Greetings from the land of ravaged Citi Bikes:
Musta been using those hookless rims.
One glance at the front page of your newspaper of choice will confirm that there’s lots and lots of important stuff happening here in America and around the world. But I don’t care about any of that crap. All I care about is my new Roaduno:
By the way, it looks like the complete Roadunos are currently sold out…BUT they still have scuffed ones available, and at a discount. In fact mine is a scuffed one, though you can hardly notice:
If you’re using the bike right it should be at least that scuffed after your first ride… Plus if you’re as incompetent as I am you’ll manage to scratch any new bike up pretty good during assembly before you even get it out the door. And if you don’t like scuffs or someone else picking your parts for you, you can also get the Roaduno as just a frame.
Anyway, if it really starts to bother me I’ll just apply some touch-up paint:
I spent lots of time with the Roaduno over the weekend, not only riding it but also making the usual adjustments and tweaks. For example, the first thing it needed was some tape on the handlebar bends:
This is where you grab the bar when you’re climbing out of the saddle, and since it’s a singlespeed you want some extra grip since you’re cranking on it quite a bit harder than you would on a geared bike. Please note I remain deeply Newbaum’s-challenged and the taped portion on the left is longer than the one on the right, which makes no practical difference but psychologically is really annoying once you notice it. Also, I used electrical tape instead of twine, which is in direct contravenance to the Rivendell style manual. However, I expect I’ll be experimenting with the bike quite a bit in the coming months (swapping cockpits and so forth) so fussing over the bar tape at this early stage seems especially pointless.
I’ve also changed the tires. The bike comes with Panaracer Gravel Kings, which are a great match:
However, on my first real ride I could feel a little hop in the rear wheel. It clearly wasn’t an issue with rim trueness or roundness, so I removed the tire and checked the rim strip and tube; all that was fine too. Then I remounted the tire, figuring maybe it hadn’t been seated properly, but still the hop remained. As it happened, I had a pair of Bruce Gordon Rock n’ Road tires in the tire pile, which were still in good shape and were close in both size and spirit to the Gravel Kings. So I put those on, and whaddya know, the hop was gone:
Did I get a defective Gravel King? I suppose it’s possible, though it’s also possible I just didn’t spend enough time trying to the tire. (In my experience Panaracers can be fussy that way…and yes, I know the Rock n’ Roads are also Panaracers.) Either way, the Rock n’ Roads also suit the bike perfectly–a little heavier than the Gravel Kings, but also a little fatter–so for now I’ll just keep them on and hold the Gravel Kings in reserve:
Speaking of fatter tires, the long reach calipers afford the bike plenty of clearance, though I noticed the other day that one or two people commented negatively on their appearance and suggested the bike would be better served with cantilevers, V-brakes, or even discs:
Of course all of this is highly subjective, and if someone doesn’t like the way something looks or prefers a different system I’d never presume to change their minds, even if I do think they’re CRAZY AND WRONG.
At the same time, we are all bike dorks first and foremost, so let’s take a moment to explore the subject and nerd out on brakes. First, let’s consider the appearance of the brake:
[How the hell did only the pedal wind up in focus? I continue to amaze myself.]
Now I happen to think that the single-bolt caliper brake is the most elegant of all velocipedal retardation systems, and that’s regardless of length. Certainly if you feel differently that’s perfectly valid, but I would implore you to at least consider the possibility that you’ve been brainwashed. Road bicycle brakes have been the victim of an insidious form of shrink-flation since like the 1980s, when pretty much all road bikes regardless of intended use started coming with short-reach brakes, a size that had previously been reserved for racers. So pervasive was this shift that the wonderfully versatile medium-reach brake started to become known as a long-reach brake:
[A medium-reach brake]
As for actual brakes with long reach, these were soon considered so gargantuan that they didn’t even bother inventing a new name for them. Consider that Specialized likes to auto-fellate itself for inventing the comfortable road bike with the Roubaix (HA!), and yet even that bike came with short-reach brakes:
Instead it had a “Zertz damping system:”
Somehow this thing was considered aesthetically preferable to a slightly longer brake. Then when they were finished mind-fucking us they said, “Oh, you want clearance? Now you need a bike with discs!”
My point is that by gradually memory-holing sensibly-sized brake calipers, the bike industry created the current situation, which is that a sensibly-sized brake now seems comically huge to people. It’s like we’ve all been practicing foot-binding for the past 40 years and so we now point and laugh at normal-sized shoes.
As for cantilevers and V-brakes, as a rim brake apologist I naturally appreciate both systems. However, let’s consider why these systems exist in the first place, and it’s mainly to accommodate larger tires and to deliver more braking power. But remember, this is a Roaduno, not a Mountainuno, and it doesn’t need to accommodate mountain bike-sized tires. Furthermore, I can attest that the stopping power on the stock barbecue tongs is more than adequate, and you’re probably not going to load a bike like this very heavily. So why design the bike for cantis or v-brakes, which require more material on the frame? In addition to bosses, cantilever brakes also require stuff like cable hangers, and they can be tricky to set up. (“Have you tried toeing them in?” is generally the last thing people say to frustrated canti users before they get punched in the nose.) Meanwhile, v-brakes may not need hangers and are generally more straightforward mechanically, but again, it’s a Roaduno, and if you want to use drop bars (I’ll almost certainly put drop bars on this thing at some point) you’re limited to special levers or kludgy adapters or mini-vs that require you to set the pad like 1mm from the rim. But a road brake is idiot-proof (take it from me, a bona-fide idiot) and requires nothing more than a couple holes in the frame, and thus seems to me to be the ideal brake for this kind of bike. Also, if we’re going to make highly subjective aesthetic observations, road-ish bikes with v-brakes scream “hybrid,” sorry:
By the way, this simplicity extends to the 120mm spacing:
I admit that at first even I was like, “Huh, why not just go 130mm or 135mm? Seems like you’d have more options.” Then I realized that the industry is moving away from non-thru-axle non-disc 130mm and 135mm hubs in general (to say nothing of singlespeed-specific hubs). However, since the fixie craze of the early aughts 120mm hubs have been both cheap and ubiquitous, and of course you have your deluxe options too. Sure, you may not be able to throw some spacers on the freehub of your old road wheel to single it up and use it on the Roaduno, but so what? Also, since track bikes don’t use brakes, you won’t run out of hub options due to industry disc-ification, and since incredibly people continue to ride fixies you’ll probably be able to get 120mm hubs until the end of time. When I started this blog in 2007 mostly to ridicule hipsters on fixies, who knew I’d wind up owing everything to them and they’d end up saving us? Thank you brakeless fixie hipsters!
As for discs, without getting into a whole “disc vs. rim” thing, suffice it to say that the entire industry has now moved to discs, and those of us who love rim brake bikes are deeply grateful to Rivendell for their ongoing commitment to them. We weirdos get our rim brakes, and the people who want discs can choose from about a zillion other bikes, from boutiquey steel Crusts and Velo Oranges to the latest plastic blob from Pon. Everybody wins! Especially me, because so far I love this thing:
Sorry about all the brake talk, but just wait until I get started on gearing…
