Thoughts

What’s the deal with the Pinion?

January 4, 2017Touring, Thoughts, NewsJoseph Ahearne12 Comments

People keep asking me what’s up with the Pinion gearbox, and what do I think.

People keep asking me what’s up with the Pinion gearbox.

What do I think?

Everyone who’s seen it is interested, and it’s pretty obvious why. It directly responds to some of the drawbacks of traditional bicycle drive trains. The main issue with traditional bikes is, external drive trains are fragile.

That’s the biggest thing.

Derailleurs stick out the side of the bike, they get bumped, knocked, or in the case of mountain bikes, something worse, and that’s it. They’re out of alignment and no longer working optimally, or not at all. And then?

That's it, your ride is over.

So let’s say you’re one of those people who have a Subaru chasing you everywhere you go, your other bike carried on top. You're one of the lucky ones because you still get to ride.

The rest of us, though, we’d have to call mom or catch the bus or god forbid walk.

And what happens when we’re out on tour in some remote village, or near no village at all, and your rear derailleur shits the bed?

You get the picture.

So what do I think? I’ve built a couple of Pinion bikes now and have ridden one for a month or so, and I’m still forming my opinion, but there are a couple of things I can say.

First, I’m still intrigued.

I haven’t taken the bike on tour yet, and the most I’ve ridden it on any one ride is no more than about 20 miles. I had some issues with the light wiring and generator — nothing to do with the gearbox — which I think I’ve got worked out now. I’ve been dialing in the little things, getting the fit just so, etc. The season for touring is coming, and that’s going to be the real test.

As I write this there are over a hundred riders doing the Baja Divide route, 1700 miles of off road riding on the Baja Penninsula, which makes me oh so envious. But I couldn’t make it down there for this one.

Anyway, here's my take so far on the Pinion bike:

What I like most is how quiet the bike is. And I mean quiet! The combination of belt drive and internal gearing is almost totally silent. The rear hub is the White Industries XMR thru-axle, and while coasting I can barely hear anything. Over rough roads or tearing through gravel nothing rattles or clanks. I love that. And having the weight of the gearbox centered below me means I don’t really feel it at all. Or notice it.

There are only two functional drawbacks I could mention at this point, neither of which are all that big a deal.

One is, there’s a gap in the pedaling. There is a freewheel in the gearbox, and the hub freewheels, so that the two together can cause a gap between coasting and pedaling. It’s not big, but it's more than I'm used to and I have noticed it a couple of times.

It makes me think one of the newer clutch-drive hubs might be a good option for a Pinion bike because the engagement is almost instantaneous. These hubs are silent and smooth because they have no pawls, but they’re a little heavier and kind of expensive. The other thing might be a fixed rear cog, but then you lose the option of thru-axle and the wider rear spacing.

The other criticism I have is the twist shifter. I’m just not a huge fan of them. They were cool when they first came out, and I had one on a mountain bike for years in the 90’s, but after going back to trigger shifters, Paul “Thumbies,” and on drop bars the Retroshift by Grevenalle, I’ve never looked back.

For drop bars Co Motion Cycles makes a really nice twist shifter for the Pinion, based on the same design they use for the Rohloff. It’s big, easy to use, very smooth, and fits up near the stem clamp on an oversized (31.8 mm) handlebar. It looks and feels like something precision-made for a high-end camera. As far as I know, if you want to use a drop bar, you don’t have many options besides the Co Motion shifter. There's a company making a handlebar that splits in the middle so you can fit the smaller diameter twist shifter up top, but that sounds like a lot of engineering to adapt a handlebar to a shifter that just ought to be redesigned.

The compatible twist shifter sold by Pinion only fits a mountain bar. And their shifter doesn’t come close to the quality that the gearbox itself has, which seems odd to me. Why make such a beautiful, functional gear system and sell it with a cheap looking plastic shifter? Maybe I’m just nit-picking here. The shifter works just fine, it does exactly what it’s supposed to, which is turn and run through the gears. But to me it just doesn’t seem to match the ingenuity of the gearbox. I think they’re waiting for, or maybe even depending on aftermarket designers to come up with a better shifter.

Which is exactly what Co Motion did.

