… and it´s been the wettest winter we´ve had for decades, so any break in the downpours is welcome.
The bike still is the Rohloff equipped city bike I´ve used (abused) for years. The pannier I´ve used since the late 1980s, and the camera was my fleamarket sourced Sony RX 100 Mk I. I think the eight Euro I spent on the Sony must rank highly on the most useful and enjoyable eight Euro I´ve ever spent on anything. But now the pix. (Don´t ask me where the geese came from in mid-February.)
Having been to Manchester recently in order to explore a city I knew 35 years ago, and found greatly and positively changed upon a visit about last year, I was amazed at how much time and energy the powers that be invested in creating a cycling infrastructure there, and shocked by how ineffective it is and how little motorists care for cyclists.
The first thing you note when cycling in the city are these, traffic islands, pylons and green fields:
You cycle up to a crossroads, wedged between buses and cars, tucked away on bumpy (!) cycle lanes that I didn´t particularly like,
and then you stop at a red light. You are going straight ahead, car next to you too. Or so it seems, because upon the light turning green, that car goes left without having indicated once and takes your right of way with such an easygoing causalness that you begin to think that maybe in the UK cyclists don´t have right of way at all, and only a conversation with one of the few other cyclists around reassures you that you do have rights in traffic. So, next time you use that green rectangle and move in front of the cars, only way if you want to live.
And so it goes on. Look at this:
Or even this:
Do I need to comment on this situation? I mean why bother with designating protected lanes at all? After a very short while I didn´t any more as the surface in the car lanes was much better anyway.
Then you have these green rectangles which should make cars take special caution with regards to cyclists.
Reality however…
And so, despite tons of green paint having been used, thousands of pollards and other items having been erected, you still find ghost bikes.
Still, making use of all due caution, I did have fun on the bike, and found it superbly useful to have had it with me, my trusty Rohloff equipped steed, light pannier and two massive locks.
On Hartshead Pike, overlooking Manchester, the Welsh hills and most of Cheshire
With which we´re hitting on the second part of my rant. Wonderful cycling paths along the picturesque canals that crisscross Manchester. Yeah. Look at the surface. It´s unbearable even on a well shod bike.
And some stretches are dangerous too:
And then, to add insult to injury, in those few places where you can attain a speed above walking pace on horrid hand laid tarmac, there are real honest to God speed bumps, that actually end a few inches away from the edge of the path too, tempting cyclists to use the small space between the bump and the drop to the water.
Very cute also, these green solar powered lights that in theory show you the edge of the path. In practice they are that weak that a strong light shining on them (headlight even) will make them invisible.
The rest of the canal cyclepaths is nice and suitable for post cards photos, but not very suited to be used as a regular channel of traffic in order to make commuters use bicycles more. This for example is the entrance to one towpath, findable only for locals:
Historic, but cyclable only for seasoned cyclists. Both are steep ramps of bridges, sorry not overly visible in the snaps.
So would I recommend anyone exploring Manchester by bike? I guess, it´s still so practical. Only look out you don´t get killed.
Instead of a proper post this month, for reasons of lack of time just a few impressions fom the first commuting cycleride this year. Taken in brilliant spring weather, the 65 km roundtrip was a nice start to the season.
Nature is awakening, and cycling to work makes for a very much more relaxed working day than driving, especially now as locals petitioning and pressurizing authorities for cyclepaths has not (yet) succeeded.
The relatively heavy KFS bike with the Rohloff hub is still my vehicle of choice for those rides as I need to carry much luggage, too much for any lighter cycle.
Over the winter some direly needed servicing brought a change in the sprocket, me choosing the largest there is. My rationale behind that was that I wanted to try to use the higher 7 speeds as much as possible to get out of the ratios that produce a grinding sound which I feel also makes pedalling heavier. This was successful as there is hardly any more of that nasty sound at least. Should have done that years ago.
Now, looking at my time budget things have not improved over the last years, and while in the beginning of this blog (seven years ago now!) I was full of ideas and energetic about it, I feel now that my posts have become less than inspirational. ATM I´m pretty sure I´m giving he blog up.
As I have no idea regarding the rules pertaining to a disused blog, if it will eventually be taken down or so, it might be a good idea for readers to scan it for any possible photos or info they want to keep, unlikely as this may be, and download them. Always the optimist, me.
No special meet or ride this month, but an update on how my Rohloff equipped bike is behaving. In all, it´s great, save the noise most Speedhubs make in the “lower case”. I have a belly feeling that in those lower seven speeds the resistance one feels also is greater than in the silent, top eight gears. The bottom bracket makes clunking noises now, and also the chain needs replacing soon, so I´ll try to change the ratios by getting a larger sprocket and a smaller chainwheel, thereby avoiding the lower case gears as much as possible. Also, I´ve not used gears 13 and 14 a lot, but 1 and 2 on every ride really, and by effecting the changes to the drive system that will be improved, I hope.
