Blog

10 bikes – could you do it?

Or, “If you could have ten bikes, what would they be? ” For Bobby B.

1. The Quickbeam in full commuter drag. Maybe with the S3X, or the Sachs Automatic, probably just fixed.

2. Bontrager mountain bike with drop bars. I love this bike.

3. The Gravel Roadster, but custom made to fit me. Ideally made by Rob English. Gears, 60mm tires, fenderable, ~20lbs. Right now I’m using the GR for 10 mile loops with the guys from work, and I enjoy the contrast with their bikes.

4. Matt Chester fixed gear. Hunter fork. I’ve loved his bikes ever since I saw one on Fixed Gear Gallery aeons ago.

5. Jones titanium spaceframe. Truss fork, shorty 6-speed cluster, H-bars. Every Jones mod available.

6. Rob English snow bike. Superlight, but giant tires. The Gravel Roadster x2. Basically, my idea is that a fatbike doesn’t need to be heavy-duty, because the massive tires insulate the bike from shocks.

7. Time Trial commute bike. For my 19 mi trip to work. In style. This would also be a Rob English bike, I think. Fenders, Hetres, lighting, and a Ruckus front box.

8. Cyclocross bike. A vanity racing bike, just for showing off. Legolas, Sachs, Speedvagen, or Ira Ryan. A pretty track bike would fill the same (nonexistent) void.

9. Custom Rivendell fixed gear offroad bike. A Quickbeam with more clearance. Threadless steerer, vertical dropouts. Gusset.

10. Appaloosa. Boscos, just a couple gears.

Not a single bike on this list has tires narrower than 33mm…

July 5, 2013
cog removal research
spoking a cogged up hub, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.

My unbuilt White ENO hub with the evil 16t cog and the lockring is back on my table. I looked up how to remove a cog from a hub that isn’t built into a wheel, and found a good thread on possible fixes.

Suggestions include:
- “Build half the wheel using the side of the hub where the spoke holes aren’t blocked by the cog.” One guy ripped his Shimano hub in half this way. I think the White Industries hub shell has more torsional strength due to its fatness, but I may save it for a last resort.
- “String some spokes in the hub, using the cog-side spoke holes. If it’s high flange, it should work, be a man.” On this hub with a 16 tooth cog, this method requires bending the spokes almost into a circle as you thread it in, in order to pass the cog. Each spoke would have to be unbent before lacing the wheel. My one test spoke makes this seem like a crappy plan. I do have 11 free spokes and a couple rims, but I’m not excited to pursue this strategy.
- “Make a wooden jig to hold the hubshell in a vice.” I have no vice.
- “Slit the cog with a Dremel cutoff wheel. Buy lots of wheels.” I have a Dremel I’d love to put to use, but I’m afraid. Plan C or D maybe.
- “Strap tool. Strap tools are bad ass.” This seems like a good plan. I may need to buy one anyway. Because it’s a tool. This is Plan B.
- “Go to the bike shop.” This worked for one guy. I love the Bike Peddler, and it’s three blocks from my house. Plan A.
Other things I’m looking at in my workroom (toolboxes stacked on the floor of the shed):

Brake cables… could these be used instead of spokes? Thread them through the holes, wrap them around the hub shell, and affix them to a rim somehow? Run the cable through the spoke holes, and affix them by the pinch bolts to dozens of brakes and derailleurs?

The Bontrager. Put the hub in the dropouts, wrap the chain rotafix-style around the cog, get some leverage on the hub with… another cog on the freewheel side of the hub, and rotafixed with a second chain? My mental picture of this working out has twice as many stuck cogs, and a wheelless hub permanently jammed into frame, tied on with two kinked chains…

Off to the bike shop! Maybe they’ll have a Phil cog-based lockring tool…
July 4, 2013
Fixing the bar-end shifters
The other day I mentioned that I was having trouble getting the full range of gear engagement out of my Shimano 7 speed bar-end shifters. The helpful folk on the RBW List pointed me to a fix for it, right there in the archives. I had ignored the thread way back in September, since gears aren’t my bag, right?

