I am! well, a mediocre amateur one at least.
I’ve put together a few tandems in the Sheldon Brown two bike style and nobody’s died on one yet.
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oh, cool. I also just remembered seeing a photo (which I can no longer find) of a guy who made a porteur rack out of the modular white-coated wire shelving units from the hardware store.
the modular support struts that go with them were appropriately long to use with what looked to be a normal wheel, though I can’t remember if it was 26" or 700c or what. some kludging was involved but nothing drastic, it actually looked like a consumer product at a glance. one end of the shelf had to be trimmed down, the smallest length shelf was still too long but it was pretty cool.
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I guess you don’t count the price tag as CK’s doing…
Here’s the thing - making a headset that lasts isn’t rocket science. It’s pretty much all about sealing, and if your headset has crap seals you can just pump a mile of grease into it instead.
If you’re gonna splurge on bearings, consider the BB.
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Or hubs. Lightweight wheels with low friction hubs will go a long way to improving a bike’s performance. I have got a lot out of Chris King / Phil Wood in the hub department. They put up with their share of abuse too.
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I was gonna mention hubs… that’s another thing folks get a bit silly about, IMO. If you consider the amount of leverage the tyre’s surface has over the hub bearings, and the fact that decent seals will cause more drag than the difference between the best and the worst bearings (assuming correct adjustment), I think you’ll find ‘low-friction bearings’ should only be of concern to track riders who don’t use seals, and use oil instead of grease.
Shimano hubs are good enough for anyone, if you ask me.
Speaking of wheel weight, what really shits me about all these wheelset systems flooding the market these days is that nobody lists their rim weight - to find it out you have to disassemble the bloody wheel. The weight of the hub barely matters a damn… and also, light tubes and tyres will make the most difference.
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I wasn’t even going to go into the oil arena. Shimano are great. I find there’s a lot more maintenance involved with the normal cone, loose bearing arrangement. Get a good sealed bearing hub tuned and it will spin for thousands of miles with little maintenance.
Hear you on the rim weight. With clinchers I tend to run Mavic CXP33s. Light enough, super rigid, and take plenty of abuse for road riding.
I don’t - get them set up right, and they’ll go fine until the grease gets contaminated. Years and years, with good seals. The trick is not too much preload, and make sure the locknuts are tight.
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Okay. I ran those sorts from 1986-2005. I prefer the cartridge bearings. Whatever.
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In MIT’s Bicycle Science; 3rd Ed. it is suggested that there is no significant difference in performance between the roller bearings (cup and cone or sealed) currently used in hubs, and a plain bushing. I find this difficult to believe - which is posited as one of the reasons that roller bearings continue to be favoured.
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Cup and cone versus cartridge is an argument I have a pretty strong opinion on.
Many cartridge bearings are just electric motor bearings with crappy dust seals, although the likes of CK, White Industries, Hope and so on will have something nicer. Once a cartridge bearing is contaminated it’s basically toast, unless you fancy painstakingly dismantling the bugger (in situ because pressing one out will usually damage it) and reassembling it, a fiddly job virtually no-one bothers with… They’re considered to be a consumable item.
Folks probably regard loose-ball bearings as similarly consumable (due no doubt to the fact hubs almost invariably come way too tight from the factory), but IME they last for bloody ages as long as they’re set up properly, and they also seem to be more tolerant of any contamination that works its way behind the seals. Which BTW is easy to rectify. IMO if you’re getting pitted cones, you’re probably doing something wrong.
To my mind, cartridge bearings are usually the cheap and lazy way to do a bearing, next to the bespoke approach, which pretty much requires the resources of a giant company. Loose-ball bearings also use less metal to get the same job done, or rather, often a better job due to angular contact rather than the usual radial contact of cartridges, and possibly better sealing.
Plus, I guess I’m just biased towards a setup that requires a modicum of skill, rather than a credit card and a rubbish bin. ‘No user-serviceable parts inside’ stuff be damned.
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Yeah, nah - there’s no way sliding friction isn’t less than rolling friction. Also, it takes a mind-boggling number of revolutions before wear rears its head in the absence of contamination, compared to bushings.
Mavic freehubs are a half-baked thing that employ a plastic bushing on the inboard bearing of the cassette, which has its problems… When that gets contaminated it gets stiff, which causes the chain to go slack when freewheeling at speed. The bushing requires frequent lubing to prevent this.
It’s bad, and Mavic should feel bad.
I like King headsets. It’s what I use, and their cost, while steep, is in line with their quality.
As lovely as their hubs are, I really only like them in two applications: tandems and trials bikes. They handle the super high loads in these cases far better than shimano hubs, and the large number of engagement points helps a meaningful amount in trials. But I’d have a hard time springing for them on any other sort of bike.
The majority of my bikes use shimano or Campy hubs, laced to Mavic rims with dt swiss spokes. It’s a not a fancy combo, but they work really well and require very little maintenance.
The spreadsheet for “new bike” keeps going. This first pass is going to hurt- it’s at about 3.5k right now, and it’s still missing a pile of stuff. Ugh.
Are dropper posts really that cool? Good ones are pretty expensive, and I’ve never used one before…
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I hear you on that count. I’m not a big fan of disposable things, and appreciate a skilled mechanic. (I consider myself one on my better days.) Considering the mileage I can put on the sealed bearings without having to replace them, I don’t feel it to be that big an issue.
One counter argument to cup and cone is wear on the bearing races. cup and cone, you can get wear directly on the hub.
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So I found a really lovely front hub in my parts collection. Shimano Saint, if that rings a bell. Splined disc rotor attachment, 20mm axle, etc. Sweet! I’ll build that up!
Wait. 20mm front axles are the old jam? 15mm is the new jam? Nobody seems to make spacers?
This is my life.
I’ve accepted that standards aren’t really standard and these things have been changing a lot in the last few years. That’s fine. But it’s like everything- handlebars, headtubes, bb’s, axles, rear spacing, etc. Oh, and wheels.
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Aren’t Saints the ones rated for trials [sic], DH and other crazy-ass cycling?
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My road bike has Topolino wheels, which have spokes made of a carbon/kevlar lamination. I have been very happy with them, and they stay trued.
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Yeah, but normal wear happens so slowly that you’re talking half a century before it’s a problem. Damage due to incorrect pre-load is what people are generally talking about when they speak of wear in hub bearings.
And it strikes the cones first, then the balls, and finally the cups. You get plenty of time and warning before the hub is toasted.
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I don’t have nearly the bikes or parts bin that you do, and I find it completely maddening.
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It’s the cost of progress. Bikes are still pretty much Lego next to cars.
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Good point again. It’s something I’ve seen more on other people’s bikes, that likely were poorly tuned. (My Chris King’s roll like butter though. You’ll have to pry them from my cold dead hands.)
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