Red Clover Components

New Product! Introducing the Freewheel Key

2/1/2018

It's the size of a Swiss Army knife, but different in concept: It does one thing very well.

I recently finished final testing of a new tool that I hope will find a place with riders who tour on freewheel-equipped bikes. I can’t be the only one who still does that, can I?

I’m calling it the Freewheel Key. It’s a lightweight, portable tool that makes it easy to remove a freewheel from a hub when you don’t have access to the heavy shop tools ordinarily used for that job. (Bike tourists of a certain age may recognize a family resemblance to a long-extinct tool called the Pocket Pro, although this successor version is stronger, much more versatile, and easier to use.)

Who needs to remove a freewheel by the side of the road?

Mostly, people who have to replace a broken drive-side rear spoke. Given the dished configuration of rear wheels on derailleur-geared bicycles, the spokes on that side are under higher tension--and much more prone to breakage--than those elsewhere. I’ve been scheming about this tool since last spring, when I broke two spokes in the course of a cross-country tour.

At this point I’m going to briefly turn down a side road and say a few words about the difference between cassettes and freewheels, since they’re similar in appearance and often confused with one another.

Cassettes are what you’ll find on most modern bikes. The rear cogs slide onto a splined extension of the hub and are secured by a threaded lockring that’s secured with a fairly modest degree of torque.

(If you want to dig into this a little deeper than I’m going to here, Sheldon Brown has a good tutorial on the subject here:)

Unlike cassettes, freewheels thread directly onto to the hub in such a way that they’re tightened by the force of pedaling. They were standard on derailleur-equipped bikes until the mid-80s or so, when they were largely replaced by cassette hubs. Nowadays, freewheels are standard equipment only on new department-store-quality bikes. But quality replacement freewheels are still available, and there are still millions of fine old freewheel-equipped bikes out on the road.

Removing a freewheel starts by inserting the correct freewheel remover into the splined or slotted body of the freewheel, and securing it with the quick-release spindle and nut.

The group of three freewheel removers on the left have 1" hexagonal bodies that are compatible with the fixed jaws of the Freewheel Key. From left to right: a four-prong Suntour tool, an earlier two-prong Suntour, and a splined Shimano remover that fits most freewheels in use today. Grouped at right, three non-compatible removers: a Shimano with a 15/16" base; and old Suntour two-prong with a 7/8" base, and an Atom/Regina remover, also with a 7/8" base. Park Tool, bless them, makes reasonably-priced 1" removers to fit most common freewheels, both old and new.

A Suntour two-prong remover temporarily secured to the freewheel body. I like to screw on the spindle nut until it's tight, then back it off a turn and a half so it won't bind when the freewheel starts to loosen.

In a well-equipped bike shop, that temporary assembly is then turned over so the hexagonal steel remover can be clamped in a solidly mounted bench vise. At that point, the wheel is turned counterclockwise, with the wheel itself providing the mechanical advantage needed to back out the freewheel. In a shop that lacks a vise, the mechanic bears down on the remover with a wrench until the freewheel begins to unscrew from the hub.

When it comes to removing a freewheel in the shop, the big-vise method beats the big-wrench method every time.

Either way, that takes force, and often plenty of it. A freewheel that’s been hammered home for a few thousand miles by a strong rider with low gears--especially if the threads weren’t coated with anti-seize or grease when it was last installed--can be a stubborn thing indeed. If you’re using the wrench method, a 12-inch adjustable is about the smallest tool that will give you any chance of success. A 15-inch adjustable is even better.

More often than not, either one will have to be extended with a cheater bar of some sort. Before my shop had a bench vise, I used to keep a two-foot length of galvanized water pipe handy for use as a freewheel persuader.

Fortunately, once it starts to turn, even a very tight freewheel will usually keep turning easily. After the first rotation or so, it’s often possible to remove the spindle and turn the remover the rest of the way by hand. (If you leave the spindle in place, remember to loosen it incrementally as the freewheel backs out, or the spindle nut will bind against it, possibly stripping the nut or breaking the spindle itself.)

Okay, detour complete. Turning back onto the main road now.

So what happens if you snap a drive-side rear spoke or two on a remote stretch of road somewhere in West Texas? You’re not going to have a vise or a big wrench and cheater bar in your tool kit then.

But who needs them? Take off the rear wheel, insert the freewheel remover, position the Freewheel Key, and thread the spindle into it. Now engage its hardened steel dogs with some nearby element of roadside infrastructure--a steel signpost is ideal, but anything from a steel guardrail support to chain-link fence or storm-drain grate will work just as well--and rotate the wheel counterclockwise, exactly as in the bench-vise method.