Anyway, so there’s a twist shifter. And I’m keeping an open mind about it, and I’m getting used to it. I understand that the gear range on the Pinion 18 speed is so large, and consequently the amount of cable that has to be moved is a lot, like about 12 inches in each direction. I can’t envision another mechanical option that would be much better.

What I’d really like to see is an electric shifter with a little servo motor that does the job. But, if someone out there is working on an electric shifter for the Pinion, please make it so we can patch the battery into dynamo hubs to keep a trickle charge on it. We make power while I ride, so why not use it to keep an electric shifter running indefinitely.

The only other potential down-side to the Pinion system that I can comment on here has nothing to do with function. It’s the expense of it. That, if anything, is what will deter people. I don’t think anyone would disagree that the system presents an exceptional alternative to traditional external drive-trains. But the 18 speed gearbox, shifter and crank set costs right around $2000, and that doesn’t include the bike that you have to have built specifically to hold it.

There are a couple of bike companies in Europe offering stock bikes that include the Pinion system, and they are beginning very slowly to make it into the US. But the cost of these imported bikes is not all that far off what you’ll pay for a custom built bike, so the question becomes, why wouldn’t you go the full mile? If you look at these imported bikes, they appear to be very pragmatic. But at this price point, aren’t we allowed to talk about aesthetics?

Stainless Steel Logo

I guess, I’m writing this, so I can talk about whatever I want to. I don’t like to talk shit on anyone, but really, these bikes just ain’t that cool. Great, they hold the Pinion system. I’m sure they ride fine and carry weight and are stable and handle just like they ought to. But to my mind one of the joys of bicycle design is where function and aesthetics meet, and in my (probably less than) humble opinion these bikes just haven’t quite arrived. This could very well be a cultural difference of opinion. In any case, that's all it is, is my opinion. I like my bikes to have that certain sense of elegance and "coolness" that I aspire to with each build.

The last thing I’m going to say at this point about the Pinion system is that I believe it is potentially the best new development in the world of touring bikes. Expensive, maybe, but call it an investment. It has almost no required maintenance and is mostly impervious to any sort of damage during normal use. The only question at this point is its longevity. It feels solid, and I don’t doubt it’s going to last for a lot of years, for tens if not a hundred or more thousand miles. But this remains to be seen.

Alright, now. Here are some photos of the most recent Pinion bike to come out of my shop. It’s a commuter/ light touring bike for Ray. For a more complete photo run, please go over to the Ahearne Cycles Flickr page.

This bike has got the works, and I think I’m most excited about how the racks came out. Especially the rear rack, it's like an old style car. Someone asked if the rear rack can actually hold weight, and my answer is oh, yes, as much as you want. It is tied into the stays at 4 points, and into the fender at 3 points, and the way the rack and fender work together makes it surprisingly strong.

For those of you interested, I am currently taking orders for Pinion bikes to be built by summer, 2017. That’s for both Ahearne frames, and collaborative bikes made by Igleheart & myself, under the name Page Street Cycles.

Keep an eye out for photos of the next bike on the list, which is a ladies mitxe with the Pinion gearbox. It’s going to be something special.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy.

Pinion Outback Touring Bike

October 14, 2016Touring, Thoughts, NewsJoseph Ahearne14 Comments

It’s not too often that I get excited about a new bike component, and usually when I do my excitement is pretty mild. Like, I was glad to see Brooks come out with a non-leather saddle, the Cambium, which has turned out to be comfortable, nice to look at, and is weather proof.

I got excited when Paul Components released the Klamper disc brake caliper, and it has proven to be far and away the best mechanical disc brake on the market.

And a few years back when I discovering that Honjo makes the H-95 fender, a super wide and flat fender for big tire bikes, I just had to use them on certain projects.

All these things and a few others were good innovations, improved iterations on things that already exist. But there are only a few times in my career as a cyclist and bike builder that I can remember when something new really changed things, in regards to components. I think the Pinion gearbox may be one of those things.

Most of the bikes I build are touring and commuting bikes, so when I think of component innovation I think mostly about how could something work better and last longer. How can a component make a rider’s life easier and better when she’s riding every day, for hundreds and thousands of miles?

When I first heard about the Pinion gearbox it immediately grabbed my attention. And the more I researched into it, the more interested I became.

