Rapid Rise Derailleur and Suntour Bar-end Shifters

I took a ride with my girls on Saturday morning, as I reported in my post about Juli's crash. This was on my Schwinn Sports Tourer, which I recently upgraded with new derailleurs. The front is a Suntour Superbe, which works pretty much like any other bottom-pull front derailleur. And the rear is a recent Shimano XT rear derailleur in rapid-rise guise. "Rapid Rise" is Shimanoese for "at rest, the derailleur wants to be in the lowest gear, not the highest".

So what did I learn in my first real ride, so equipped:

1. The combination of Suntour barcons and a rapid rise derailleur works just fine. I need to take a little slack out of the cable (I can feel when the cable goes slack near the lowest gear), but that doesn't affect operation.
2. The shifters have plenty of travel to support the 6-speed freewheel on there, which means they'd be fine with a 7-speed freewheel or cassette, too (both have 126 mm spacing). I haven't tried (but could) a 130 mm-8/9/10 speed road wheel to see how that works. Maybe over the winter, on my rollers.
3. The derailleur works really well. All new Shimano stuff seems to, of course, but it's absolutely transparent in the shifting department.
4. The derailleur feels heavy. No, not on the bike, in the hand. Weight weenies won't want one, but they wouldn't be looking at a MTB derailleur anyway, I suppose.
5. I probably need to lube the shifters a bit because they're growing a little stiff. No fault of the derailleur, there.
6. The reorientation is confusing as hell, especially since I'm trying to coach my daughters through upshifting and downshifting with their conventional rear derailleurs while I'm shifting my own drivetrain at the same time, the opposite way. Given the coaching and shifting and making sure Juli is using road smarts, I'd rather not have one more thing on my mind.
7. The derailleur has plenty of capacity for my 13-32 rear cluster and my 39/52 chainrings. No more excess noise from interference between the biggest cog and the guide pulley, as with the last derailleur.

In hindsight, I should have just gotten a regular XT or LX derailleur. But my curiosity is now satisfied, and that's worth something. And for now at least, the inconvenience of remembering which way to move the lever is not so great that I'll be swapping the derailleur again.

We'll see if it ends up on my list for the off-season, though...

All for now,

J

Lessons

It was a big day for Juli today -- first crash on her road bike.

I'm not celebrating this, other than that I'm glad she's OK. But we've all been there, and we'll probably be there again. And probably so will she. The trick is to learn from these sorts of things.

The crash was a two-wheeling classic. I entered a cul-de-sac a few miles from our house, looping a wide path around the outside, with Ava in tow on the trailer bike.

Juli carved a tighter loop, aiming to cut me off.

But her inside pedal was at the bottom of the stroke. And her MKS track-style pedal was upside down, so the raised cage extended farther down than usual, eating precious clearance (small wheels, 165 crank)

The leading corner of the cage touched down, pivoting her rear tire up and off the road. Freed from the tire's grip, momentum was able to carry the back of the bike in a straight line, rather than being forced to follow the arc of her original turn.

We've all seen the tangled sort of hop/trip/skip/crunch that followed. She stayed mostly on her feet, but came away with a bruise from the saddle on her inner left thigh, several chainring teeth worth of scratches on her lower calf/Achilles, and an accompanying bruise.

As I was massaging the bruise, working the ouch out, we talked about what happened. I showed her the bent corner of the pedal cage, and gave her some pointers about crank position when cornering and a kiss on the nose. I straightened a few things out on the bike and pedaled it around a bit to make sure it would get her home OK. As I guessed she would, she threw a barb my way, implying I loved the bike more than her. I brushed it off, and she let it drop. She drew no blood, and let's remember... she's not yet 9. But her instinct to lash out is both familiar and worrisome.

Ava watched all of this play out, as she does. Watching, listening and learning.

Then we rode on. Each a little older.

All for now,

J

She's Rolling

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

I hit a milestone in Fatherdom last weekend -- Ava rode without training wheels. Her pedal strokes were shaky and tentative, and there was lots of body language in her hips trying to stay balanced, but she rode 20 feet or more several times. Good stuff.

