of Avocet’s assembly workers to get about 250 of the devices assembled. Here is a drawing from the book, along with a calibration chart so you could tell exactly how much tension was on each spoke.

I calibrated each individual unit, and created individualized calibration charts for each one. I had to calibrate for 14, 15 and 16 gauge spokes, and wrote up instructions to avoid the butted ends of spokes as well as the places where spokes crossed one another.

I found a picture of one of the original devices on eBay. They were nicely machined aluminum with a good Starrett dial. They came in a box with my calibration curves. There are a lot of copies, some of which look like they were made from the same set of drawings as the original devices.

Anyway, this was my interaction with a minor cycling celebrity from decades ago. Jobst died in 2015. His last bike ride was in 2011 on his 76th birthday, when he crashed. In the old school European tradition, he didn’t believe in wearing helmets, not even the old leather ones.

I have one story about Jobst that he told me himself, and I’ll let you go. Jobst went on these huge epic rides around the Santa Cruz and Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Part of the reason I found him so fascinating was that I had spent a lot of time in the saddle on those very same roads, between San Francisco and Big Sur, and anywhere in the Sierra mountains east of Sacramento to Bakersfield. He also spent weeks at a time cycling the mountains in Europe.

But anyway. This one particular ride had him alone out in the Sierras somewhere south of Yosemite, I think. Jobst, along with everything else, was a great lover of nature and animals. He came across a dead baby rattlesnake in the road. He stopped, and tried to push it out of the road with his shoe, but couldn’t move it, so he reached down with his hand.

Of course it was just playing dead, and when he offered his hand, it bit him. Baby snake bites are the worst, because they don’t let go. So he was hundreds of miles from civilization by himself, and had to get to a hospital. He was able to get back to his car and drive to Sacramento as the venom was doing it’s thing.

When I saw him a couple of weeks later, his forefinger and thumb were a nasty black-purple. It was a wonder he hadn’t lost the fingers.

A colorful guy, with tons of great stories to tell. A bit of a controversial character if you happened to disagree with one of his many strongly held opinions. And a wonderful engineer with a great understanding of how things worked, and how to explain it to people so that they would understand.