Raleigh Sports Updated

Here's my Raleigh Sports, brought into the 21st Century with a few parts from my friends at Velo Orange http://store.velo-orange.com/. Diagonale 650B rims, 650 x 38B tires, tubes and rimstrips and Zeppelin stainless fenders. Tektro long-reach dual pivot brakes and levers from a 1990s mountain bike. It all works well together, and still rides like an around-town three-speed. Definitely a keeper. Watch as I post more of the Earle Wheels Permanent Collection.

A simple bike for a casual rider

A friend, Jack Lyness, recently asked what he should get for starting to exercise after a period of sedentary decline. At 300 pounds or more, he had no need for a lightweight. Living in a fundamentally flat area, he had no need for a multitude of gears.

I was lucky to be able to provide him with an aluminum frame, aluminum rim coaster brake cruiser.

While there is nothing new, high-tech or sexy about this bike, it is what Jack needs right now. It will get him moving without doing further damage to his hips and knees, and moving is healthy.

But the best thing. It will be fun.

What do I mean, “Bikes for the rest of us?”

There must be a lot of bicycle racers out there, huh? If you look at the latest issue of Bicycling, it’s pretty convincing that bicycles are for racing. In the buyer’s guide issue, there are 14 bikes listed as entry-level road bikes. Of those, there were only five that I would call non-race bikes, and two of those had carbon-fiber frames

The articles are all about training for fast rides, riding fast for training, or fast training for rides.  The featured bikes are all racing bikes. Carbon fiber frames, close clearances because that’s what makes bikes look fast, not a fender to be found, but fenders were mentioned is one of the short reviews.

Racing has to be the prime purpose of riding a bicycle, if that’s the ink devoted to it, right?

Wrong.

Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, the biggest trade magazine in the sport, annually devotes an issue to statistics. They had numbers of people own bikes, number of people who ride now and then, numbers of numbers and more. The one that I liked is this: 5.29 million people in the US ride their bike at least 110 days in a year. These are “serious bicyclists.”

The big racing organizations provided these: USA Triathlon has 150,000 members, and USA Cycling just under 71,000 current licenses, for a total of 221,000 “serious competitors.”

Which means that more than 5 million serious bicyclists are NOT serious competitors.

So tell me, why is almost every recreational bicycle in the $1,000 - $2,500 price range a racing bicycle?

Why can’t we find fun-to-ride road bikes with clearance for 700x28 tires and fenders?

Sure, there are a few, but they are hidden behind all of the flashy carbon fiber race bikes so specialized and fragile that they cannot take full fenders and that can break if you fall wrong.

To be continued …

Why I don’t have dial gauges on my truing stand

There are truing stands on the market now that have dial gauges that will show you to the tenth of a millimeter how round and true your wheels are. They present a beautiful picture of precision that the bare steel pointers of my Park TS-2 seems to lack.

People who use them talk about how accurate they are, how quickly they can get a wheel true and round.

Thanks, but no thanks. When I get the wheel round enough that the pointer is a millimeter off the rim in both lateral and radial measure, and when my dishing tool says the wheel is centered on the axle, I say that deviation is small enough, and work only with the tension meter. I will give up a deviation that will be undetectable while you ride the bike to have the tension closer to even. Remember, we are riding on pavement, not a brand-new velodrome with a polished concrete surface.

If I had a better grasp of the mathematics and physics involved, I could manipulate the formulae and finite element analysis presented in Jobst Brandt’s “The Bicycle Wheel” to prove this thesis mathematically, but I don’t ride numbers. I ride bicycles. I have heard from customers and felt on my own bikes that my wheels just ride better. I believe it is because I concentrate most on even spoke tension. 

More on my frame comments

On my Website, www.earlewheels.com, I say that the best steel frames ever built are being built in the United States right now, and customer reminded me about that and asked me to expand on that.

With few exceptions, only American builders have operated one-man shops, measuring customers, designing frames and building them from start to finish

The best of them combine high levels of precision in fitting the frame tubes and high levels of art in finishing the construction. The frames are not only paragons of structural integrity, but works of art as well.

In addition, steel tubes have gotten continually better. Three decades ago, I was discussing the differences between the established tubesets by Columbus and Reynolds and the newer, lesser know Japanese tubes. What I found then is that the upstart tubing made it easier to build a clean lugged frame. And even though steel frames are a disappearing part of the mass market, small suppliers have continued to improve the tubes, the lugs and the brazing materials.

In short, the best of today's craftsmen, using the best of today's materials are building frames that surpass nearly everything that has come before.

Rather than name names, for fear of leaving out some very good ones, I would encourage anyone people to look at the National Handmade Bicycle Show (http://2013.handmadebicycleshow.com/) and any regional framebuilders' shows. There is a lot of brilliant work out there now.