Need to have something like this as a plug-in add-onâŚ
Where you have a pre-printed âtrip-ticâ of your route that automagically scrolls as you ride.
⌠they specially designed a font for the numbers âfor readabilityâ, but then cut the â3â off on the right. And whatâs happening on the left? The 0 is partially cut off; itâs already obscured by the needle⌠and then they add an even-more-cut-off second 0!!!
Itâs hard to tell from the picture but that looks like lugged construction to me. With lugs, the joints are held together by a reinforcing sleeve and brass filler is flowed into the space between the the tubes and the lug by capillary action (when everything is heated enough). The bottom bracket usually has sockets for the other tubes in lugged construction. The brass that you can see in the picture looks like the âshorelineâ which is seen when the joint has been filled completely with brass until a little web of surface tension is visible at its edge. Itâs one of the signs of a good join.
Lugged construction is super and is probably the historically dominant manufacturing method because it is easy to industrialise and is fast, whilst enabling a good standard of reproduction and strong bikes. It does limit the manufacture of a frame to specific proportions, however, because the angles at which tubes meet is fixed by the design of the lug. Fillet brazing allows a framebuilder to vary the angles because the method of joining is (traditionally) to hand-file the tubes to mitre at the desired angle, and then join them with brass filler. There is a small capillary braze where the tubes meet, but the brass is also built up in a broad layer of material reinforcing the joint like this:
Usually in bikes this is filed smooth as shown, but a really well-made braze has an attractive âstack of coinsâ appearance in any case.
I like the look, yes, it is an analog display for a nice cyclocomputer. I am sure they will sell a lot as there are tone of cyclists addicted to bling and tech.
@AnonyMouse You are in the San Francisco area? Any work with the Gates belt stuff or Rohloffs?
Unfortunately (given the weather here, currently) not - Iâm based in Tottenham, London. Iâve not built anything using Gates Carbon Drive or Rohloff yet, but they are really interesting and, particularly as manufacturers are coming up with better solutions to the challenges of each (particularly the frame-splitting required for the belt drive) I think theyâre becoming more viable options. Are you looking to build an adventure tourer for a round-the-world trip or something? Personally Iâm waiting for a drop-handlebar-mountable shifter. There have been a few attempts but I donât know of one that has been an unequivocal success yet!
I reckon the non-escapement Ergolevers are ripe for modification⌠the indexing bit could be 3D scanned and printed in sintered metal, with revised index points for the G-springs. They could be modified to friction-shift even easier.
You could even use a pair to shift a NuVinci hub, by ditching the mouse ears and using each side to pull each cableâŚ
The indexing in Rohloffs is within the hub itself, which I guess simplifies the process of constructing a shifter to work with it - even, as you say, by using a friction shifting mechanism. I donât know enough about NuVinci hubs to hazard a guess - while I understand the theoretical model of balls and cones for the continuous gearing, I find it difficult to believe thatâs whatâs inside! Iâm keen to try a Nuvinci in a cargo bike though, as Iâm convinced that itâs the perfect application of the technology.
There is a ratcheting box mechanism that is out now that moves the shifting to levers. Check cyclemonkeyâs blog (Neil is the US Rohloff distributor).
I am at the stage of hardly riding enough miles to justify another bike purchase. Most of my saddle time is on my Surly Big Dummy, which I splurged on and got he Rohloff for. My other bike is a late 90s cross country hardtail, which I donât enjoy spending as much time on since it is a somewhat race oriented geometry from that era.
Every few weeks I will find myself daydreaming of what the next bike purchase would look like 
Most likely it will be some sort of touring/trail hybrid something that might let me eke out some of the shorter brevets and still take out on the fire roads. Iâm heavy so I like 2.0"+ tires. I can ride the distances, but not at brevet speed. PBP hits my dreams occasionally as well
The NuVinci uses two cables; one to pull the mechanism to a lower ratio, and another to pull it to a higher ratio. So obviously, this makes it pretty tricky to use anything other than the standard shifter.
I figured my Ergo hack idea is a pretty nifty notion for a drop bar solution. When you pull the cable with one lever, the other lever is free to release its cable, friction notwithstanding. You can verify this with standard Ergolevers by hauling on the cable running down the downtube; if you do it hard enough the lever releases the cable, no harm done.
this seems to be the sticking point with the Pinion gearbox crank, too (well, that and the whole needing-a-custom-frame thing.) people seem to like Pinion but I thought the NuVinci was not-ready-for-prime-time? canât remember, seems like either everyoneâs adopting a wait-and-see perspective, or maybe itâs heavy or something? you sound like youâve used one, though, how is it?
@AnonyMouse you might be in a good position to sell Pinion-enabled frames since they require a custom bottom bracket, does it interest you either as a builder or rider? anyone asking you for it? or is it not-ready-for-prime-time? also, Iâve seen that people who want a belt-drive inexpensively will build one up on one of those old MTB frames that have the elevated chainstays, negating the need to break the chainstay. then again, maybe those elevated chainstays are crap? couldnât be worse than a removable chainstay, though?