What is a Pinion?

It’s a gearbox that mounts in the bottom bracket area of a bicycle. This may be an inexact analogy, but think of an automobile transmission. The gears are contained inside a housing or “box,” and so should require very little maintenance. On their website Pinion recommends draining and refilling the gearbox with fresh oil annually, or every 10,000 km (about 6200 mi). Couple this with the Gates Carbon Drive, the belt of which will last up to 20 or even 30,000 miles, and you've now got a bike that should run smooth and trouble-free, at least as far as the drive train is concerned, for a very long time.

The 18 speed gearbox weighs just over 5 pounds (about 2.25 kilos), which is a bit heavier than a Rohloff internally geared hub, its closest relative in bicycle drive trains. But the great thing about the Pinion is that the gearbox mounts under the rider, basically in the center of the bike. Because the load is centered there shouldn’t be the added sensation of weight as when it’s carried further out. This is the same reason frame bags work well to carry gear, because it’s locked in the front triangle of the bike, and is under the rider, so the weight can’t “swing” while a rider’s momentum shifts side to side with each pedal stroke.

Another great thing about the Pinion gearbox is the exceptionally wide gear range. Pinion offers three versions: 8, 12, and 18 speeds. The 18 speed has a 636% range from high to low. Compare this to a typical ten speed with a triple front, which has about a 575% range. It's a huge spread of gearing, and the increments between gears are relatively small. But for the moment these are just numbers. It's the ride that will really tell what the gearbox is all about. I chose the 18 speed for this bike because I wanted to get a sense of how wide the range actually is.

Ok, then, this is the Pinion.

So then, what is this bike?

Page Street Cycles Pinion Outback Touring Bike

It’s a Page Street.

And it’s the latest variation on a bike we fondly call the “Outback.” The Outback is kind of generic name for an off-road touring bike. You can call it a bike camping bike, or bike packing bike, or anything else you want. We call it an Outback Bike. It’s meant to run fat tires (in this case 650b or 27.5" X 2.8" tires) and carry gear so you can head off and away from paved roads onto gravel and single track, ATV trails, old rail beds, beaches, whatever — anywhere at all that cars can’t or usually won’t go.

And for those of you not familiar with what Page Street Cycles is all about, please check out the new website. In a nutshell, Page Street is an excuse for Christopher of Igleheart Custom Frames & Forks (nice new website, Christopher!) and myself — Joseph — of Ahearne Cycles, to collaborate and make awesome bikes.

Christopher and I share a shop, we share a lot of tools, we bounce ideas off each other, we make each other laugh, we feed each other’s cats when one of us leaves town, sometimes we share lunch. We have similar ideas and values when it comes to bikes and cycling, so we thought, why not work together sometimes? We both love salmon and we both build bikes, and whatever we build together is going to be a fun project. I don’t know exactly how — you can ask your local Hindu religious figure — but that fun gets translated into each bike’s ride quality. It’s like they’re good vibe bikes. Maybe that should be our tag line.

Page Street Cycles

The Good Vibe Bikes

Basically, Page Street Cycles is our team name. It’s what we call bikes that we both have a hand in making. Christopher and I will each continue making bikes under our own names, but now we’ve got this other thing, too. In the end, it’s all just a party.

Ok so, this latest bike is an example of what we can do. Here below is a summary of the features included. I did my homework on this one, and came up with much of the design. Igleheart and I built it together.

Paragon Machine Works "Toggle Drop" is the bomb!

Bedsides Christopher, I’ve got a lot of people to thank for helping make such a rad machine, including Rolf Prima for the amazing Alsea wheelset, and Paragon MachineWorks for the Toggle Drops that make this whole bike work just right; Paul Components and the folks at Pinion who put up with all my questions. Marc at Gates Carbon Drive for technical support, supplying belt wheels and belt, and for caring for the bike in Las Vegas. Also, Ogando at Velogical and Jens who made the battery buffer (hidden in the steerer) and USB stem cap, the so-called Forumslader; Dave at Black Star Bags for the fabulous custom seat bag (we'll be offering these bags in the future). I also want to thank Dan at Co Motion Cycles for the shifter and the good advice on shift boss placement. And last but not least, I have to thank Kai Yao for all the awesome photos. My hope was to design something that could go everywhere and do everything. Nothing less. Whether we succeeded in building it or not remains to be seen. So far, it’s looking pretty good.