Since I now have two bikes with bar-end shifters, constituting 50% of my entire stable and all of my geared bikes, it behooves me to pay attention sometimes.

The basic problem is that if you take the shifter apart and fiddle with it, or buy it in separate pieces, or install it multiple times, you can end up with a shifter that doesn’t have enough “throw” to carry the rear derailleur all the way up and down the cassette. This apparently happens because the wound-up ratcheting springy magical thing inside the shifter gets unwound. To fix it, you need to wind it back up.

In an ideal world, I’d be able to buy (or make!) a special tool to wind up the slack, and reset the shifter. In practice, you can simply use the shifter pod itself to wind the shifter back up.
- You need to slack up the cable (but not remove it, yay).
- Remove the shifter from the pod, leaving the pod in the bar-end.
- Line up the square “chunk” on the shifter with the matching indent of the pod, with the lever pointed straight out.
- Ratchet the lever straight down.
- Take the lever off the pod, line up the squares with the lever pointed straight back.
- Ratchet the lever straight down.
- Times 4, or until the lever no longer goes down.
- Take the lever off the pod, and line up the squares with the lever pointed straight down.
You are now ready to rock and roll. “Rock and roll” is biketinker for “adjust the limit screws on the derailleur so you don’t shift into the spokes.”

Every time you ratchet down, you’re taking slack out of the system. Or appeasing the tiny daemons that live in there.

Here I am, practicing my new videography skillzes.
July 1, 2013
skate deck color check

I had a skate deck color request for “not quite chartreuse, not quite olive-y acid green.” I thought all my decks were black (with a sexy black band around them), but I had a rasta deck hidden away as well.

This seems more “not quite Juaritos limon soda,” but I really like the stickers.

I think I can make matched pedals by using pieces that match diagonally. Usually a pair is directly attached, where the left side of the deck becomes the right pedal deck, and vice versa. Just have to be a little more careful in the measuring…

Update: Success – the diagonal matching works! This whole deck is getting that treatment. I’m prepping more decks even now. They’ll go on Etsy, with cleats, at a dramatically inflated price.

July 1, 2013
White ENO hub with a cog, lockring and no spokes

This was an impulse buy. I should regret it, but I don’t. I’ve wanted an ENO hub for a long time, partly because it’s useful for fixing (“turning into fixies”) bikes with vertical dropouts, but mostly because it’s such a cool idea. I have a goal of putting White hubs on a couple of my bikes, but haven’t yet. I love hubs. I’m attracted to the shiny blingy ones, but I really like the ones that do weird things.

This hub has a center of rotation that is non-congruent with the axle ends. This feature lets you run a singlespeed or fixed wheel on a bike with vertical dropouts, because you can swing the hub backwards to tighten the chain. Before the ENO Eccentric, you would have needed to calculate a Magic Gear, in order to have a decent chain tension with a vertical dropout. So it’s cool, and extremely niche. In fact, secret knowledge is the essence of cool.

This one has 135mm rear spacing, so it could be built into a 26″ wheel for the Bontrager, or a 29er wheel for the Gravel Roadster. I like the Bontrager as it is, and I just geared up the Gravel Roadster with a derailleur and cassette.

So I have a hub that’s begging for a new bike to be built around it. Oops. Maybe a Legolas or Black Mountain Cycles cyclocross bike? A Jones doesn’t need this, since it comes with an eccentric bottom bracket that does the same thing. Those are all unlikely choices, since I already spent my discretionary funds on this hub… oops.

The other “oops” is that it was cut out of its wheel before the cog and lockring were removed. I figured I’d lace it to a rim, to get some leverage on the cog, but it’s going to be hard to weasel spokes past the cog and into the spoke holes in the first place.

I won’t keep the cog on there. I don’t think I can build a wheel without removing the cog, and I don’t use 1/8″ cogs, anyway. Or lockrings (the Rotafix Method is fine). So… what’s the best method to remove a cog from a hub, if you can’t use the rim for leverage?

