Search results for:

Tell your missus to take it easy on wet corners. I found the Hypers to be a bit slippy in the wet. Wish I had another set though.

I found 165mm cranks worked well on a dropbar Shopper and I am >180cm.

The Instagrammer is correct. On a tandem, I spend most of the time in the big ring, so tend to have the chainline slightly inboard of ideal. I would run the chainline as 50mm or a bit more but that would be difficult if you are using the inner two chainring positions.

Be careful of pedal clearance swapping from 451 to 406 on a Raleigh Shopper.

At joints.

A pity. I liked it, until some started coming apart.

My Reynolds stainless frames are 953. I tend to avoid the cheapjack options.

I am not seeing failures of brass brazed stainless frames. Given that silver braze is perfectly within the temperature range to cause intergranular corrosion on stainless tubing, I think coating the joints is the best option. No corrosion = no problems.

Brazing is just a hot metal glue. With the correct preparation (allowing wetting), you can braze lots of materials together. There were (rare) brazed aluminium and brazed titanium frames last century. What makes you think that you can’t braze cro-mo or mild steel to stainless or stainless to stainless with brass?

Many folk silver braze stainless tubing because the stainless tubing was high strength and very thin wall, hence tended to distort a lot under the higher heat of brass.

I don’t fully understand your question.

Most folk avoiding the greater heat of brass do so to minimise heat distortion with thin-walled tubing.

For clarity, the intergranular corrosion issue is within the eutectic silver braze material, not the stainless. If the braze doesn’t get exposed to chlorides (e.g. road salt, sweat), then deterioration is slow to nil. Shiny stainless ridden solely on sunny Sundays won’t ever come apart.

A friend of mine was doing winter 600km brevets in northern England on his midlife crisis bike, fillet brazed stainless (eutectic silver). After it came unglued a couple of times, he consulted with the metallurgists at his work. Their response was that palladium was the correct brazing material to absolutely avoid intergranular corrosion but brass was better than silver.

His bike manufacturer started clearcoating their stainless bikes and that seems to provide enough protection. A couple of other UK framebuilders have swapped from silver to brass after some of their frames came unglued. No issues with brass that I know of, other than increased heat distortion.

Have a chat to Reynolds.

Silver brazing and stainless is not a great combination when exposed to chlorides. Intergranular corrosion is a real thing and tends to unglue the joint over time. A decent coating will slow or halt the deterioration.

I am a fan of https://www.tyrekey.com/ Even my missus can remove and fit tight tyres with it and small enough to carry on the bike.

I’ve done about 18 x 1200+km brevets on four continents.
https://www.randonneursmondiaux.org/59-Calendrier_2023.html might give you some ideas for longer brevets.

The BRM list linked above will tell you most of the shorter brevets. Most countries have very front-end-loaded calendars during PBP years.

Up Nebo and Glorious, through Splityard Creek and Glamorganvale, then either ride back or train from Rosewood. Plenty of variations (and elevation gain) available on that.

Occasionally a screw securing the cable guide can act as a grub screw on the BB.

I wouldn’t be happy using that bar for any athletic riding. Pootling down the pub, maybe.

Yes. Many older-style cranks have stress-raisers between crank and spider. Prophylactic rounding out can prevent cracks forming.

I had a couple of Super Record cranks crack the same way. I ground out the cracks, checked by dye penetrant inspection. I shelved one set because the crack had gone too deep for my comfort. The other remained in use with no issues.

30.0 cups are traditionally matched with a 27.0 crown race. 30.2 with 26.4. There are exceptions, of course.

Campag are ISO and what I would use. It is pretty easy to cut a 27.0 fork to 26.4.

I am glad that I’m not the only one to have the feeling that low trail bikes can bite back at times, though I don’t understand exactly how or why. I have a couple of them (including a Moulton) and have been taken down hard more than once in circumstances that felt like they should have been manageable. One of them put me in traction for weeks.

Background: 4 decades of riding most things with pedals - velodrome, road, penny farthing and MTB racing last century, tandem racing and touring, own several small-wheel bikes, ridden brevets on most bikes above, confident descender, used to unicycle, ridden all recumbent bikes that I have attempted so far (though some weirdies would probably beat me).

Raw mudflaps are worth it, particularly the longer ones.

You could ask Royce directly. I see Cliff a few times each year and he is always helpful.

Commiserations

It seems I will be captaining a blind stoker on Sunday. Anything that a ‘big bike’ rider should watch for in particular?

There were a couple of fat bikes. None of them finished.