She did this on her "new" bike, which I picked up two weeks ago. It's a used Gary Fisher Gamma Ray. Effectively very similar to the puppydog Hotrock which is now over at their mother's apartment, but I think a little older. It's in great shape, which is often the case for a little-kid's bike that has been stored indoors. Apart from getting dropped or left outside, little kids don't abuse their bikes much. It's the next bike, the bike they get really comfortable on, that gets trashed. Jumped over stuff. Crashed into stuff. Dropped onto sidewalks and streets. That kind of thing.

The Gary Fisher is red, as you can see, with black and yellow/gold accents. I think it was positioned as a boy's bike, but Ava likes red as much as any boy, so there. I've already repacked the headset, which was a bit loose anyway, and lubed the chain up. This weekend I need to repack the front and rear hubs, and the bottom bracket. One odd thing about the bike is that it came with a both a rear coaster brake and a rear cantilever brake, but without a front brake at all. Can't imagine why they did that, I'd have gone with a front caliper brake. I do have a kids' sidepull brake and lever set I can bolt on, but I'll see how she does without it, first. After she's got a few more laps around the cul-de-sac under her belt, the saddle needs to come up a few inches, as well.

In other news, I fixed the Motobecane's brake lever feel by slicing slits into the parts of the new Cane Creek hoods that were interfering with the Dia-Compe levers' travel, so I'm back to not complaining about the brakes again. I also swapped out the small ring on the Motobecane, dropping from a 42- to a 36-tooth small ring, and I shortened the chain by two links. Unfortunately, I think doing both was a mistake. The Cyclone derailleur doesn't have enough cage to take up the slack with such a small front ring, so I'll need a longer-cage derailleur. And a longer cage will possibly no longer allow the use of that chain. Oh, well -- chains aren't too expensive, if that turns out to be the case.

Anyway, I'm now watching eBay for a Cyclone II GT (long cage in Suntour parlance) that I can swap onto the bike.

And I'm still trying to figure out the crankset situation for the motobecane, because I'm finding it to be hard on my knees. The current 170-mm SR Apex crankset is cute enough and has a classic look to it I'd like to preserve. But if it's not comfortable, that's much more important than aesthetics. I need to measure the q-factor (how far apart the outer faces of the crank arms are, where the pedals screw in) of the (identical) cranksets on the Schwinn and Kestrel to see how those compare to the Motobecane. That should give me some data to mull over, and help me decide what variables to play with. The choices will be to mount a slightly narrower or wider bottom bracket, or to buy a new crankset with 172.5 arms and the right Q-factor. I'm hoping not to have to buy anything. I've got a bunch of components in hand already to make adjustments, I just need to know which adjustments to make and see what happens.

I've been riding a bit, but nothing I'd describe as an adventure yet. Last weekend I rode with the same friend again, but this time out in Concord and Lincoln. A good ride, and it's interesting how you can see people making progress in their riding technique from ride to ride. My companion on that ride fairly cruised up one hill I expected to see a struggle on, for example. Just a matter of attacking it differently, and it was good to see.

Yesterday I took a ride around town on the Kestrel. Only about 14 miles, but with my route plotted specifically to take me past three houses for sale in town. Two were village colonials (similar in layout to my Victorian-era home, but smaller) and one was a cape. I'm trying to get my arms around what to do next -- try to buy my wife's share of the house, or find something more manageable in town? Anyway, they were cute houses, but one of the two village colonials sat on a lot not much bigger than the house and both were near train tracks (one a low-traffic freight line and the other a high-traffic commuter and freight line). The cape was close enough to a Mass Pike overpass that trucks booming over the expansion joints at either end would be a constant source of irritation, not to mention the constant rumble and hiss of passing highway traffic. I don't think any of them are the right house, but I think I want to go look at the small-lot one to see what it looks like inside. It's good to look around and gauge my options, if nothing else.

All for now,

J

Small changes, big impacts

It's funny how seemingly small changes can have a significant impact on your bike and/or the way you ride.

Last Friday night I made some tweaks to the Motobecane in advance of a ride. I lashed the Hupe down with some tie wraps (in a stylish faded fluorescent pink, just because), wrapped the bars with some black "cork" wrap, put the Cane Creek hoods I'd bought for the Superbe levers on, and... I think that's it. Oh, wait -- I installed the Tange Passage aluminum headset, too, in place of whatever that was that had been on it before.

