Cycling UK Forum

In the olden days, the only items of machinery in a typical household were a sewing machine and a bike, and they both had to be oiled to remain functional. Everyone knew that provided you put a drop or oil in your Sturmey-Archer hub once a month, it would keep running sweetly year after year with no other intervention.

Fast forward to 1980+ and our houses are full of machinery with not an oilcan in sight. All household mechanisms are greased and "sealed for life". And a merry life it is, but a short one.

Grease is oil made captive and second-best to the free-living variety. It ultmately becomes displaced from the sliding parts and with no way of injecting more grease or oil it dries up. But since people are no longer accustomed to oiling things, even Sturmey-Archer had to abandon oil lubrication in favour of grease.

Alone amongst modern hub-gears, Rohloff runs on oil, now with good seals to keep it in, so it needs changing only once a year, which is not too much of a chore. Rohloff really have no option, since only with oilbath lubrication could such a wide-ratio gearbox achieve a level of efficiency acceptable to the pernickety human engine.

Other modern hubgears have to be regreased more or less often depending on their design. Sram hubs are a simple design internally, with few moving parts and strong springs to keep them moving as intended, and seem to run longer than any other without re-greasing. Shimano hubs, on the other hand, are relatively complex mechanisms and apparently much more prone to problems when the grease runs dry.

At this years Shimano press day the hub-gear man didn't have much to do (none of the other journos have eyes for anything apart from the latest on or off-road racing stuff!) so I quizzed him about the maintenance needs of their hub-gears. He said they should be serviced every 2000 miles or 2 years, whichever happens first.

Shimano do their best to make this easy, and any shop that wishes to provide the service can get a supply of special oil and a "dipping can". Provided the hub is being serviced before it has dried up enough to mis-shift, with the likelihood of attendant mechanical damage, all it needs is for the internal gubbins to be unscrewed from the shell and dipped into this can full of oil, yanked out and screwed it back in. Enough oil will cling to the nooks and crannies for subsequent use to churn it into and thus refresh the original grease.

Unfortunately, very few UK shops seem to want to have anything at all to do with hub gears nowadays. Fortunately Madison Cycles provides a website where Shimano Service Centres specialising in hubgear work are indicated by an appropriate symbol. And if you're lucky, there may be one near you!

velomaniac wrote:... most other hub gears are not tough enough for off road use ...

The torque developed at the hub is purely a function of rider strength and gearing, and riders do not magically turn into super-human bike-part killing machines the moment they leave the tarmac!

Admittedly, a more draggy riding surface may demand lower gears, but gradient and load carried are more important factors, hence my road touring bike has a lower bottom gear than most mountain-bikes.

And besides, Rohloff is not the only super-tough hubgear. The Sram Spectro 7-speed is also very strong and not subject to the usual manufacturer's cautions with regard to size of chainwheel and sprocket. Even Rohloff imposes limits, but Sram do not. And if you want something even tougher: Sram make a special tandem-strength version of their 5-speed hubgear.

I hope that's some help.

They are mini-vees - see my comments in Cycle Q&A (now on website).

Campag don't expect anyone using any of their stuff to fit mudguards or use tyres bigger than 28mm. So you'll find the cable lies such a short distance above the tyre as to be unusable on a typical British touring bike.

And even with arms this short they'll need more cable than a racing sidepull, but not so much more that you can't use them with the same levers. However the blocks will have to be kept very close to the rims, which will need to be kept very true.

hubgearfreak wrote:... have you lived, or do you live, in a flat part of the country and tried a fixedwheel, or is this entirely based on assumption?

I once lived most of three years in Cambridge, went out with the DA every Sunday (as a break from student life) but still approciated my gears alright. Ever been out in a "fen blow"? And although I found a few more fixed fanatics in this group than home in Derbyshire, most of the Cambridge CTC-ites had gears. Most of the bikes around town did too, mostly hubgears back then.

I've also done quite a bit of touring in Holland, and observed that the utilitarian Dutch mostly find a choice of gears to be more useful than troublesome.

As it happens, on Sunday I was discussing drivetrain maintenance with a friend who commutes on fixed (no chaincase) and keeps careful records of chain wear etc. He also has a geared bike for hillier rides (although his commute involves at least 1000ft of climbing!) and volunteered the observation that chains do not actually last much longer on his fixed wheel bike. Weather, he finds makes the most difference. Because his fixie is used all year rain and shine (whereas the geared bike comes out for high days and holidays) he can get as little as 2000 miles from a chain in a wet winter and generally need a couple of repalcements every year (changing them at 0.5% elongation in order to avoid also replacing the sprockets).

My own commuting weapon of choice is a light roadster, custom-built from 531 to my own design, with Sachs 7-speed coaster hubgear and fully fitted chaincase. I probably do less than half the work miles of my fixed friend, maybe a third, but my bike still has the same chain and sprockets as I built it with almost a decade ago, and I've regreased the hub once. And before you say that coaster-brakes, hubgears and chaincases make wheel removal a chore: they do, just a bit; but I choose my tyres advisedly and in all that time have suffered only one puncture, so am I bovvered?

