It’s been very dry around here, bodies of water notwithstanding:
The downside of the dryness has been lots of brush fires:
But the upside is that trail conditions are optimal:
Lately my preferred trail-meandering bike has been the Roaduno:
[Photo was taken a week or two ago. Note how the color has drained from the landscape since then.]
Since receiving it I’ve made various changes, the most significant of which have been the switch to drop bars and the unlocking of the inner chainring to achieve a two-speed setup, and I’ve been extremely pleased. However, part of the fun of a quirky bike like this is experimenting with it, and I’d been thinking it would be nice to have something a little bigger than that 38-tooth ring, so I decided to provoke everybody who’s already offended by the whole “dinglespeed” thing and go all the way by converting the bike into a “thringlespeed.”
Obviously I could have achieved thringle-fication by adding a third ring to the crank that was already on there, but instead I decided to switch it for this:
It’s the Suntour “Microdrive” that was on the Softride–or at least the drive-side half is. The other half seems to be a Sugino:
But if your crank arms aren’t mismatched are you really don’t square taper right?
I’d say no.
Thanks to its Micro-ness, in addition to the 42-tooth outer ring, I’d also get a teeny-tiny 20-tooth inner ring, which is considerably smaller than the 26-tooth inner ring on the Silver crank:
It’s a lovely crank in every way, and a 26-tooth inner ring is plenty small, but remember, we’re experimenting here.
Usually when I tinker it winds up being a debacle, but in this case everything went smoothly despite my best efforts. Fortunately the existing bottom bracket was a good fit, though as you can see there’s not much room between that teeny-tiny ring and the bottom bracket lug:
Besides that it was really just a matter of adjusting the limit screws on the front derailleur, and before long I was out riding:
The first thing I noticed was the difference in both stiffness and Q-factor of the mismatched crank arms:
Just kidding:
I did really like the triple, though. The bike already had a low gear, but now it has a low gear, as low as I could possibly need. The middle ring is small enough to get me almost everything else, and the 42-tooth outer ring is a real improvement on the flats. And it’s all controlled by a simple downtube-mounted toggle switch:
“But what’s the point of all this? If you’re going to turn a singlespeed into a three-speed, why not get an internally-geared hub or something?,” you may be asking.
Of course I understand that the front-shifting capability of the Roaduno is not for everybody. However, the beauty of it is that, unlike an internally-geared hub, if you do decide to take advantage of it, it you can use all that old crap you’ve already got lying around–shifters, derailleurs, freewheels, fixed hubs, etc. (And if you don’t have bins full of that crap you can get much of it for next to nothing.) Then if you get tired of it in frontally-geared mode you can quickly remove everything and make it a “proper” singlespeed again. An internally-geared hub is a whole other proposition–obviously they’re great, but they’re not conducive to spur-of-the-moment tinkering the way derailleurs and stuff are. I did all this on a whim before heading out for a ride, which is a big part of what makes the bike fun:
Speaking of Rivendell, I see the presale for the lugged version of the Roadini is about to open:
[Photo: Rivendell]
Why must they tempt me so?