The headset worked out OK, but the threading seems a little different. Maybe Italian pitch to the threads or something. Anyway, it felt like the steel steerer was cutting slightly different threads into the top nuts, but they secured just fine, and it feels good. The crown race is slightly smaller than 26.4, and wouldn't hold the new race, which is odd, and I ended up just reusing the old crown race, since it fit the crown snugly. I didn't see anything on Sheldon Brown's headset page that showed a smaller crown race seat diameter, so not sure what's up. Maybe someone swapped the race in the box, and that's a 27? Or maybe it's an odd size -- dunno. The steerer is still too short to use my Velo-Orange decaleur mount, though. Bummer.

The bar tape worked out OK too. Feels fine, giving me more to hold onto and some shock damping. But the lack of coordination in the bike's color scheme is really highlighting the mongrel effect. Tan and blue and black and brown and red and chrome and maroon and dark anodized and silver anodized and I think unanodized and stainless. Plus the faded fluorescent pink and gray plastic dip of the Hupe. There's a lot of visual noise on the bike right now. Doesn't look nearly as good as it did when I first rebuilt it. But it rides well.

Except for the brakes -- putting the hoods on totally messed up the brakes. Two things: They make getting the cables on and off much harder, and they interfere with the levers' travel. As I said last time, getting the cables on and off quickly was one of the things I really liked about the brake levers. That ability went out the window with those hoods. And the levers are much stiffer with the hoods on. I'm going to try trimming them down, I think, to see if that helps. Trim off the part where the cables enter, so they're free again. And trim them back away from the levers at the bottom, so they don't add, in essence, a rubber spring to the lever. Then we'll see how the next ride goes. I don't care how they end up looking, so much -- the bike is already a mongrel, remember.

The ride on Sunday was good. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the air was cool -- perfect for riding.

I rode over to the conservation land, met up with a friend and took a ride from there. We did probably 8 or 10 miles together, and I added another maybe two miles at each end. The loop I took us around is through familiar territory -- my childhood neighborhood, in a sense. We cut from Southborough into Ashland (which is very close-by at that part of town), skirted the edge of Hopkinton State Park (most of which is actually in Ashland proper), stopped at the Bay Path Humane Society to check out the dogs. I'm still a ways off from a dog, and I need a new car before I can transport one. But as with many things, it's always nice to look. Then we cut into the state park for a bit before cruising back to the conservation land. Made one more quick refreshment stop along the way, too, where I shot the photo above.

My riding partner on Sunday is still a relative newbie to riding, and I spent some time coaching -- emphasizing the importance of spining, rather than grunting up hills, recommending gears, listening to the drivetrain and calling attention to a front derailleur in need of trimming, etc. I enjoyed the role, and tried to share and to help without making an ass of myself.

Reflecting on that attempt at coaching now, I can point at specific moments where something has changed the way I ride or the depth of effort I put into my bikes and cycling. Getting the Shogun. Adding Look pedals. Getting the Kestrel. Having my friend Dan point out that I don't spin enough. Having Dan chide me for not trimming my front derailleur cage (same timeframe, and possibly the same ride). Rebuilding the Paramount as a commuter bike. All great examples of where a simple piece of feedback or a new experience or experiment deepened my relationship with and my passion for cycling. I'm not sure that bikes have ever really just been an appliance for me, as they are for so many riders (nothing wrong with that, btw). But through the sum of all such events, my perspective on cycling is very different than it once was.

It'll be interesting to see if and how that same enthusiasm takes root in my friend. Or in my daughters for that matter. In each case it's up to them, not up to me, and I'm not trying to force anything on anyone. But I like to share.

Next weekend Dan will be in town from Calgary and he's carved out Sunday morning for a visit before heading to the airport. I won't have the girls, so we're hoping to get a ride in. I'll let him use whichever bike he wants, and I've got some other gear he can borrow. No helmet though, I'm just now realizing. Anyway, assuming he doesn't pick the Schwinn, my goal is to get some time with the new derailleurs I installed.

