21st Century Grocery Shopping

This is my Mundo parked up at Tesco in Burnage, approximately 6 km from where I live.  Loaded on the bike I have 4 boxes of breakfast cereal, 48 cans of Pepsi Max, two jars of curry sauce & various vegetables.  Because the Pepsi is on the top of the rack, the pannier bags are almost empty and I could have carried a great deal more (but nothing else took my fancy)  The bike as it is now (including upgraded fork, brake, lights, lock seatpost and saddle) cost roughly the same as half of a year’s car insurance would for someone my age.

I think the vast majority of people could get by just fine with a similar arrangement.

Twenty Test Ride

I decided to go to work on the Twenty today, it has a front brake now and a Dutch-style O-lock so it can be used(After my first post a user from http://raleightwenty.webs.com/ told me that the mount I recognised as an O-lock mount is also used to mount a pletscher rack).  My first impression of the ride was that the bike deserves its cult status.  It is very comfortable and for someone a bit shorter than me would provide a nice upright riding position (I have to have the seat too high for a perfectly straight back).  The bike doesn’t have the overly twitch steering common to smaller wheeled bikes, making it very pleasant to cruise about on.  The stock gearing is pretty high, with a 15 tooth sprocket on the hub making third gear pretty much redundant.  I have a few spares knocking about so I will have to fiddle about to find the optimum.

I had heard that bikes with steel rims (and calliper brakes)had pretty feeble braking made worse by water.  The front brake at first seemed reasonable considering its advanced years.  I made the mistake of passing through a puddle and getting the rims wet, it was only a few minutes later I had to brake and when I did I genuinely thought my brake lever was jammed because the wet brakes provide absolutely no friction.  They may warrant further research to provide new ultra low-friction materials for the future.  Suffice to say I will be looking into alternative solutions to the braking issue as the project progresses.

Raleigh Twenty Update

I have spent the weekend working on the Twenty, stripping the paint, getting rid of rust, repainting, servicing the bearings and replacing the cables and chain.  It is now almost rideable, I just need to service the calliper brakes and re-attach them, although I doubt I will keep them.

Stripping the paint was very labour-intensive.  I used a combination of a wire brush drill bit, a sanding bit from a Dremel and manual sanding to remove the paint and the odd patch of rust.  Once the frame was naked I went to work giving everything a coat of anti-rust spray primer.

I suspended the frame by the headtube from a fire-escape to maximise the area I could spray  (I did the same for all the other bits such as the mudguard, fork etc)

After several layers of primer, paint and polyurethane clear-coat I re-assembled the bike.  The first thing I did was the fork and headset.  When I took the headset apart I was surprised to see that there were no bearings in the lower cup/crown race.  A quick look at Sheldon Brown’s Raleigh Twenty page fixed that, I needed 25 5/32nds of an inch ball bearings.  The cranks and bottom bracket seemed ok, so I kept them and just cleaned out the cups and replaced the bearings and re-assembled it all (after cleaning off the rust).  The back wheel seemed fine after a bit of poking around and a clean, with the Sturmey Archer AW hub living up to its reputation as one of the best made mechanical items in human history.  The front hub turned out well too, I replaced the 3/16th of an inch ball bearings and cleaned out the hub and all seems well with it.  By Sunday afternoon I had my new Raleigh Twenty almost ready to ride:

Those who have read this blog before may notice the similarity in the paintwork to the Yuba Mundo:

This is partly for comedic effect when they are used together, and partly because my current intended use for the Twenty will be when I go to pick people up from the city centre (or anywhere else within about 5 km or so) by taking the Twenty with me, with the Yuba acting like a mothership.

Raleigh Twenty

I recently picked up a 1979 Raleigh (Triumph) Twenty from eBay.  It was cheap and surprisingly I was able to ride it a few km from where I picked it up to Wigan Wallgate station.  This was appreciated because it meant I had to spend less time in Wigan.