Which brings up one last point, and is the biggest question I now have:

How is this bike going to feel?

You know what I’m saying? I mean, there’s something beyond the simple functioning of a bike that makes it pleasurable to ride.

I like the sound of a chain and cog interface when everything is running smooth.

I like the crisp feeling of indexed shifting on a traditional external drive train. I know derailleur systems really well, and have ridden a whole lot of miles on various bikes and configurations of derailleur/chain/cogs, and have done so with great success. I know that I can trust a good-ol’ 9 speed chain-and-derailleur system, and I know how to work on it.

Front Rack Upper Deck, Light & Roll Cage

I also understand its limitations: Chains will rust, especially around salt water; If your derailleur gets hit in a crash or by a stick or whatever it can kill it; Cables stretch, chains too; cogs wear out, and so on. For the most part, though, traditional drive trains are pretty solid and durable.

There are a lot of unknowns here.

So how’s it going to feel with a carbon belt and no chain, no derailleur, everything contained, no need to think much at all about drive train maintenance? I like the idea of it, for sure. Especially for long trips, and remote riding. But am I going to like the way it feels? This is going to take some time to learn, and is an assessment I’ll write about in a future post.

Feelings aside, though, if you think about the bike as a tool meant to perform a certain kind of work as efficiently and effectively as possible, then all of this sounds pretty good.

I do have to admit, my hopes are high.

An Ahearne Original -- Functional Spork Head Badge

Pump Peg Support Bearings -- Borrowed From An Original Engineering Design by JP Weigle

Down Under Nearly Over

November 2, 2015Travel, Thoughts, NewsJoseph Ahearne2 Comments

Jesse and I constructed the very first bicycle frame in the Surreal Foundry & Cycle Shop here in Fremantle, Western Australia. A lugged single speed road bike meant for around town riding. Jesse’s dream workshop is now a reality, and he’s even had an inaugural party to announce the completion of the workshop to the world at large. The ‘world at large’ being, mainly: Friends, family, acquaintances, neighbors, people who somehow helped out with the workshop’s construction, anyone else interested or related. And, perhaps even more importantly, by celebrating the workshop’s completion, this brings a long and somewhat trying process to a point of Closure for both Jesse and his partner Kerry.

The workshop is gorgeous. It’s behind the house, is an asymmetric design, kind of wedge-shaped, which fits well with the huge Norfolk pine and the “flow” of the back garden. The inside of the workshop is I’d guess about 7 or 800 square feet, has it’s own water-efficient toilet, two deep stainless steel sinks, a small area which will eventually be a paint booth, and is stocked with most all of the tools needed to build bikes. Jesse and I have been talking over the past couple of years about

equipment, and he’s gotten himself an Anvil frame fixture and fork fixture (your stuff is bad ass, Don!), a blasting cabinet, a couple of different belt grinders, a variety of hand tools, and this table from Germany that is kind of like the King of All Tables, in terms of what you’d want in a workshop.

The King of All Tables

Professional Extreme with Fork Blade Bender, Clamps

…is made by a company called Seigmund, as I said, in Germany. It’s perforated and modular and has all these clamps and brackets you can buy that fit the holes so that you can set up and work on anything that needs fixturing in any way. The table weighs right at a ton (850 kilos). It’s called the Professional Extreme 850, if that tells you something, and it’s made from “special” tool steel and is “plasma-nitrided and coated.”

What this means is that the table is extremely tough, heat resistant, scratch resistant, and just generally hard. There’s this awesome video advertisement for the table showing off how tough and bad ass it is by dropping a car on it from like 40 feet up (15 meters) and burying it in gravel and dragging it out with a crane, unscathed. They even blow it up with dynamite (check out the guy in work overalls and hardhat blowing a little bugle to announce the explosion), and the table gets not even a scratch. The video is only 2 minutes long, and is well worth it, even for just the acting and heavy machinery and general absurdity of it all. And everyone in the video keeps a straight face the whole time. Those Germans are something.