All for now,

J

First Real Ride on the Motobecane Grand Touring

I logged probably 15 miles on my mid-1970's Motobecane Grand Touring today. This qualifies as the first real ride on the bike, and I have some impressions to share as well as a few things to clean up.

Impressions
Essentially this is an old-school bike-boom 10 speed, except it's currently running 126mm hubs and a 6-speed freewheel. And it feels old-school, but mostly in a good way.

For example, the brake levers have a decidedly blocky feel under the fingers, the bodies an undersized feel in the hand when riding "on the hoods", and the cable housing loops out where all creation can see them. This is actually very handy for making adjustments to the cable and housing length, as well as to the location of the lever bodies on the bars, but the point is it's a very different feel than you get today with modern aero levers. And the Superbe brakeset has plenty of power and good modulation, so though they may be old, they work beautifully.

It's the only bike in my fleet that I can ride no-handed. The last bike I had that I could do that on was the Raleigh Rapide I rode from when I was 13 until I went off to college. The Shogun and Kestrel are high strung, but the Paramount and Schwinn are not, particularly. So I'd assumed this had more to do with advancing years and the slowing of reflexes, but now I think it's the geometry (and maybe alignment) of the frames of all those other bikes. It's nice to know I'm not actually feeble yet, at 42. Given that most of my other bikes are more recent designs than the Motobecane, I'm going to chalk that up to old fashioned sensibilities as well. I'm not sure how to chalk up the Schwinn in this regard, which pre-dates the Motobecane by a few years, and that long-gone Raleigh by nearly a decade.

Dire predictions about the adverse handling effects of a fork swap aside, I'd say the new fork is working out just fine. The 531 fork is of similar vintage but has a significantly different bend than the original French fork. I didn't notice anything untoward about the handling, actually -- it feels great. And there's the no-hands thing, too, of course.

The frame (which has Vitus 172 main tubes) feels relatively soft, which you shouldn't take as too much of a critique. Judging by what happens with the outer chainring's position relative to the front derailleur as I'm climbing, there's a fair amount of flex in the bottom bracket, and the ride quality is pretty smooth. It doesn't feel fast and explosively efficient like my Kestrel 200SCi, but nobody said it had to. And though the bottom bracket flexes more, the frame doesn't deliver the sting over impacts that the Shogun used to.

The drivetrain shifts beautifully. I'm not really sold on the Campagnolo friction shift levers, because I like some sort of feedback in the lever (these are smooth, even buttery, but I like retrofriction shifters better), but the Suntour Cyclone derailleurs are quick and precise. The front shifting is faster than anything else I have, even without all the ramps and pins that are part and parcel of today's groupsets. And the rear shifts cleanly and quickly over a freewheel that's likewise devoid of Hyperglide tooth profiles. Very nice.

The saddle is an old Brooks Team Professional that I've mentioned here before. I spent last winter trying to soften it with neatsfoot oil, and I have to say that it felt pretty good today. It hasn't adapted to my shape yet, but even so it doesn't feel like a pressure-treated 4x4 anymore. Honestly, it's not any worse under my bum than any other saddle I have, which is a radically better situation than I had last summer, when it left my perch points battered and sore after a week of riding maybe 100 miles on it (on the Paramount, no less, which has cushy high-volume tires on it). Apparently neatsfoot oil realy is the stuff for loosening up old leather saddles. Thank you Sheldon Brown, once again...

Open Items
I need to wrap the handlebars. Right now they're bare aluminum without even any end plugs. The Nitto 115 bars provide plenty of feedback that way, yes, but they're a little harsh, even with gloves. I have some black cork wrap I'll put on them for the rest of the season, in lieu of using the red Tressostar tape I'd bought for the bike (which I'm setting aside, given what Juli's bars feel like underhand). This is the only change I'd classify as urgent.

I also need to take the unusual and unidentified headset off and put on the new Tange headset I have waiting for the bike. I'd planned to hold off, but I can't run a lock washer on the current setup and the top nuts keep loosening up as a result. I'm going to polish up the headset I have on there now and put it on eBay. Yeah, I suppose this one is urgent too, for safety reasons.