The next oil change is due too now, and the bike has deserved it as I´ve used it a lot this year. I don´t have an odometer, but a conservative estimate is at about 2.500 kms so far this calender year, and a lot more since the last oil change. Gear changes are still 100 per cent precise and instantaneous, there´s no play in any bearings and no oxidation on the shell or any other periphery parts, so the oil change will be all the attention the hub needs, I hope.
The bike as such needs a good clean, though, but all that oily dirt can be said to be a rust and theft inhibitor, meaning, I just don´t care 🙂 I see to it that the chain is lubed, the tires are inflated and the brakes are adjusted, and that´s about it. I do have to clean it soon though to check for any possible cracks in the frame, I know.
Major repairs: The front fork had to be replaced after a slight accident last year, and the Shimano 71 front hub gave up its ghost quite spectacularly in May, replaced with a SON now which runs appreciatively lighter, and that´s not a belly feeling. I bought a reduced price overstock wheel with the SON in it, so I have two different rims and spoke sets in the bike now, shiny and black, but again, I don´t care as long as it works and it does that perfectly.
My commute? It´s an about 32 kms long ride over four slight hills in the Teutoburger Wald area in Northern Germany. It takes me roughly 1:30 to 1:45 hours, which is not fast, I know, and while I´ve never been a fast rider, I´m still not fully back to even that form, after all the lack of time and the illnesses over the last 10 months or so, also the bike is really heavy and carries a lot of load too.
The route crosses no famous terrain at all, there´s no historical interest in that anyone famous was born in any of the villages and towns I cross, no battle has taken place, no famous buildings, nothing. At least, I´m not aware of anything, save maybe the part of the road that doubles as a hillclimb car race track once a year, explaining the heavy duty guard rails:
There´s loads of youtube videos on that race, it´s the Osnabrück or Holter Berg hillclimb, depending on how well the makers of the videos know the area 🙂
So for want of anything more interesting, one has to concentrate on making new friends on the way,
and on the few buildings that are nice.
Noted the colour red in some pics? Here we go for a sugar shock:
And no, the Schwalbe is not the company vehicle of the strawberry sellers´, it´s just in the colour its owner chose when doing up the moped.
Setting out early in the morning, there sometimes are spectacular sunrises, but they occur only when one has forgotten the camera at home. On the days the camera is at hand, one has to be content with simpler things like this:
Some 30 minutes later, the countryside begins to look familiar.
There´s more hills
and more decends
and some flats leading to more hills.
In all, I won´t say anything new in that when one cycles a route that one has partially driven so many times, there´s many things to be discovered, even tiny ones, which one is able to stop for and savour when on the bike.
So that´s the commute and the comment on the speedhub.
But why not more posts? I´ve been sidetracked by some issues with the heating in our house which didn´t render any sexy pics, by the car which did,
Photo courtesy Yannik
and a new love which rendered some spectacular snaps,
Photo courtesy Gideon
but which has put my affection to the test by taking up a lot of patience, even though I´m not new to the hobby of old motorbikes.
Also a lot of fleamarkets have been in the way of blogging.
Editing courtesy Nikki
Plus the century runs I usually do have been bedevilled this spring by adverse weather conditions, be it rain, thunderstorms or heat I couldn´t stand.
But I hope next month my post will be more interesting again.
After putting the German bike supply system to the test in https://starostneradost.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/rohloff-test/, I had a bike which was pretty good, and I felt proud of it. However, the grating noise and vibration emanating from the Rohloff Speedhub in the lower 7 gears proved unnerving in the long run, even with me using the steel frame, plus the hub started to lose oil at an alarming rate. Rohloff say that oil loss isn´t a problem as long as the oil is “changed” every 5.000 km, but the rate was alarming for my cellar floor, and that was enough for me.
I then thought I´d just try and ring the makers, because a former neighbour of ours, who also rides a Rohloff, said that this is possible. And it was: No wait, no expensive premium service phone number, but straightforward talking to a chap who had a lot of knowledge about his hubs. Wait till November, he said, then send in the hub via a cycle shop, and we´ll fix it, possibly for free. I couldn´t believe it. Also the wheel was to be sent complete, no spoking to be unpicked, even the tire was to stay on.
Some of the colourful paperwork which accompanies a Speedhub
So right at the beginning of November I packed a big parcel, printed out a form from the Rohloff website, took both to our LBS, whence the parcel was collected and to where it was returned within ten days.
It really was free, shipping, repair and oil change, and after fitting the wheel to my bike, I must say that the improvement is fantastic. Hardly any vibrations any more, no grating but rather a much healthier and softer whirring noise, and far less drag in the intermediate gear. And no oil leaks.
