Cycling UK Forum

I am the proprietor of an independent bicycle shop. I have opened four months ago and despite newspaper adverts I am finding it difficult to drum up new bike sales.

One of the main types of new bike sale nowadays seems to come from the various cycle to work initiatives. However I have a problem with these initiatives for a number of reasons both generally and specifically with how it impacts my business:

• The scheme seems very open to abuse. Nobody is really keeping score of how often the bikes acquired under this scheme are being used for their intended purpose, and other forms of abuse are possible. This may lead to a political backlash against bike to work initiatives
• Access to the scheme is dependent on whether your employer decides to participate in one of the schemes
• Although Cyclescheme is open to all retailers, many of the competing schemes tie the purchaser into buying their bike with one particular retailer

My suggestion for an alternative is to use a scrappage scheme. Scrappage has, from our point of view, been successfully piloted within the automotive trade and found to be successful, so with a few tweaks scrappage may be suitable for rolling out into a dynamic sector such as the cycle industry. The alterations I would make would be to target the scheme so as to scrap the countless Bicycle Shaped Objects on british roads - perhaps by defining a "bare-bike" weight above which a bike becomes eligible for scrapping (BSO's are notoriously heavy). The bikes ellegible for grant assistance could also be defined so as to ensure that impractical bikes are not simply traded in for newer impractical bikes. Maybe set a minimum price, also make mudguard and rack braze-ons mandatory?

As I see it, the advantage of scrappage would be as follows

• More equitable amongst the consumer - it is not dependent on the workplace policy or intended use of the bike
• Removes heavy impractical bikes from the road, similar how the car scrappage scheme was claimed to rid the streets of polluting cars
• Fairer for the independent bicycle dealer - if done correctly it would put local stores on an even footing with large retailers
• Would reduce the opportunity for abuse of the scheme that exists in current initiatives

I would be interested to hear what other CTC members would like to say on the above suggestion, and any comments that they could add. If the response is positive I will consider writing to the Association of Cycle Traders and the CTC proper to suggest this change to bicycle purchase assistance. Of course the larger retailers are unlikely to support any change to the current workplace bike initiatives, becasue a lot of bikes are sold under these initiatives, with the sales skewed more than average to big retailers who are able to cherry pick the large employers by offering exclusive contracts that are very attractive to these employers.

Regards
David

AndyA wrote:Using a larger axle tends to mean using smaller bearings, small bearings wear out faster than large ones. Hence 15mm and 20mm would be no use for high-load long-distance touring. 8mm could be useful then as it would allow the use of large bearings, but realistically what is the point? I think that for touring and commuting it is always a good idea to keep your bike as "standard" as possible so that if you break anything you will not be faced with a week's wait for parts. I doubt 8mm is goint to take over the status quo

The problem of wheel ejection is also solved by mounting the disk brake on the front of the right fork leg, as mentioned by 531colin

My understanding is that the use of a larger axle will result in the use of smaller bearings only where the whole assembly must sit within a shell of fixed diameter. This is why there were problems with bottom bracket life for the ISIS system (is that what you were thinking of?) - the big axle did not leave much space around the outside for the bearings. AFAIK this is not a problem with hubs which are built around the axle and are not constrained by the arbitrary size of it's allocated hole in the frame. In fact headsets have been getting bigger in diameter for years, and the bottom bracket is gradually changing in performance bikes from the traditional 'English' size to the press-fit BB30, so called due to the fat 30mm axle that runs within it. The trick seems to be similar to frame tubing: a wide pipe with thin walls is lighter and stiffer than a thin pipe with thick walls, but the practical limit is where the increasingly thin walls of the tube are vulnerable to denting and other damage. The ideal axle thickness is probably an engineering problem to solve.

As for shops being equipped to deal with hub gears of this nature, hopefully Shimano will have to ensure that "Shimano Service Centers" really live up to their name! The Alfine 11 combined with the launch of the Sturmey-Archer S2C and the next generation of Rohloff Speedhub will make this year very interesting in terms of hub gear development. It's your move, SRAM...

Once the bike trade learns to deal with the oil changes for Alfine 11, it would be handy for them to revise the design of their other hubs for oil lube. Not only would the reliability of the hubs increase, it would make it even more worth the while of bike shops to acquire the kit necessary for oil changes.

I took a while to write the post because I wanted to discuss the use of through axle systems but did not know quite what question I wanted to pose.

In response to Crepello, I do not think that there is anything wrong with the quick release wheel, but then qualify my answer by saying that what we have ended up with now is not a quick release system . This is because of litigation culture, the tendency of the torque reaction of increasingly popular disc brakes to push the wheel out of the drop outs, and the difficulty in teaching the public how to use their quick release systems. In my last point I do not mean to belittle non technical public, we should all check the QR handles are tight before each ride, but in real life do we all manage to do that? All the above has resulted in 'lawyer lips' around the drop out which effectively makes the term quick release a misnomer. Finally, QR is a mixed blessing in the urban environment, where quick-release also means quick-nick.

So I would argue that the adoption of some sort of through axle system on new bikes is pretty much inevitable. As with all these things there will probably be a number of competing standards. In the CTC our interest is in advising fellow members which is the best to get, either from a technical level or for backing the technology that will come out dominant in the market. On that basis I would ask the following:

1. Is the QR axle an idea that has outlived its usefulness?
2. This new 8mm system is presented as the obvious upgrade path. Is it inferior to the 15mm MTB standard for touring? The available pictures seem to suggest that the hubs are very similar to the standard QR hubs. Is it possible this new 8mm standard is just a way of adapting the tooling used to make standard QR systems, rather than the well thought out 'clean-sheet solution'. 8mm is not very thick and seems to run contrary to the trend for headsets and bottom brackets to make a large diameter tube shaped axle rather than a thin solid bar.
3. Is there any chance of dynamo hubs for the 15mm axle? The availability of dynamo hubs seems a good indicator that the front hub is designed for touring.

Regards
David

In the mountain bike world most people see thru-axle designs as the future means of attaching the front wheel to the fork. The standard quick release axle has served touring bikes for many years now but has recently lost a lot of its convenience due to 'Lawyer Lip' safety features. The increased weight of riders and baggage, popularity of disk brakes and rough stuff touring seem to point towards through axle systems of some sort being a future design feature of touring bikes.

Of the options that bike designers have right now, there is the 20mm x 110 (too clunky for road bikes IMHO and 15mm x 100 (a competitor to 20mm as a compromise for lighter off road use). Now we seem to have an even smaller size: 8mm supported by Shimano and Suntour. Presumably the axle length is 100mm.

The smaller 8mm size is supposedly developed for trekking (i.e. touring bikes). There are Deore LX grade front hubs available including a dynohub here. The problem is, that with QR likely to be phased out and what I consider to be two viable replacements (15mm and 8mm) would you wish to invest heavily in something like a SON hub or nice fork until you know if the tried and trusted QR will succumb, and what will replace it? Although this new 8mm standard seems aimed towards us as tourists and there are dynohubs available for it, does the limited market for so-called trekking bikes mean that it would be better to choose the more established 15mm standard to gain access to a greater range and quality of components?