I spotted this bike parked up at UMIST near Piccadilly station a few days ago. The manufacturer is Dutchie, I have noticed their site a few times when I was searching for a bike, before I lucked-out with the DL-1. The bike comes with SRAM hubs, which I have mentioned before are some of the more expensive internal hub gears, hub dynamos and drum brakes out there. The rear hub is a 3-speed with coaster brake, and the front is an i-Light dynamo hub supplemented with a caliper brake. This particular bike sells for just under £300, which is cheap when you look at the cost of the SRAM hubs and factor in the included accessories and the lugged-steel frame.
Once again I am puzzled by the choice of the SRAM dynamo hub over the cheaper Sturmey-Archer dynamo hub with drum brake. There may be some kind of behind-the-scenes bulk-discounting by SRAM to influence this decision. Still, it is quite a lot of bike for the price, always nice to see more of these kinds of practical, utilitarian vehicles being made available to the public.
I hope it didn’t end up getting stolen, the owner seems to have fallen into the trap of “If I can’t take this bit off, no-one can.” All you’d have to do is remove the fork momentarily to defeat the lock.
Great bike for the money. But like you say, the first thing I would have to do would be swap that front hub for a drum braked dynamo.
ReplyDeleteThrow a nice saddle on it as well and you'd have yourself a really nice bike at a really nice price. It'd probably cost £100 for the saddle and hub, but you could make a bit back by selling the spares. At the end you'd have something which, spec-wise, would be about halfway between a Pashley Roadster and a Roadster Sovereign.
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