The Raleigh Twenty was made between 1968 and 1984 and was sold under most of the company names Raleigh had accumulated by that point, with the brand used to differentiate between models:

The one I got is a Triumph, the second most basic of the models on this list.  Sadly the kitbag is gone, and the rest of it needs some work.  By the feel of the ride, all of the bearings need to be replaced.  This presents an interesting technical challenge, due to the widespread use of proprietary sizes and threading by Raleigh “back in the day.”

The Twenty on the train ride home

The Sturmey Archer hub shell date stamp, October 1979.

 

Genuine Brooks leather saddle (not as bad as I thought it would be, but it will be replaced).

At first I thought these were quick releases, but they are actually basically wing nuts.  They allow easy seat and handlebar height adjustment.

Interesting brazed yet non-lugged frame construction.  Seems to have stood the test of time though.

The bike only has mounts for caliper brakes, although the back also has a plate for mounting a Dutch-style O-lock, which I may do at some stage.

I am planning to start by completely disassembling the bike and treating any structural issues such as rust first, possibly giving it a new paint job.  All the ball bearings in the headset, bottom bracket and wheels will be replaced and the bottom bracket may be switched out if the cotters break when I remove them.  All the cables will benefit from being replaced too.

I will keep updates coming for this project as it progresses

Lets see an end to the anti-cyclist sentiment

People reading this in Manchester may have heard about the story in the news at the moment regarding an old woman who died when a bus driver was forced to perform an emergency stop to avoid a guy on a BMX.  While I accept that it looks like the guy riding the bike was doing so without due care and attention I fail to see why the news coverage focuses so heavily on this aspect of the story.  It is worth remembering that on average 7 other people would have been killed on the same day due to road traffic accidents yet none of those are in the news.  I also suspect that if the guy on a BMX had been replaced by someone in a Land Rover Discovery that this wouldn’t have been regarded as newsworthy at all.  Part of the reason this story is seen as newsworthy is not the tragic and avoidable death but rather the novelty aspect of the fact that it appears to have been caused by a cyclist.  People in cars causing deaths is seen as normal, but because cyclists are responsible for so few of these incidents it ends up in the news. 

The other part of the reason why this story is in the news is that it preys on many peoples prejudice towards cyclists, for example if I am at the pub talking to someone who drives a car but does not also ride a bike, the conversation often follows a pattern I’m sure will be familiar to many of you:

Me:  I saw an old bike on eBay today, I’m thinking of restoring it for a hobby-project

Motorist: Yeah? You know I saw this guy on a bike go through a red light.

Now, imagine this reversed:

Person:  I’m thinking of getting one of those kit-cars to build up in the garage as a bit of a hobby project, it’ll probably take me years to get it done but I enjoy that kind of thing, you know?

Me:  Oh yeah? Did you know that on average around 250,000 people are injured or killed on the roads here every year, and almost every single one of those injuries was caused by someone driving a car?

I don’t do that when I talk to people, but people seem to insist on telling me this kind of thing, as if that guy who ran a red has anything to do with me.  People who drive but don’t cycle often appear to have a lot of prejudice towards cyclists, and the news media picks up on this in its reporting of news regarding cycling in order to generate interest by feeding these prejudices.  Maybe they don’t like people who cycle because they see them as different from themselves, maybe they see cyclists as a reminder that they could more socially responsible and not drive, and this upsets them.  Maybe they resent the fact that they aren’t getting the driving  experience promised to them by advertisements, instead sitting in their tin boxes idling along at 15-20 km.h^-1 in rush hour traffic, and resent the cyclists they see for not falling into the same trap. 

Sure there are some bad cyclists and there are some bad motorists, but people and journalists should remember one important thing; a bad motorist can easily kill several people and not die in the process.  A bad cyclist has at best a limited chance of killing someone, and will probably die in the process.  Maybe we should focus our attention more on motorists who kill thousands of people a year and injure hundreds of thousands more (and that is just on this tiny island of ours) rather than on the occasional freak (and tragic) accident caused by someone on a bike.

