This blog has moved

This blog has re-located to Chester

Thursday 28 October 2010

Dutchie

IMAG0528

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. 

IMAG0529

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.

2 comments:

  1. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Throw 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.

    ReplyDelete

This blog has moved to Chester. All the old posts can be found at Chester Cycling where I invite you to continue the discussion instead

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.