June 30, 2013
Four clicks on a 7 speed shifter

I bought a used 7 speed set of bar-end shifters in preparation for gearing up the Gravel Roadster. I also got a nice set of clamp-on downtube shifters for the Ross at the same time, but realized that I don’t have a cassette-able wheel that will work with the 120mm spacing it has now, after 13 years as a fixed gear. The Kogswell singlespeed hub I’ve got on there is only suitable for fixed use (and offroad fixed, at that), because the nut (or something) makes it unpossible to remove a freewheel with our normal Earth tools.

I digress, but the gist is, “hey I might have zero single-geared bikes by the end of the summer.” Unlikely, but possible. I might do it just to freak myself out. I have an automatic Sachs two speed coaster brake wheel and a Sturmey-Archer S3X three speed fixed I can put on the Quickbeam in about four minutes (that’s half an hour in biketinker time).

Back to the matter at hand. I did indeed install the cassette and (just the right) shifter on the Gravel Roadster, and I rode it 10 miles with some friends from work, on their normal road loop (Lakeville, Stage Gulch, Adobe Rd). If we were to judge on tire size, I was the clear winner, with 54mm Big Apples, to their 25mm whatevers (volume increases by the cube, too, so… yeah). If we were to judge on usable gears, though, I was by far the loser. I had two chainrings, but no front mech (that’s English for “derailleur,” which is French for “derailer“), they were only 4 teeth apart, and of the nine cogs in back, I had maybe 5, since I could only get 4 clicks out of the indexing. The smallest cog (biggest gear), and the top three (easiest) cogs were unreachable with the shifter. My hardest available gear was about perfect for the ride leader’s pace, which was steady, just shy of brisk. The cassette is by no means a tourist’s friend, or a mountain bike cluster. It might even be a straight-block (it’s not). The limited range cog set is the funniest thing about the bike, even counting the Cyclone derailleur and the pink fenders. It is a roadster, though, not a jeep.

So I was rolling along Lakeville, getting parched on Stage Gulch and spinning out on Adobe Road, with cogs ranging from 13 to 18 teeth on a 32 tooth ring. About 72″ to 54″ of development, WHICH IS THE SAME RANGE I HAVE ON MY FIXED BIKES.

I had a good time, and my only embarrassment was failing to call out a black foam-wrapped 2×4 laying across the bike lane. “It looked like asphalt! I never ride with people! Ride fatter tires! Geez… ”

But. For all the fun, and the adequacy of the gear, it wasn’t working like it ought, which irks my OCD, and I don’t see the point of having shifters if they don’t give you more range than you can get with a dingle setup.

Why didn’t the Shimano 7 speed shifters give me a full derailleur’s swing of travel? My full friction Suntours on the Bontrager give me all 9 cogs. My friends on the RBW (Rivendell) list told me how to fix it (and more interestingly, why it was broken), which is a post for another day.

(I’m learning a bit from Paul McGowan, not just about musical reproduction, but about blog posting. Set the stage., String the punters along, and give ’em their money’s worth…) ;^)

June 25, 2013
Spoke replacement with a disc wheel

I rigged up the Gravel Roadster with a 9-speed cluster, a Suntour Cyclone derailleur, and a 7-speed bar-end shifter. So gears. I put gears on the old Big Apple one-speed.

I’m setting it up for my brother, who’s moving out here in August, after 20 years in the Navy. He ought to have a bike to ride, and I’m doing the shakedown cruise by riding it with roadies on the lunchtime ride at work.

One of them noticed my rear wheel was out of true, and when I went to fix it (after not finding my truing stand anywhere), I saw that a spoke was broken. There are a few silver spokes mixed in with the black already, so the wheel probably took some damage at one point, and other spokes may fail.

The downside of the disc brake, is that you can’t really get a new spoke in there without pulling the rotor. I poked at it, then just pulled out the DeWalt and the Torx bit and started dismantling.

The new spoke went in easily, and I thumbed it down to into the hub flange to angle it correctly, and peeled up the rim tape to drop in the new nipple.