Check out the video for the Seigmund Professional Extreme 850 here.

But I’m getting side-tracked. Tools & tables. Building a first bike in a brand new workshop with new tools, you’ve got to expect to run into difficulties, so-called bumps in the road. And we did. We had to make a fork blade bender before we could start the fork. We had to fill the tanks and set up the torch and we then had to replace the faulty regulators. We had to buy silver and flux. I had to learn to braze with these new types of flux, figuring out their properties and heat-windows and all that. We had to figure out the abrasive system for mitering. Oh, and yes, we had to uncrate the frame jig and set it all up. Nice job packing the crate, by the way, Don Ferris. Seems like you’ve spent some time figuring that process out. We had to design a bike around the lugs that Jesse already had in his possession. We had to guess at the lug’s actual angles, because Jesse bought them off a guy who used to build bikes quite a while ago and there was no finding the guy now, not on the internet or otherwise. Japanese track lugs, not like any I’ve seen, exactly. We made an educated guess at the angles. We had to order more bits from Ceeway in England; tubes, steerers, braze-ons, etc., and wait for them to come before we could finish off the bike.

Many hiccups and minor set backs (like right off I cut the first set of fork legs 1 cm too short, which made me feel kind of like an asshole, but not too much so, because that’s just the way it goes sometimes, especially if you let yourself get distracted), but we took the time and did the work and the first set of tubes and lugs became the first bicycle frame built in Jesse’s shop. I was pleased, Jesse was pleased, it’s all going to work out just fine.

Jesse’s got a lot of work ahead of him, learning the millions of little details and skills and the handiwork that goes into building a frame. But he loves bikes and he’s spent a good portion of his adult life making things that uses sapphires and electrons and can read things at distances with a timing that is more accurate than I can even imagine — clocks, he calls them; really high-end clocks. I didn’t study physics enough to comprehend but about 3% of what Jesse made, but whatever it was was quite a bit more complex than making a bicycle frame. A very different skill set.

But I think that one of the things Jesse likes about bikes, which is one of the things that I, too, like, is the very physical interaction with the final product, and the variability of the subjective experience of it. To conceive it, to design it, build it, and then to ride it and get feedback and take that bit of knowledge back into the workshop and refine it and do it again and again, always pushing a little closer to a level of perfection that is yours and yours alone, and sharing it with others and hoping they see what you see — that’s the art, the craft, and really that’s the fun of it, the part that really makes it all worthwhile. In my opinion, anyway.

Jesse’s off to a good start. Now he gets to spend a lot of time working with Seigmund to make his next bike.

My time here is winding down, and spring is in full bloom in Australia. The bike is built and my duties here are pretty much finished. For now. I’m headed out soon; back to the states, to Oregon, home. The past few weeks, even including the time we were working, have been eventful and easy and in many ways a lot like a vacation. I’ve learned a lot of things about Australia that I didn’t know: Natural things, cultural things, things about the economy and government and people’s attitudes toward others and some of the less obvious stuff like how people deal with conflict and what they think of the American Presidential Circus (APC).

I started writing what I thought was going to be a blog post over a week ago, but I’ve got so much material and so many things I want to talk about that it (the writing) became longer and longer and I thought, well shit this isn’t a book it’s a blog, this isn’t going to work at all. I’ve got to cut it down. Maybe put it together in pieces, post it in parts. Subjects I’ve written about include, but are not limited to:

— The timeline and historical significance of the band AC/DC, especially in regards to former front man and lead singer Bon Scott, who died from asphyxiating on his own vomit in the front seat of a car after a night of heavy drinking. This was while the band was on tour in London in 1980. And what happened to the band then. Bon Scott’s grave is here in Fremantle, Western Australia.

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— Nature. Meaning plants and birds. Big birds little birds water birds pretty birds dumb birds birds of prey and so on. There are a lot of weird birds in Australia, and plants and trees unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Lizards, frogs. And the birds make these sounds, it’s almost terrifying at certain times, and then at other times the way their voices cry out you’d think they were genuinely making fun of us humans. Mocking our children. And the plants, they may walk around at night when no one is watching. And whales. And sharks (there was an attack listed in the paper within a few days of my arrival, which made the ocean seem a little menacing, despite how clear and blue-green it is). I didn't tell Maggie about the shark attack because I didn't want to talk about it. And I didn’t see any actually hopping around, but kangaroos, too. Dogs everywhere. Little snakes with legs. Writing like I'm Nature Boy.