Clean and oiltight – the hub after its return
Of course it can be said that the hub now is in a condition that it should have been in from the start, but then how many firms would accept a warranty for a six year-year-old product? A Speedhub costs a lot of money, however besides the undoubtable and tangible high quality of the product it seems that customer service like Rohloff´s is invaluable.
The 130 page handbook which comes with every hub is another proof of this: There is much more info in it than a normal cyclist can use; i.e it will not leave you in the lurch, ever. It´s not 130 pages because it is in two dozen languages like manuals for Chinese consumer electronic goods, but because it´s crammed with info.
It starts with comparably little things like the description of a sprocket change, but also includes a spoke length table for all imaginable rims.
This handbook is absolutely unnecessary, and that´s what makes is another example of exemplary customer service.
You get what you pay for.
A Rohloff Cheapo
Last October I started to put the German bike supply system to a test.
Our local bike shop had had the opportunity to sell two seriously expensive electrically assisted bikes which are all the rage over here (and many of which have been tested as life endangering failures by the German equivalent of “Which?” magazine, btw) under the proviso that they´d accept a very strange bike in part exchange, so they did, luckily for me. The very strange bike was equipped with a Rohloff 14sp hub, Magura HS33 brakes, a rather nice Shimano/Busch und Müller lighting combo and some other useful stuff. So what was strange about that?
That it still was a cheapo. It was made for a large volume selling chain store dealing in bicycles (couldn´t very well call it a cycle chain store, could I) who fished for bargain hunting customers with the big names on the bike, but nonetheless managed to produce an unrideable (as in undrinkable, opposed to non potable) vehicle. First, in order to attain their price point, they saved a lot on labour, throwing the thing together in a way which allowed me hardly to leave anything untouched.
Next, the cheap presumably Chinese frame and especially the telescopic front fork were of such a quality as to bring tears to the rider´s eyes. The front fork wouldn´t budge when riding, but when applying the brakes it would nearly throw me over the handlebars because it dived to the bottom straight away. The carrier rack was so narrow as to be unusable, the sprung seatpin had no end of side play, and so on. This was, for instance, what the Rohloff cable entry hole in the down tube looked like:
Rain water would enter without any problem, and standing the bike on the handlebars after a few rainy rides would have water gushing out of several of these holes. The hole had sharp edges, too. The chain was so badly aligned that there would be a constant noise from the rear sprocket. Both left and right hand chain stays had a thread each underneath for the Rohloff cable stop. The fashionably short front mudguard was that fashionable that dirt would be thrown up everywhere when cycling in averse weather conditions. I swapped it at once for a stainless ´guard I had taken off a fifties bike as being unoriginal.
Buying a Rohloff and not Using It
So the bike had been ridden a max of 50 miles by its first owner; small wonder. You could tell looking at the rim brake surfaces, brake blocks or those nooks and crannies on a modern bike you can´t get dirt out of if you life depended on it. After five years the first owner just wanted to get rid of the bike and next, so did the bike shop: It was October. We agreed on a price which was considerably less than what you usually pay for a used Rohloff hub alone, my plan being to ride the bike over the winter, then break it for its more expensive parts, sell them at a profit and junk the rest, unless I liked my first Rohloff 14sp hub, in which case I would try to get a decent frame. So the first part of my system test had been successful: How cheap can you get a Rohloff equipped bike? Very. It had taken the best part of 15 years, but still.
The next part of the test was: Can you make a good bike out of a chain store cheapo? After a Saturday afternoon´s worth of wrenching and a few hundred kilometers the answer was No. I had replaced the carrier rack with one from my used spares box, and the seat pin had been swapped out for a non-sprung one, plus a good Brooks Conquest, also from my box, but no way.
I kept riding the bike regardless because I must admit that the Rohloff and the modern Maguras grew on me very quickly. I like hub gears, always have, and this one must be the zenith of them all. Contrary to what some people say I find changing gears easy (the secret seems to be to leave the cables rather slack), and the noise and vibration the lower half of the gears emit can also be greatly reduced when a steel frame is used. Sure, the energy needed to produce the noise and vibration felt through the soles of my shoes must come from somewhere, and on a bike there is only one source of energy, but the hub gear concept is neat and clean, and I like that. On the whole, I´m not becoming one of those Rohloff addicts, or disciples, or whatever you want to call them, but for me, the hub´s shortcomings do not outweigh its advantages.
The Way to a Decent Rohloff Bike
I decided to get a good, hard wearing and not too fancy frame about half way through this year´s very long winter, so the next part of the system test followed: Sourcing a lugged steel frame in 65cm c/t with Rohloff OEM dropouts. I don´t like the excenter method of chain tensioning, neither can I stand the long torque arm or an external switching box. Neatness, that´s the hub gear principle. No problem if you want to spend a couple of grand, a number of frame builders will be pleased to oblige. There are beautiful OEM dropouts available, but they all have their prices of course.