The pictures below probably explain that better than words do.

Thread the spindle into the Freewheel Key to hold it and the freewheel remover in position. Some older French spindles use non-standard threading (vive la France!), but because the hub doesn't care how the spindle is threaded, they can be replaced--if only for the duration of that cross-country tour--with any M5x0.8 threaded spindle of the same length.

Plug the steel dogs that extend from the front of the Freewheel Key into the perforations on any square- or channel-section signpost, and turn the wheel counterclockwise while pressing it firmly against the post--a motion that will be familiar to anyone who has opened a child-resistant bottle. When you think about it, the setup corresponds closely to the vise-removal method pictured earlier--the aluminum body of the tool substitutes for the vise, the signpost for the workbench, and the cylindrical steel dogs for the big bolts that secure vise to bench.

The press-and-turn method also works with a utility-pole guy wire, or almost any other immobile steel object that's strong enough and fits between the dogs. This photo and the preceding one, incidentally, also show why no one goes bike touring in Vermont in February.

Thanks to its 7075 T6 aluminum body, the Freewheel Key weighs in at a fairly svelte 5.2 ounces, or about 150 grams. Even so, it's a tough little beast. I’ve broken two freewheel pullers and destroyed one wheel while trying to see what it will take to break the tool itself--and I still haven't managed to break one.

“Wait a minute,” I can hear someone say. “The alloy body may be almost as strong as steel, but even heat-treated 7075 aluminum is quite a bit softer than steel. What about damage to the aluminum where it bears against the steel freewheel remover?”

In fact, the aluminum does wear at that interface--although much too gradually to make any practical difference. In working with the prototypes, I’ve found that two dozen of cycles of as-tight-as-humanly-possible freewheel tightening and loosening leaves faint marks on the aluminum jaws, but it doesn’t come anywhere near damaging them in terms of function. (Engineers refer to this type of wear as “fretting,” which admittedly does sound worrisome.)

I suppose that a busy bike shop would wear one out pretty quickly by using it in place of a bench vise. But it's not made for regular shop use. Normal roadside use won’t faze it in the least. Even if you’re the worst spoke-breaker in the history of bicycle touring, one Freewheel Key should last you for several lifetimes.

This well-used prototype tool shows a few wear marks from the pressure of the steel freewheel remover. But look which one broke first.

I’ve resisted the urge to beautify the tool in any way. Starting with heavier bar stock and CNC machining it to a swoopy, graceful shape would have doubled or tripled the cost without adding anything to the performance of the finished product. There’s no polishing or anodizing. It’s an emergency tool--simple, effective, and as low in cost as I can make it.

I like this thing a lot. The prototype pictured above has taken up permanent quarters in my touring tool kit.

Not everyone, I realize, will see things the way I do. I can hear the contrarian view already:

"Be serious! One hundred and fifty grams?" [Is this the same hypothetical person who was asking about fretting a few paragraphs back? It could be, but I think it's someone else.] "That's half again as much as one of those big Snickers bars! You're going to haul that much weight around when you're not even sure you'll need to use it?" [shakes head in disbelief]

Too true! The hypothetical person is right. It does weight as much as one and a half Snickers "2 to Go" candy bars (the kind that theoretically serves two, but that bike tourists invariably eat all at once). And that doesn't include the freewheel puller itself, which adds at least another ounce.

In short, this is not a tool for riders who think about their touring loads in terms of grams. It's a tool for people like me, who place a high value--perhaps an overly high value?--on mechanical self-sufficiency.

And here’s the really big question: How many mechanical-self-sufficiency-valuing bike tourists out there value mechanical self-sufficiency enough to actually buy one of these things? At a price that pays for making them here in Vermont?

I guess that’s two questions.

I’m going to take the direct approach to finding the answers. A small production run is in the works, and the first Freewheel Keys are going to show up in the Store section of this website sometime in the next few weeks. You won’t be able to order one until then, but I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have in the meantime.

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Are Triplizers Immoral?

9/11/2017

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A year or so ago, I went on a vintage ride organized by Onion River Sports, the bike shop in nearby Montpelier, Vermont (and a very good shop at that). Eroica it was not. It was basically thirty or forty people with a variety of old bikes meeting up in the parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, going for a 25- or 30-mile ride, and meeting up afterwards for pasta, beer, and commemorative T-shirts. The ride itself was hilly--as rides around here tend to be--and mostly on dirt. It was great.

Don't you love this guy's pants?