It needs a paint job. It's on the scruffy side, and the fork and frame don't match. Maybe this winter I'll get it painted, along with Juli's Fuji, in matching colors (won't that be just too cute). I think I've said before that I'd like to get something in a Bugatti blue with silver lugs or lug lining, but we'll see where I end up, there. No rush on this one, definitely.

I need to shorten the brake cables and housings to get the loops even and a little less gangly up front. And again, I may swap out the shifters if I can find an inexpensive set of Simplex retrofriction clamp-ons. These two are is mostly aesthetic, as well.

I ought to replace the tires at some point, too, as the ones on there are getting up there in years. I used them on the Schwinn last year, and on the Shogun before that. So maybe that's three urgents. A set of Panaracers with a little tread would make riding on grassy trails a possibility, so I may go that route.

I may also put a set of Look pedals on the bike. I have two extra pair kicking around, so that's easy enough to do. The dust cap on one of the pedals unscrewed and rolled into an intersection on my ride, so at a minimum I need to torque them down a bit more.

The rims are going to need replacement at some point, as the anodization on the square old Mavics is pretty worn. And when I do that, I'll swap the brake pads as well. But no real rush on either, as the brakes still stop pretty smoothly, with only a hint of snatching at the more worn spots on the braking surfaces. This will be expensive when the time comes, so there's really no rush on this one.

The biggest change is that I want to replace the cranks, and at that point I'll have to do the BB as well. I can feel the difference between 170's and 172.5's, and I don't like the feel of spinning up to a cadence on shorter cranks, which this bike has (the Shogun and Paramount also have 170's, but the Kestrel and Schwinn have 172.5's). I've really known this since I first got 172.5 cranks on the Kestrel , but had still hoped for the best with this bike. I may actually look for something with a smaller BCD and smaller rings, install those on the Schwinn, and move the 105SC cranks on that bike onto the Motobecane. The crankset on the bike now is an SR Apex with 42/52 rings. The bottom bracket is a Tange cup-and-cone component with Swiss threading, and I think a 125mm axle.

I have a 36 tooth inner ring for the Apex cranks, which will make it more versatile than the current setup. I need to install that and get some benefit from it, since I spent the money. And I also bought a replacement Shimano UN-72 bottom bracket whose cups have been removed, and a set of Swiss-threaded Phil Wood mounting rings (stainless) to use with this crankset. But if I get a new crankset, those are probably both sunk costs that maybe their next owner will benefit from more than me.

In any case, I'm calling the build a success, despite needing to do a few minor and major changes to get it just the way I want it. It's not yet pretty, but it's an enjoyable ride, and I'm glad to have it in the stable.

All for now,

J

Sunday Ride

I took my kids for a ride this weekend. Ava on her trailer bike, Juliana on her Fuji, and me on my Schwinn.
For our ride, we targeted one of my favorite destinations -- Breakneck Hill Farm. This is one of the two farms the town has acquired in recent years, in order to repurpose them as recreational open space. It's a quick 3 mile ride from the house, so it's a great destination while the girls are still strengthening their legs. I want to try the other one as well -- maybe next weekend.

When we got there, we rode a little ways onto the trails, then parked the bikes and took a hike when the girls' mother joined us. The nice thing about the farm is that biking and walking are both allowed on the trails, but not enough bikes use the trails to damage them, so they stay grassy and smooth and uneroded.

The trails form a big loop that cuts across the front hills, then winds along the back side of the farm, back to this bridge. There are a handful of cut-throughs mowed into the pasture to let you shorten the walk, which takes about an hour if you take the whole thing at a leisurely pace. We walked maybe half of it before heading home.

The trustees of the farm maintain a herd of those black and white cows. I understand they were originally purchased to try to keep the brush at bay, but ultimately, the farm had gone too far to seed for that approach to work. It took a persistent effort at mowing and brush clearing to get it back to this state, and I'm sure that there were many bad cases of poison ivy stemming from that effort. In any case, the cows mostly keep to themselves, grazing in the pasture area set aside for them. But in the fall you can get their attention by plucking some (pretty unappetizing to people) apples from the few trees in reach of the trails, which they'll eat out of your hand.

Overall, a nice ride. Next Saturday we'll ride to socccer again, and I hope to to get Ava riding without training wheels for the first time.

