Advice from my mother

My mother always said that if you are buying something you want to keep for a while, buy the best you can.

Working with a Curtis Odom hub for the first time, I knew my mother would approve. I was blown away the attention to detail. I was expecting a beautifully finished, smooth rolling hub with an extraordinary design carved into the oversize flange. I got all of that. I also got the best-thought out hub/spoke interface that I have ever worked with. What had appeared to be a price expensive but still fair to both parties is now a bargain.

Let me tell you why: When I snapped the first spoke into place in the hub, it was like only one other hub I had worked with, a particular small period of time during the production of Campagnolo Record hubs. I had spoken with Curtis about a week before I got the hubs, and we agreed that it was harder to lace a wheel with these hubs but worth it for the life of the wheels built around the hubs.

To get the spokes to fit perfectly and settle in for the long haul, the hub flange has to be exactly right. The right shape and diameter of spoke hole, the right thickness of the hub flange, the right alloy for the forging and the right forging itself. Curtis nailed every detail.

A build with these hubs takes a little longer, because the spokes are a tight fit and the flange thickness matches the size of the spoke elbow. Once the spokes are tensioned and pressed into place, the head of the spoke is flush against the hub flange and the bend of the spoke is gently cradled in a trough of deformed alloy. The chances of fatigue failure of a spoke are close to zero. I hesitate to say never, but I cannot see any combination of load and road that would cause spokes to fail in these hubs. 

The only time I have worked with hubs close to this good was in the early 1980s, when Campagnolo Record hubs had tight spoke holes. The were slow and hard to get laced up, but the wheels built with them were special right from the start. Curtis remembered those hubs and incorporated everything we liked about those hubs and incorporated them into his hubs, then made them into decorative art besides. Take a look at the pictures in the posting just before this one. Pictures of the finished wheels will be posted after Cirque.

Introducing Clubman wheels

Between the wars and just after World War II, British cycling clubs established a tradition of social recreation. Groups organized for sporting and recreational rides of a less competitive nature than races. Later, in the United States, serious cyclists gathered their friends and riding partners into some pretty large touring clubs, some with thousands of members and multiple rides scheduled every weekend.

Riders in these clubs, especially the British clubs, would have a single do-it-all bike. By the 1930s, several brands of bicycles offered a “Clubman” model. Meant to be a working bike, the geometry would be more relaxed than a full-on racing bike, the clearances would be large enough for big tires and there would be the capacity to mount fenders and a rack. This would be the road bike “for the rest of us.”

One of the things that distinguished club riding was the variety of events, from loaded tours to time trials. The way to get one bicycle to do all of those things was to have different sets of wheels to match different conditions.

To celebrate that spirit and Earle Wheels new partnership with Curtis Odom, we are proud to introduce the Clubman series of wheels. Built on Curtis’s incomparable ultra-large flange Clubman hubs, the first of these wheels are presented with Velo Orange PBP rims and Wheelsmith 2.0-1.7-2.0 mm butted stainless steel spokes and Duristan nipples.

These highly decorative wheels are also built to be used for decades, then rebuilt at moderate expense. For those of us whose sponsors won’t buy $2,750 carbon wheels, these wheels are a sensible investment at $855 with Campagnolo or Shimano cassette body and 130 mm over-locknut dimension.

Wheel madness

If racing bikes have separated themselves from real-world riding, racing wheels have spun into a whole different universe.

MAVIC, a rim maker whose products I used for decades, recently introduced carbon clincher wheels, with a sticker price of  $2,750 for the pair.

And for this, you get a wheel that, according to one review in a racing magazine, has finally gotten braking effectiveness to the point where aluminum rims have been for at least half a century.

The deep section carbon rim does provide a lot of aerodynamic effect, which is great at speeds above 23 mph or so. Serious competitors may need that kind of advantage. But for the rest of us, I’m not so sure.

There seems to be a weight advantage, at least from the stock Earle Wheels I weighed. The MAVIC set weighs 1545 grams (without skewers or rubber), a pair of stock PBP EarleWheels weighs 1950 grams. Not a negligible difference, but hardly impressive when you consider the cost of the Earle Wheels. PBP rims on Velo Orange Grand Cru hubs are $379.

For $2,371, the rest of us, the serious riders who are not serious competitors, can buy a whole lot of fenders, lights and foul weather gear to broaden our ability to ride our bikes more.

Everything old is new again

Last fall, a neighbor gave me  Univega Grand Rally from about 1982. It had been sitting behind the storage shed in his back yard for nearly a decade. I was not sure what I was going to do with it, but I knew I had to tear it down to the frame and check it over. The frame turned out to need work. Fortunately, Hal Bielstein, a frame builder from Rapid City, SD, needed a pair of wheels that I had, and I was able to trade a lot of work with him. He modified the frame for 650B wheels with modern rear hub spacing, added numerous braze-on bits and had it painted.

New parts include brakes, cranks, fenders, rims and tires from Velo Orange http://www.velo-orange.com/.

The Brooks B-17 was courtesy of Omar Khiel of Oasis Custom Cycles http://www.oasiscustomcycles.com/.

The rest of the parts were lurking in my garage looking for a home. I built it up the weekend before my vacation and rode it the four miles to work a few times, but today I finally got it out for a little longer ride. 

This is what I mean by a bike for the rest of us. I headed out with a headwind and some spitting rain. The low gears let me slow down to fight the wind and the fenders kept the water away. 

I can only describe the ride as plush. On level road out of the wind, it did not feel a whole lot slower than my skinny-tired Litespeed, but its 38 mm tires just float over rough road. 

A store for the rest of us

On my vacation in Washington, DC last week, I visited a bike shop where almost ever bike in the store had fenders, many had internal hub gears and chain guards, and there were NO carbon fiber race bikes. Here is a link: http://www.bicyclespacedc.com/.