Things look rather different, however, if you want something down to earth you can for instance leave well locked in town while doing your shopping. Used frames – forget it; 65cm is just too exotic. Re new frames our local, provincial bike shops drew blanks for various reasons, most simply not regarding steel to be a suitable material for framebuilding at all, a number of them obviously not willing to look a little deeper into the matter than their ususal wholesalers´ catalogues. (Are they in for a surprise; they are completely overlooking the recent steel renaissance.)
I had nearly given up, the system failure seemingly not allowing me to get a decent, but un-fancy and un-hype-name Rohloff bike going. Note this, my budget for the frame/fork was up to 500 Euros, which to my mind isn´t nothing. So I had all but made my mind up to break the bike, squirrel the Rohloff away and recoup as much as possible of my money through selling the rest.
This was when the system´s saving grace in the form of freshly opened Dortmund cycle shop Radbude showed up.
Tobit Linke, its owner, not only knows that steel can be a very feasibe frame material (he tried on PBP, among other long rides), but he also was willing to spend some time looking for a frame which would suit me. He has a lot of interesting stuff you won´t easily come across in your run of the mill bikeshop and caters for the enlightened cyclist who is willing to spend a quid more.
This is a short film my son made:
It was the third try which scored, and I ordered a new off the peg bike frame, something I hadn´t done in about 25 years. Lugged, oversize tubing, shiny black, no transfers or stickers of any kind. Well made, in the heavy German tradition, just what I wanted.
Problems and their solution
After a while it arrived, and off I went to Dortmund with the cheapo bike in the boot, to have Tobit swap round the parts. He had to show me the ropes with the Maguras as well as with the Rohloff, both being firsts for me, so there was some work in it for him, too. We also reused the bottom bracket/crank and the handlebar/extension assemblies from the cheapo.
After we had done this, I proudly went home to assemble the rest of the bike. I even found a 30mm seat pin in my box, but then disaster struck. I have been re-using used stainless bolts all my bike wrenching life, which is close on 30 years now, without a hitch, but the cheap chain store bike had one last nasty surprise for me. When trying to mount the rear mudguard, a stainless screw just gave when its thread was halfway down the thread in the frame, the head coming off without any effort at all. Tobit later told me that this is not an infrequent occurrence when working on cheap bikes, so I assume I have been pampered, missing out on all of these nasties.
Anyway, off I went to Dortmund again, very much p/o, to have the offending half of the bolt drilled out or otherwise dealt with, and asked Tobit to finish the bike, which he did, using some rather clever tricks. I usually take pride in being able to do 95 per cent of the work necessary to keep me going on the bike, including wheelbuilding for my randonneurs, so having someone build my bike was new to me. Of course, there were things left to do like locks, the bottle cage, speedo, some brake fine tuning after the new blocks had settled in and other stuff Tobit couldn´t know about, so I still can say that the bike has been partially built by myself.
I must say that I like visiting Radbude; it´s nice to have a cycle shop again which sells this sort of bikes when they can get at them:
The Bike
So, after all this, what does the bike look like? Here are some snaps.
The frame was obtained through a wholesaler from Krüger, a manufacturer situated near Bielefeld, who mostly caters for the cycle industry. I am trying to get an appointment at the workshop and will report if it works out.
The frame seems to be well made, rugged, and not overly refined, but the price is very good, and the frame seems to be well worth its money. There are loads of useful braze ons, and hardly anything has to be banded on, which is great. One thing I don´t like are the kick stand threads on the left hand side dropouts. I can´t help thinking what happens if the droput is bent. That´s why I used the standard stand from the cheapo.
The ride is surprisingly lively, and I have not succeeded in inducing front end shimmy, which is something. The bike feels quick at low speeds, and I hope that once the tank track like Marathon Plus tires are replaced by something lighter and more responsive, it will be at high speeds too.
I would have preferred a more traditional geometry, but the slope in the top tube is not too bad and the Rohloff OEM dropouts make for steep seat stay angles anyway; something which can´t be easily helped.
I like the large diameter cable eyes under the top tube and the fork; they easily accomodate Magura pipes and all sorts of other stuff.
With the system test completed, I hope I will be riding this bike for a long time. However, there´s possibly one more stage to the test: Is it possible again, after many decades, to have a bike with all German main componets today? Once the rims will have worn out or the strange spoke pattern will have given rise to problems, I will replace the Shimano dynamo hub with a Son. I also could put in a German made bottom bracket bearing and a carrier rack. So let´s see what happens next.
starostneradost 