— And speaking of birds, I found an emu egg at a market and couldn’t help myself. I bought it, cooked it up and ate it. Maggie, bless her, she helped with the process. Emus are the second largest bird on the planet, next to the ostrich. This egg was BIG. The whole process was very weird and disproportionate and disconcerting. But I did it anyway. The yolk was like the size of my fist, but softer. I scrambled it with vegetables. Catsup & hot sauce. Toast.

— Bunker Bay, Dunsborough, Yallingup, the entire Margaret River region, cape to cape, south of Perth; Towns with unbelievable beaches and olive oil and chocolate and wine and products made with fine marino wool, lazy winding roads through a canopy of trees whose palette is more on the yellow and light grey side, rather than the deep greens and browns that I’m used to. Surf towns, beach towns, very relaxed towns. Lots of nature to lose yourself in. Whales migrate past from colder arctic waters further south to wherever else they go to spawn and breed and eat. Hippies and yogis and a lot of very rich people live in these places.

— Reading the Infinite Jest in Australia. I read this book many years ago, in another foreign place, and took some things from it, but I know a lot more about the author now, his life and death and quirks and history and what he seemed to like to think and write about. It’s a big book and requires some readerly work and energy, but hot damn he’s a good writer.

— This is only a few of the bigger subjects I’ve been thinking about. Others include a discussion of the pros and cons of Airbnb; thoughts on addiction and habituation and routine and practice; the night sky (yes, I’ve seen the southern cross); a couple of weird dreams; and bike building in a new workshop, which I’ve already said a few words about…

I’ll have to come back to some of this other stuff. This is probably just enough for now. Actually, my plane is leaving soon. It's hard to believe after a trip like this that I'm actually going home. No more beach or sun or shorts and bare feet for a while to come. But I'm looking forward to getting back into my workshop.

Rosellas, I think. They were everywhere.

Working in Australia, New Zealand

September 9, 2015News, Thoughts, TravelJoseph Ahearne2 Comments

In just over a week I leave for Australia and New Zealand. This trip is going to have a few different elements to it. I’m traveling for the sake of travel, on the one hand, but I’ve also got some work lined up that is going to occupy some of the time I’m there. The work, though, sounds almost as fun as the exploration of these new places.

All said, I’ll be out of town for about six weeks, from 17 September through 3 November. That’s a good, long trip, and if you’re interested, I’ll give you an overview of what’s happening, a quick run-down.

— September 19 - 21 I’ll be in Sydney with Travel Portland helping them to give away a couple of bikes; one of my bikes and a Breadwinner. If you’re interested in knowing more about it (and I’d say if you’re anywhere Sydney or Auckland during this time, you ought to check it out), here’s all the information you'll need.

— September 22 - October 3 I’ll be in Auckland, New Zealand. The first 4 nights of this I’ll be helping give away another 2 bikes, (1 Ahearne, 1 Breadwinner). Then I have a week to explore in and around Auckland, see the sights, meet some people, hopefully ride my bicycle (yes, I’m bringing a bicycle that I will be leaving in Perth, but that’s a story I’ll get into in a moment).

— 4 October - 2 November I’ll be in and around Fremantle and Perth on the west coast of Australia. During this time I’ll be the first “Artist in Residence” at the Surreal Foundry & Cycleworks. Jesse Searls is an aspiring bicycle frame builder and the founder of the Foundry. He is in the process of finishing the construction of his workshop as I write this. We’ve spent the past several months discussing bike making equipment, tools and jigs, etc. It sounds like he has bought a lot of the equipment needed, and so, for much of the month of October we’re planning to work together to get his workshop up and running, and to build a bicycle frame or two together. I believe we’ll be going at a fairly relaxed pace, so there should be plenty of extra time for me to explore, cycle, read & write, swim & surf, and generally get out and about and see that part of the world. Maggie will be coming for the second half of October, so she and I will be exploring as well.