Havenât used a NuVinci; Iâm just really, really interested in the first practical CVT for bikes. Pretty sure itâs good to go; the current model is the second generation and works well by all accounts AFAIK. But yeah, itâs heavy, and expensive.
As for raised chainstays on a frame, itâs heavier and flexier than other ways of allowing a belt drive. The best way would be to use sliding dropouts that eliminate the need for an eccentric BB and also allow a belt between the chainstay and seatstay when removed, not that I recall ever seeing such.
I agree with @Kimmo; those raised chainstays look like theyâre going to be flexy - and presumably manufacturers beef them up to try to compensate for this. Iâve also seen bikes where the chainstay bends down so you can thread the belt through like the eye of a needle, but I suspect similar flex issues and additional ground clearance problems too.
Pinion looks to me to be a fairly expensive way of solving a fairly specific problem - that of the weight of an internal hub, in a mountain-biking-with-airtime context. The robustness of hub gears is an obvious advantage over derailleur, in mountain biking, but putting that much weight in the rear wheel messes up the centre of gravity. Pinion moves the centre of gravity back to the centre of the bike. If that is your main problem, and money is no object, then great! I donât see a great deal of use for it in other cycling, though. That said, bottom bracket gearboxes have existed since the 1920s or 30s, but didnât catch on because they werenât very efficient at the time.
I have seen a cargo bike using one so that the rear hub could contain an electric motor, but I think you would be better off using a conventional hub gear and placing an electric boost down the seat tube,interfacing with a splined bottom bracket spindle, motor-doping style.
Iâve not heard anyone crying out for Pinion specifically, but a few years ago I did see a bike that Superted built for vert or tricks that mounted a hub gear on tabs within the main triangle, then ran a second chain from the non-drive-side (well, I guess itâs drive-side now ;)) to the rear wheel.
@Kimmo is right - sliding dropouts would probably be the best option - and Iâm sure Iâve seen one that un-bolts on the drive side so that you can fit the belt. Eccentric BBs are really clever, but much more awkward to adjust than sliding (or even just horizontal) dropouts. There may well be some applications where they are a necessity, but I would generally err in favour of the simplest option.
So people keep saying! But I think that âanalog displayâ truly doesnât mean anything. As I said in my first post here, analog is not a style, it is a certain domain of signals. Digital measurements do not become analog by using an older type of display, that is a completely superficial difference. The digital measurements are obtained by sampling a sensor at discrete intervals, and that is what counts. By loose analogy, shaping cake into falafel after youâve made it does not make it falafel, regardless of how it is presented.
I am not trying to persuade anyone here who categorizes things differently. I cycle, and would love a well-made analog speedometer, which is why I was interested. But a moment considering that there is no such thing as an analog GPS (as currently implemented) got me to dig for a few minutes, and ended with me being disappointed that the tech seems misrepresented. If they called it âa digital GPS Speedometer with a retro-stylee displayâ, then I would have no been the slightest bit annoyed.
It can be annoying enough when semantic drift complicates the use of non-technical terms. But allowing it to creep into technical ones also just seems like a really bad idea.
Perhaps itâs time to accept that the terms âanalogâ and âdigitalâ have had broadly understood non-technical meanings for several decades, related only vaguely to their original, technical meanings - and it is the non-technical term that is drifting in scope?
A close look at the product photos shows a variety of similar, but distinct layouts each with various compromises. These are prototypes, so perhaps we could reserve the ?!!?! reaction for a production model.
So how would you describe an analog clock face?
Sort of. The word âanalogâ dates to the early 19th century, well before digital signal encoding became popular. The word really just means âa thing from which an analogy is drawn.â It seems a bit hypocritical to complain when the original meaning of a word is co-opted (âwhat does hairstyle have to do with professing anything?â) but then insist that when people use a word that someone else has co-opted, they should disregard the root meaning (âwhat does whether you define the data points discretely or not have to do with analogies?â).
Itâs not that people are co-opting the use of a technical term; the technical experts used an existing word to describe something, which does not negate its original meaning. The use of the word ânoiseâ to describe signal degradation, for instance, does not negate its meanings of âsomething a person hearsâ or âan unidentified sound.â
If a device stores data in a form analogous to the data, it analog data storage, correct? A vinyl record, for instance, stores data in an analog format: the amplitude of the sound waves is analogous to the depth of the grooves in the vinyl. If you cut a tiny slice from a single groove of a record, magnify it, and label the depth in terms of decibels, then people will be able to look at it and know how loud that instant of the recording would have been (when played upon a specific turntable). It is still an analog representation of that data, but it is one instantâs worth of data. Thatâs all an analog display is: storing and displaying an instantâs worth of data for that same instantâs amount of time.
The speedometer is exactly the same. If you extended the needle of the speedometer in a direction orthogonal to the face of the meter, storing the angle at which the needle pointed at each moment, it would be exactly the same as a record - instead of the depth of the grooves representing the amplitude of the sound wave, the angle of the needle represents the speed of the bicycle. The fact that it only stores and displays an instantâs worth of speed data for an instant, instead of storing 30 minutesâ worth of sound data for the lifespan of a vinyl record, does not change the fact that it is being represented in an analog format - that is, a format which draws an analogy to the original data.
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