A few turns with the spoke wrench (and a little slipping and rounding – what’s up with that?), and the wheel is now acceptably true. I failed to mount the tire in the “correct” direction again, though.

June 24, 2013
quite the touring rig

DSC02347, originally uploaded by socalpedalpusher.

Check the hitch connection on that homebrew bike trailer. It seems like it deserves more study. I think there’s a fork or two in there, creating a universal joint…

June 23, 2013
I can’t be the only person to recycle cable ends

I squeeze them transversely (if the hole was a rice grain, I’d grab it by the ends and gently squeeze until it turned into a lentil), to open up the tube, then I clean up the opening with a scratch awl or corkscrew end. Or a nail. Pretty much the closest thing that might work. There’s a kind of fit curve between “can I see it from here,” and “I’ll know it when I see it.”

If the cable goes into the cap, I’ll crimp it down with the needlenose pliers. Bike shops have a special tool for it, I think, that puts a nice crease in the cap instead of mashing it willy-nilly and hoping for the best.

June 20, 2013
It’s a corker

I like to use corks as bar plugs. They’re light, they’re natural, they’re free, and some of them have a personal connection. This one is from a bottle of Van Duzer I drank with my friends in Oregon when one of them was a winemaker there. I cut the corks in half, one half in each end of the bar.

The only trouble is… how to get them out? Plastic plugs pry right out, and Velox plugs have an expanding screw you undo.

For cork extraction… use a corkscrew! I’m pretty sure everyone does this, but it’s amusing and enjoyable to me every time.

The new tape (Bike Peddler has cloth tape, but you have to ask, and it’s only black) gets folded over to tuck inside, with the cork holding it cleanly.

I did some other stuff to the Gravel Roadster at the same time. And shellacked the tape! I never do that, but I bought shellac to finish some paintings, and figured “what the heck.”

June 17, 2013
The Peddaling Baker

I bought some baked goods from this fellow. He mills his own flour for his sourdough loaves, and sweetens his peanut butter cups with xylitol.

The downside is that two peanut butter cups and a hamburger bun-sized “loaf” will set you back $10. The bread was really good, and I ate it in tiny slices to maximize the payback, and kind of approach it as a $3.50 box of melba toasts, not a loaf of bread you could put in a shirt pocket. The peanut butter cups were grainy, so maybe he could mill his nuts a little finer.

I support what he’s doing, but I can’t really afford to support what he’s doing.

June 12, 2013
47mm Marathon Supremes on a Quickbeam

Here’s a 47mm Schwalbe Marathon Supreme measuring 43mm actual width on a wide-ish rim.

Yes, those are my calipers.

I like the Marathon Supreme on the front. Cushy, and fast. I put in my best commute time after installing it. Not scientific, but it’s a nice-feeling tire.

I took the Marathon Supreme off the back, due to clearance issues, but I may try again with a 19mm rim. The Kwest I have on there now looks anemic next to the giant Supreme on the front. I also plan to go back to the S3X, in order to ride some climbing loops at lunchtime.

June 10, 2013
STOLEN BIKE – Valiensi

MR3C9442, originally uploaded by JamesPatrickValiensi.

One of James Valiensi’s bikes was stolen today at CSU Northridge. Yes, that’s his name on the down tube.
If you see it on Craigslist or around Northridge, please email him (through Flickr?), or let me know and I’ll pass the lead on to him.

Yellow JP Valiensi bike.
Hammered metal fenders
Wald Giant Basket on the front rack.
Unique Bosco Bars with cork grips
A bell.
Leather Brooks saddle.
Tweed seat bag.

Dang, what a loss.

June 6, 2013
Three Nitto friends

Three Nitto friends, originally uploaded by olipop.

Olipop’s overlay of three Nitto stems, showing reach and rise. Also, it just looks cool.

June 4, 2013
Sycip’s personal trainer

My personal trainer, originally uploaded by Sycip Bicycles.

May 17, 2013
Irony

“I think fixies are ridiculous. Because, like, brakes. Duh. And they’re terrible for your knees.”

May 16, 2013