I can’t say enough about how excited I’m becoming for this trip. Jesse first contacted me in March 2014, asking about a bike I had advertised for sale on my website. Yes, I told him, it’s still for sale. He was considering buying it for his son, who plans to ride from coast to coast across Australia following the most southerly roads along the Great Australian Bight. Jesse and I exchanged several emails, and he told me his story, which I found to be very interesting. Jesse is a recently retired physicist who had, quite a number of years ago, helped invent technology which enabled new capacity in digital networks and improved the sensitivities of radar systems. It was a significant enough improvement that he started a company to produce the technology, and his company was eventually bought by an international contractor. For the next bundle of years Jesse worked for his company as they did international sales, and as he explained it, the burden and stress of this work was incredible.

Now that he’s stepped away from the company, he realized that some of his most personally satisfying moments were when he was able to take concepts and designs that were theoretical and to actually fabricate them — to make them into something physical. Jesse’s love of bicycles started in 1973 when he bought a Frejus racing bike to use as his primary mode of transport. Since then he has had a yearning to learn how to build them. Transforming an idea into a “thing” by using the hands to fabricate it, then getting to test it and use it, or watch someone else do so and hopefully see a smile peel open their face — there is a great deal of joy to be found here. And this is where I come in. Having built a lot of bikes and having taught a lot of people how to build their own bikes, Jesse thought I might be a good person to hang out with for a while. Lucky for me.

In all of this, I do feel very lucky. Jesse wants the bike I had for sale, and I’m going to bring it over with me. We’re going to work together to set up his workshop, and then I’m going to help him use the equipment to learn to construct his own bicycle frames. Based on our interactions through email I think both Jesse and I are pretty mellow individuals, and I think we’re going to get along just fine. I’m really very excited to meet him in person and to see the workshop he’s constructed. What a dream come true in itself — to be able to consider every last detail of a workshop and build it from the ground up. And then to have the dream, part II, where you get to fill the workshop with great tools, and then part III, actually using them to make things. As I said, I feel really fortunate to play some part in this.

I am also looking forward to the opportunity to see some of the beaches and treks in southwestern Australia. Apparently, it has some of the best surf beaches in the world, big trees, and a broad range of vineyards and gourmet food producers. There's also the Munda Biddi Trail (which means "path through the forest" in the Noongar Aboriginal language), which is a 1000 kilometer off road cycling path. If I'm lucky I'll get to spend some time exploring this as well.

While I’m away I’ll have my computer, and plan to post photos and words about what’s happening. Please check back if you’re interested in hearing about the place, the trip, the progress, the work, the experience.

Thinking With Your Ass

March 3, 2015ThoughtsJoseph Ahearne1 Comment

There are different wheel sizes out there

I don’t spend a lot of time in bike shops these days. When I do go, it’s usually to buy a part I forgot to order or to say hello to a friend.

It happened the other day that I was in a bike shop actually shopping for bikes. The last time I did that was so long ago I can hardly remember, back in a different era of human history. A good friend of mine has a soon-to-be eleven year old son, Ethan, and I was at the shop to pick out a bike for him for his birthday. Ethan and his family are moving to Bend, Oregon this coming summer. When talking to anyone who’s spent time in Bend, there are mainly two things they talk about; cycling and skiing. I don’t know how it is for the skiers, but when people talk about their experiences mountain biking around Bend, their eyes get this far off look and they perceptibly begin salivating. They talk about it like it’s something out of a dream. Anyway, my friend William plans to introduce his son to trail riding, and to do so he needs a bike. The criteria for the bike were pretty simple: Suspension, knobby tires, good brakes, room to grow.

William and I had talked about my building a bike for Ethan, but he’s just getting to the age where he (Ethan) is growing an inch or so every couple of months. Shoes come and go faster than the seasons change. We thought it might be smarter to wait on the custom bike until he’s gets to whatever height he’s going to stay at for a while.

William’s wife, Natacha, met me at the shop. She, too, will be riding some trails in Bend with the family, and so would be looking for a bike. Nothing fancy or high end for either of them. We chose an extra small adult bike for Ethan. It’s basic, satisfies the needs, colors and graphics not too offensive, ready to ride at under $400.