Hence my observation that anyone who claims his voluntary abandonment of variable gears has a utilitarian motive, and then fails to follow-through by fitting a chaincase, has demolished his own argument. (It's rarely a her, most women have more sense!)

Fixed and single-speed is pure aesthetics, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not so sure about the bravado/showing-off aspect, but if it makes you happy I'll try to be happy for you. I'll even concede that this form of cycling self-denial might be useful as a training aid - for those who are into that kind of thing - but a bike with variable gears is almost always a better means of transport than one without.

And there was me thinking it was quite a useful bike.

meic wrote:This is something I have noticed. We have a lot of old drivers around here and most of them drive as if they believe they can not cross the centre line to overtake a cyclist. Often with no other vehicles in sight and on a straight wide road, they will slow down and slowly overtake inches from me when the rest of the road is totally empty. I have never had this behaviour from people looking 60 or less.
Someone suggested a very scary but probably true explanation. Their eyesight is so poor that they can not see more than 30 yds. So they can not see the road is empty so their only option is to proceed slowly hugging the cyclist!

I've noticed this happens particularly where there's a solid white line in the middle of the road.

Remember the Daniel Cadden case? When I heard about that my first thoughts were: what's so bad about letting cars put a couple of wheels over the white line in order to pass a cyclist, and how stupid is the law that the cyclist has to be going as slow as 10mph before they are legally entitled to do that?

So I've been observing what drivers actually do when I'm riding on a road with a solid white line my side of the middle.

More than half ignore the law, and if there's nothing coming the other way they cross the line anyway. What with the accelleration of modern cars and the shortness of a bicycle, I've never noticed any dangerous situations created by this manouver. The prescence of the white line seems to give even these law-breaking drivers some pause for thought and they do at least wait until there really is nothing coming the other way - unlike when there's a normal centre marking.

A few drivers legally, frustratedly crawl along behind, inches from my back wheel, but not many and by far the worst from my point of view are the 1 in 3 who squeeze by too close for comfort, carefully trying not to put any wheels over the line!

I can't help feeling that it would avoid a lot of frustration and aggro for cyclists if this law (that I guess harks back to the horse-drawn cart) were updated and uprated to 20mph.

Left as it is I'm afraid it only adds to the urge to get us off the road wherever theres some crappy bike path nearby.

Prompted by the news that on the date of the London-Brighton ride anything, absolutely anything, with wheels and pedals will be impedimenta non grata on Southern Railways.

Finally Folders

First the railways turned away tricycles, and I did not speak up,
because I wasn’t a tricyclist.

Then they excluded tandems, and I did not speak up,
because I wasn’t a tandemist.

Then they refused bicycles, and I did not speak up;
I just bought a folding bicycle.

But when they banned folders there were no cyclists left,
on the trains, to speak up for me.

Chris Juden
With apologies to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

It depends on your reason for riding a bike.

For most people, including me, a bike is just a way of walking faster, and a luggage trolley to boot! It gets us from one place to another with less effort and more speed, cheaply and without either damaging or disconnecting us from those places - unlike motorised transport in all its forms. It's why we cycle for transport and for pleasure: not for the pleasure of cycling as such, but for the unrivalled access it provides to the sights, sounds and scents of the world.

For the overwhelming majority of humanity therefore, a bike with gears is an unalloyed improvement on one without, for even if the part of the world we are living in or visiting happens to be flat, the wind will blow one way or the other, sometimes we will be tired or frisky, and it always helps to start off in low.

Meanwhile, pretty much all of the structural and maintenance advantages claimed for single or fixed are equally true of hub gears - with knobs on if you also have a chaincase (a point which the people who make these claims invariably overlook), but the problems of derailleurs are also much exaggerated.

To look for logical, practical advantages in fixed gear or singlespeed however, is to miss the point entirely. There may be some, but this is not what appeals to its devotees. For "cyclists", the cycling becomes an end in itself and they/we (I'm not sure if I really qualify in view of what I've written above) strive to maximise the exciting sensation of impelling one's body into virtual flight over the earth, by reducing the intervening bicycle to its minimum components. Fixed and singlespeed merely take this tendency to its ultimate aesthetic conclusion, with a dash of self-denial to spice it up!

It is significant that the use of fixed/single-speed is more conspicuous in countries where one almost has to be some kind of bike nut to cycle at all! In places where cycling is a mainstream, these eccentricities of the enthusiast fringe are submerged beneath the mass of commonsense practical everyday riders.

British Standards define the distances that all new bicycles have to be capable of stopping in, for speeds of 16kmph and 24kmph, in dry and wet conditions. The legally required dry distances are about double the shortest possible distances (try to stop any shorter and the bike will overturn instead) and can be bettered on a well-maintained bike. However it is true that the majority of bikes in common use are not that well maintained and will need a somewhat longer distance to stop.

