meic wrote:I am able to date most of my IKEA stuff as being 19 years old as that is when we set up the house. As none of it had any hinges it is doing fine, though I probably sub-consciously vetted out anything with a fragile design when I bought it all. Most remarkable is a can opener which we lifted out of the 1 Euro box as a gamble and is still excellent at opening cans.
I am pretty sure that this was my first exposure to Chinese mass manufactured goods, we bought a lot of stuff because it was about a third of the price we saw anywhere else. We replaced all the house's crumbling bakelite light fittings with energy saving light sets with an enormous saving because it all came from China, while stuff on the high street was from Europe.
Indeed, that's very much our experience too.
I like the very occasional Sausage and Egg McMuffin, too
meic wrote:I am able to date most of my IKEA stuff as being 19 years old as that is when we set up the house. As none of it had any hinges it is doing fine, though I probably sub-consciously vetted out anything with a fragile design when I bought it all. Most remarkable is a can opener which we lifted out of the 1 Euro box as a gamble and is still excellent at opening cans.
I am pretty sure that this was my first exposure to Chinese mass manufactured goods, we bought a lot of stuff because it was about a third of the price we saw anywhere else. We replaced all the house's crumbling bakelite light fittings with energy saving light sets with an enormous saving because it all came from China, while stuff on the high street was from Europe.
Indeed, that's very much our experience too.
I like the very occasional Sausage and Egg McMuffin, too
I concede that the cafe is okay. Nice to find a point of agreement.
Pretty much my whole house is furnished with Ikea stuff, not had many problems. Had a drawer runner bend, mainly cos of kids hanging off it. Put up with it for a while then decided to try to get a replacement. Filled in a form on the website, didn't even have a receipt, around a week later, new runner arrived in the post, direct from Sweden. I did give them my Ikea family card number though, so maybe they tracked the purchase that way, or looked at how much I spend there and decided it was worth it. The only thing that annoys me is I seem to keep buying things that are discontinued soon after, meaning I can't get matching things.
That actually looks like quite a useful piece of kit - if you add the racks and the trailer and one of the bags £722 total for a bike with a decent level of utility at the non-discount price.
coaster brakes are not very commonplace in the UK; this is despite Sturmey Archer manufacturing millions of them. I am given to understand that for many years (in the first half of the twentieth century) their three-speed coaster hub was one of their most popular models, but not so much in the UK. For whatever reason UK manufacturers appear not to have specified such brakes for the volume sellers in the home market anytime after WW2, whilst SA were still merrily churning out zillions of coaster hubs for export.
I'd go as far as to say that if you see a bike with a coaster brake in the UK, it is most likely to be fitted to a machine that was originally designed for another market, that has been imported to the UK in relatively small numbers.
There have only been a few exceptions to this, and those have mostly been somewhat niche models such as Moulton stowaways and the like.
Meantime in other markets, it has been commonplace to sell bicycles which have only one brake, and that is most likely to be a coaster brake. An upright roadster bike in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, USA, and many other countries would commonly have a single coaster brake and nothing else, whilst in the UK it has been illegal to sell (anything other than children's bicycles) with a single brake for many decades. [In Germany some popular models have two rim brakes and a coaster brake!]
The SRAM automatix hub has some features that are worth knowing about;
- the hub isn't very well sealed; it doesn't really have effective labyrinth seals on most of the bearings, and there is no good way to introduce more grease without (at least partially) stripping the hub. If you used the hub daily I'd suggest that this ought to be done once every year. - stripping the hub is straightforward but it ain't that easy because you need some 22mm cone spanners to do the job. - the hub has a direct drive low gear and a 'gear-up' high gear. The latter gear ratio is less efficient. - The most sensible way of setting the gears is so that you cruise on the flat in the high gear and then use the low gear for hills. I assume this is how the IKEA bike is arranged. This leaves you riding in the non-direct drive gear most of the time, which reduces the mean efficiency of the whole system. Arguably it would have been a better idea to make a hub with a direct drive high gear and a reduction low gear instead. - The shift point in the gearing is preset and may not suit everyone. It is possible to reset it (by tweaking the shift control preload spring), but this requires the hub to be fully stripped down and furthermore the adjustment is usually on a trial and error basis, i.e. the adjustment is unlikely to be perfect first time. - if you use chain drive you can change the overall gearing of the hub by fitting a new sprocket of a different size (the fitting is the same as other hub gears including SA and Shimano, so there is plenty of choice) but if you do so you will almost certainly want to adjust the shift point in the hub, because the shift will occur at the same hub rpm which will now be a different crank rpm. - with a belt drive you may have limited (or even zero) options for changing the gear ratios using 'off the shelf' parts