Nexus 3-speed conversion

Well, I’ve finally converted the Kona Africa Bike One into a Three.  Initially I  planned to buy the hub, sprocket, fitting kit, shifter, spokes, rim and rim tape separately and build the wheel from scratch.  However, when I added up the total cost of these components it was coming close to £100.  Before shelling out the cash, I decided I would have a look to see how much the cheapest Nexus/Sturmey /SRAM 3-speed-equipped bike I could find was.  It turned out it was the Raleigh Drift at £187.  Considering that I would have a single speed wheel with coaster brake left over at the end of the process, I decided to buy the whole bike, steal the back wheel, shifter and fittings and replace it with the back wheel from the Kona, with the intention of selling the newly singlespeed Drift on for around the £100 mark.  I get my 3-speed and someone gets a cheap beach cruiser bike.

This turned out to be a quite a good idea in the end, after overcoming a few hurdles.  The O.L.D of the Nexus hub was about 10 mm wider than that of my coaster brake hub.  After consulting with Uncle Sheldon I decided to cold set the Kona frame.  With nothing more than an old table leg and some brute force I managed to increase the space between the rear dropouts and the wheel went in without issue.  The 16t sprocket from the Nexus wheel was a bit small for my taste, and it made the third gear essentially redundant.  The gearing of the nexus three-speed hub feels like roughly minus a third in 1st and plus a third in 3rd, so I decided I would swap it for an 18t sprocket like the one which came with the Kona, so that 2nd gear would be the same as my single gear had been previously.  This produced gearing roughly equivalent to a 24-18-12 cassette.  There appeared to be a great deal of confusion online as to whether sprockets from Sturmey, SRAM and Shimano hub gears were all cross-compatible.  Some of the hub gear sprockets I saw appeared to be splined in a similar manner to those used on a cassette:

Others appeared to be splined in a different way, with just 3 small protrusions on the inside edge:

After noticing in the forums that the consensus was that the sprockets were interchangeable between most hub gear manufacturers, and also that the second type of sprocket was available from Shimano and Sturmey, I decided to take the plunge and buy one.

I was slightly concerned reading about how fiddly and generally an pain in the arse it had been for many other people to remove and reinstall the snap ring holding the sprocket onto the hub, but my own experience was fairly positive.  I prefer doing this to removing and installing handlebar grips.  All you need is two small flat head screwdrivers to persuade the ring off and on again and that is it.  Much easier than messing with a chain whip and lockring tool.

The only downside is that my rear wheel rim is now pink.  Its not completely negative though, my uncool bike is now that extra bit more uncool, and I assume also less desirable to thieves.

and finally the bell crank:

 

I am pleased with the result of this conversion, it has greatly improved the effective range of the bike.

eBay fail

I came across this on eBay, I have noticed it before but I am only just getting around to posting it now.

This is one of the biggest barrier to mass adoption of cycling in the UK.  Every company selling bikes sells them as “Sporting Goods.”  I doubt that the car would be in its sadly dominant position today if the places which sold them promoted them as sporting goods, showing off only the F1 cars in the showrooms, keeping the more practical transportation-oriented models out of sight.  Yet this is what practically every bike shop I have ever visited does.  If you want to get around on a practical everyday bike they can oblige, but the range of them is always small and they are hidden at the back of the shop (or they have to order them in from their supplier).  It is ultimately self-defeating for these companies to promote cycling as sport.  Far more people want an effective and easy way to get from A to B than want to participate in races, cyclocross and freeriding etc. 

By all means keep the mountain bikes and track bikes and all of the performance clothing and components available, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.  But please don’t promote those thigs as cycling.  Promote cycling as what it is (or at least could become) to the rest of the population; cheap and effective transportation.