When formulating the CTC Standard for the Safety of Hired and Used Bicycles we decided that the ability to stop is too important to water down with respect to wear and tear, and to require that it is maintained at least at that level. So if you want to see a published table of distances that has some official recognition, that are practicable for a reasonably well-maintained bike, you can download the pdf here. The stopping distances on p4 are the same as in BS6102/1, which uinfortunately is not on the net, 'cos selling copies is how BSI fund their activities.

ThomasDylan wrote:I saw the TopPeak dual-valve head on Wiggle. Let me know what it's like.

Topeak offer two replacement hose & head "Upgrade kits" and I've tried both of them.

Initially I was so impressed with the "Smarthead" on a Topeak Twister we had on test, that I bought the pump for myself and also got a Smarthead Upgrade kit for the SKS floorpump at the CTC office (which was suffering from the recurrent SKS problem of a wornout rubber seal). After a couple of years, both Smartheads began to fail. First they wouldn't work on Schraeder anymore and then malfunctioned on Presta. This was about four times longer than you could expect from the rubber in an SKS valve chuck, but that's cheap to fix (if you can get the rubbers!). I dismantled and managed to mend one of them for a bit, but it soon failed again: too many moving parts in there and too easy for a bit of wear and friction to stop them moving right.

I concluded that the Smarthead was too-clever-by-half, and that I was smart enough already to know whether I'm trying to pump a Schraeder or a Presta valve! All I really wanted was a pumphead that did both without any fiddly adapters.

So next I got a couple of Topeak Twinhead Upgrade kits. Much better. Nice positive lock onto the valve and not much to go wrong. Three years later and both Twinheads are still functioning perfectly.

Here's a review from a folding bike enthusiast. He didn't really use it for its intended purpose (mountain-biking presumably) but then maybe you won't either. For mainly road riding the suspension is excess weight and the tyres too draggy.

Dahon also have some more road-worthy large-wheeled folders in their range. Unfortunately UK shops don't seem to want to stock them.

CTC is launching a couple of basic courses in conjunction with ATG, the people who do the Cytec training for Association of Cycle Traders. For details see www.ctc.org.uk/maintenance.

I've tried them all and had best service from Ciclosport cycle-computer-altimeters. The CM434 is their current base model with altitiude.

They used to offer a CM436M with internal memory and download to PC. I have one, but haven't used it much as the 60 hour memory isn't enough for a tour (especially when I forget to switch it off) and my PC has unaccountably forgotten how to "comm" with it. This feature now seems to be available only on the top model HAC5 multifuntion devices, but the new interface uses a more modern, convenient and probably more reliable USB connection.

Question 1 makes sense only if you're actually talking about a Campag Rally rear mech. I remember this model from the late 70s/early 80s. I'm pleased to say I never bought one, but I know some people who did.

The Campagnolo Rally was beautifully made but awfully designed, a mechanism that you could absolutely rely upon to shift badly for ever! They would never do the decent thing and wear out, but even the most sentimental of owners eventually got sick of the hesitant spoke-teasing shifts and either bought a Huret Duopar or something Japanese! By the mid 80s you couldn't give them away, which probably explains why you've been able to find an unused Campag Rally mech.

So the answer to 1 is: depends what you mean by work!

2: Campag do not really offer any wide-ranging clusters. Well, 10-speed goes to 29T, if you can call that wide. But 10-speed is high maintenance and othewise its a meagre 26T - unless you get something special made up by Highpath. And besides it's greater versatility, Shimano's freehub is a better design.

3: Campag have gathered their triple stuff into a kind of ghetto, apart from the main groupsets. The "Champ" front mech is for 9-speed chain and hence most likely to accept the wider 8-speed chain you'll probably be using in the interim.

4: Campag brake levers have the same action as Shimano's road stuff, so they work just as well, or badly, with cantilevers, depending on what model and how it's set up. Campag's own cantis were not bad, but now rare as hens teeth. Best of current crop is the Empella Frog legs.

JohnW wrote:A question for CJ - Have you referred this matter (i.e. Carl Gerrard's disaster) to Chickens?

No, because Mavic rims are also imported by a number of other firms. And I have tried writing to Mavic in the past, but they do not reply. My oppo at the FFCT has closer contact with Mavic however, is aware of the problems not only via CTC but also from French cyclists and does bring these to Mavic's attention. Not that it seems to do any good!

Is it possible that the wheelbuilder is responsible?

Possible but not likely. My first intimations of trouble with Mavic rims, tearing along the perforations as it were, came from a very well respected wheelbuilder, who was reluctant to build rear wheels any slacker than the tension he had found by experience to be optimum in order to avoid the problem of spoke breakages.

CJ - does the CTC have an officer appointed to raise such serious matters with manufactureres/importers?

Yes me, and when I think it'll do any good, that's what I do. And when I think it's a waste of time, I don't.

Should not such matters be submitted to the mainstream Cycling press, as a warning to others?

Cycle is read by as many people as most other cycling magazines. It might not be on the shelves in WHS, but it's mainstream alright.

I respectfully and earnestly suggest that the picture and Carl Gerrard's account should be prominiently featured in "Cycling".

I've had so many I feel sure that other magazines must have received similar reports. You'll have to ask them why they haven't printed them.