When looking at bikes for Natacha, who is about five-foot-eight, we looked at the “entry level” mountain bikes, i.e.. inexpensive. It still blows my mind that you can buy a perfectly good new bike for under $500. If you consider the price mark-ups at each point from the factory in Asia where the bike was made to the port and then distribution center(s) in the USA, including the paint, shipping costs, any tariffs, parts and assembly, and then there’s the mark up at the shop where the bike is being sold to the consumer — if you work backwards to the beginning of all those costs, all the way back to the factory, it means that the bike, complete and ready to ride originally cost under $50. Probably more like $20. That’s for the whole bike. For $20 I can afford one mid-quality top tube. I don’t want to bitch about the economics of bicycles, and cheap imports in general, but when I’m faced with the truth of it it’s somewhat mystifying.

But anyway, while shopping for bikes we were helped by a very friendly salesperson, I’ll call him Stephen. When picking out Natacha’s bike, one of the first things that Stephen told us was this: “All the bike companies are transitioning over to the 650b wheel size. 26 inch wheels are going to be obsolete.” I did a sort of auditory double-take. “What?” I thought. “Are you serious?”

Looking around, it seemed that he was. Serious, I mean. All the newest adult mountain bikes on the floor of the shop had 650b, or 27.5 inch wheels. I don’t read the magazines, I don’t follow market trends. I’m around bike people enough, and have plenty of friends working at shops, so I’ve heard talk about the rise in popularity of the 650b wheel size. But not on this scale, or maybe I wasn’t listening very well. We’ve been talking about this wheel for several years now. Coming to find out that this once very niche market has gone totally mainstream and now in fact has supplanted both the 29er and the 26er wheel sizes seemed a little crazy. Like, if you’ve got a friend who’s always turned up his nose at grape Kool Aid, ever since you can remember he went for either cherry or lemon-lime, ever since you were little kids. And now, suddenly he’s got the tell-tale grape mustache, and all he ever talks about anymore is how grape Kool Aid is the shit, it’s the only beverage worth drinking, he won’t let his mom buy anything else, there’s nothing else like it, etc., etc.. It makes you shake your head because there’s something kind of sad about it. And in fact it might hint at some sort of, I don’t know, instability in your friend.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with 650b as a wheel size. I personally really like it for the applications that I use it for. To my mind, and in my opinion, for most people who ride bikes as commuters, go on light tours, or for whom a bike is very part time recreation, for anyone buying “entry level,” or even “mid level” bikes, and even many versions of the “high end” bikes, wheel size ought to be proportionate to the frame size. Smaller bikes, smaller wheels; larger, larger. That’s a general rule of thumb, not a law set in stone. In this way, you can nail the frame geometry and get the best ride quality and most desirable handling characteristics. There’s some room to play in bike design, of course, and the way a bike feels is very subjective. To my mind, again, the way a bike handles is way more important than the way a distant factory is tooled, and the consequent pushing and shoving of marketers.

When the entire market shifts in this way, and broad claims are made, such as the one that “twenty-six inch wheels are on their way to obsolescence,” I immediately become suspicious. Was that just a blanket statement by a salesperson who was more concerned with selling his shop’s products? Or was his statement an example of the voice of the industry?

These industry-wide re-inventions seems to happen in regular enough cycles that it might be possible to name it. There’s a sort of herd-induced excitement whenever anything “new” catches on in the bike world. In very loose historic terms, in the 1970’s and 80’s it was BMX; in the 90’s, mountain bikes and a little later downhill bikes; in the early 2000’s, 29ers were all the rage (before hitting the main stream, that was most of what I built); mid-to-late 2000’s hand made custom bikes became very popular; and somewhere in there plastic bikes started to really take off; in the early 2010’s it was fat bikes, commuter bikes, and especially in Europe and Asia, electric bikes. And now, here we are in 2015 and our wheel size has settled into the era of the 650b. That’s great. A new trend has arrived. No judgement, I’m just noticing.

In all these words I’ve written about this I don’t offer much in the way of specific guidance. I really am just taking note. I think maybe my only real message is to keep your eyes open and think for yourself. When the market tries to push anything on you, take it with a grain of salt. Educate yourself and formulate your own conclusions. Which, in this case, is another way to say, get on a bike with 650b wheels and ride it. Your ass will tell you what it thinks.