All for now,

J

Derailleur Swap for Schwinn Sports Tourer

The derailleur situation on my 1972 Schwinn Sports Tourer has been sub-optimal since I finished the build a year ago.

When I first built the bike up, I used a mix of early 1990's Shimano derailleurs. At the rear, I had a Shimano 700CX derailleur, which appears to have pretty much the same quality and design as a contemporary 105SC rear derailleur -- painted aluminum outer parallelogram link and knuckles, stainless inner parallelogram link and cage and unsealed pulleys. And at the front, I used a 105SC braze-on derailleur (the one that came with my Kestrel), mounted to an oversized and shimmed Shimano braze-on adapter clamp.

How was this sub-optimal? Well, both derailleurs worked seamlessly within the range of their design. The long cage of the rear derailleur wrapped enough chain to support the broad spread of gears I'm running, and the functionality of this part was as flawless as I've experienced with any recent Shimano derailleur. But the maximum cog limit of the rear derailleur was more like 30 teeth than the 32 I'm running, so there was a lot of noise (and probably wear) in the lowest gear, as the guide pulley rode right on top of the first cog.

Up front, there was no functionality problem at all, but what I'd cobbled together certainly wasn't elegant. A standard Shimano clamp-on front derailleur made for 28.6 tubing doesn't wrap around the slightly oversized Schwinn tubes, you see, and I didn't want to either break a clamp or crimp a tube. So I went with a way oversized adapter and shims, and it worked just fine as I said. But it tugged at me.

So over the past few months, I've been scheming. I bought a set of Suntour derailleurs a while back. The rear was the Superbe Tech you can see in the photo from my last post. And the front was a Superbe Pro with the band-type mounting system I first encountered on the Motobecane Steve gave me. I wasn't familiar with these prior to that encounter, but essentially there's a chromed strap that wraps around the seat tube. The strap is sized to fit the seat tube and held together with a stud that serves as both a pin to clamp down the strap and a mounting point for the derailleur body. Seeing this on the Motobecane, I incorrectly guessed that these were one-size fits all, or somehow adjustable. I discovered that wasn't the case today, but even so figured I'd have better luck making one of these fit a Schwinn seat tube than a cast aluminum clamp. And indeed, it wasn't a lay-up, but it only took a few moments of fiddling with a pair of pliers to get the Superbe Pro front derailleur to fit.

That's the front. At the rear, I installed a Shimano XT derailleur, which has a maximum cog size of I think 34 teeth, so it works great with my rear cluster. While I had the old derailleur off, I inspected the brass shim I'd made to adapt the Huret dropout to modern derailleurs, and it looks no different than when I put it on. Works fine with the XT derailleur, too, as expected. The other thing of note about the rear derailleur is that it's a Rapid Rise model. That means the spring in the derailleur body pushes, rather than pulls, so at rest, the derailleur wants to be in low gear, rather than top gear. The effect of this is that it reverses the orientation of your rear derailleur lever. So with my Suntour ratcheting bar-ends (which work really well with this derailleur, I've already found), pulling up on the right lever shifts up, rather than down. It's a little odd, I have to admit, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I have three basic shifter layouts in operation in my fleet anyway, so remembering that the bar ends work one way vs. another way shouldn't be a big deal. However, if I'm coaching Juli, I'm going to have to remember what "go up a gear" or "go down a few gears" means on her bike.

My ride today was on the Kestrel, and I only made a quick test run up to the next driveway to make sure I didn't screw anything up. So far so good, but not a lot of data yet. I'll learn more on my ride to soccer next weekend with the girls, weather permitting.

I'd also be interested to hear what others have done with these bikes, in this department. Anyone else tackle a modernization of one of these great old tanks?

While I was at it today, I also swapped the Ultegra rear derailleur on Ava's trailer bike for a similar but more beat-up unit. That one works fine, but the rear adjuster barrel is kind of hosed (the threading in the knuckle is messed up). Since she's not running indexed shifters, that's NBD, but I can unload the one I pulled off on eBay for more than I'd get for a damaged one. I'm still clearing out my parts box, so that's one more part to list.

All for now,

J