During the milling-around phase just before the ride started, I wandered over to a guy with a beautiful Schwinn Paramount from 1970 or so. The red paint was immaculate, and it was still equipped with the murderous gearing typical of Paramounts from that time period: Something like 52-49 chainrings in front and a 14-24 5-speed freewheel.

I complimented him on the bike and remarked that I'd be walking a lot of hills if my bike was geared that way.

(In addition to just being friendly, of course, my plan was ease into a conversation that would end with him saying "How I wish there was some convenient way to convert this original crankset to a triple so I could ride effortlessly up even the steepest hills! If such a product existed I would buy it immediately!" I have few equals when it comes to guerilla marketing.)

Alas, it didn't work. He agreed that the gearing was much too high, and that he had to walk a lot of hills. Then he went even further. I don't remember the exact words he used, but the gist of it was that originality had to take precedence over mere comfort.

Before I could think of a response, we were rolling.

With a new Brooks saddle and a lighter wheelset, this Dayton-made "Van Cleve" model might make a nice commuter. But the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum prefers to leave it alone.

I've run into that attitude before, and I have to say that it always leaves me kind of puzzled. I mean, is the bike supposed to serve me, or am I supposed to serve the bike? Should my riding experience today be dictated by the Schwinn product manager who specced the chainrings when I was in tenth grade?

At this point I should point out that I have strong views on maintaining the originality of old bikes. I won't permanently alter old frames or components for the sake of short-term convenience. That position has cost me, too: I spent a shocking amount of money (for me, at least) on a long-cage Simplex derailleur for my Peugeot PX-10, when I could have gotten the same functional result by by butchering the original hanger and installing a cheap and perfectly reliable Suntour VGT-Luxe. (For more on this, see preceding blog entry "Derailleur Hangers Demystified.")

But I see nothing wrong with swapping bolt-on components at will. Why not? The bike's next owner can always restore it to original condition by removing the non-original crankset or wheels and replacing them with the right ones.

In the exceptional case of a bike with real historic value--Eddy Merckx's hour-record bike, for example, or one of the five surviving bicycles built by the Wright Brothers--it's best leave things completely alone. But that anonymous bike-boom Raleigh International? I say go ahead and swap parts around--just be sure to keep the old ones.

A nice day for a fall ride. The guy on the left--with the old Bottechia--is Onion River Sports service manager Per Tonn. I don't know the other folks. I was about five miles behind them at this point.

I saw the Paramount guy a few more times in the course of the ride. On two of those occasions he was walking his bike on steep pitches. He seemed to be having a good time, although he was so far ahead of me that I couldn't say for sure.

In any case, I'm pretty slow to begin with, and was made even slower by a loose headset on my newly rebuilt Gitane Tour de France, which I had to stop and adjust. I'd been hoping to see the Paramount again, but by the time I got to the finish both bike and owner were gone.

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Notes on a Cross-Country Tour

8/22/2017

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It's been about four months since my friend Phil and I finished a cross-country tour on the Adventure Cycling Association's Southern Tier route, from San Diego, Calif. to St. Augustine, Fla. It was an excellent trip in pretty much every way, and a feet-first plunge into loaded touring, given that my only prior experience was a couple of one-overnighters.

Approaching Aguila, Arizona. It's often said that recumbents are slower than upright bikes, but the rider may have something to do with it. I spent most of the trip struggling to catch up to Phil. If the recumbent really did slow him down, I'm glad he didn't have an upright. Dig those temporarily matching panniers!

We started on Feb. 21 and finished on April 14--a total of 53 days overall, of which six were non-riding rest days. Neither of us had any way of measuring mileage, but if the 3,050 mile figure listed by the ACA is accurate, we averaged about 63 miles per riding day. (Coincidentally, I turned 63 about three weeks after the end of the ride.) Our longest daily mileage--based on distances listed on the ACA maps--was somewhere in the low nineties; our shortest was about 35.

My point in mentioning this is not to draw attention to how awesome we are (although we are pretty awesome). What I really want to do, before I forget, is just record some of the useful day-to-day stuff we learned along the way about doing a long bike tour. Given my limited experience at such things--this was my first tour, after all--I don't offer any of this as advice. But here are some things that worked well for us.

Breakfast on the Nueces River. Living large with two kinds of peanut butter and chocolate granola.

1. Food
Just before noon on our first day, we stopped to buy lunch food in a San Diego supermarket, where Phil suggested buying a bag of flour tortillas.

It was such a good idea we did it again later. And again. And again. For the next seven weeks, in fact, we ate tortillas at least twice a day, and often three times a day. They're cheap, fairly dense in terms of calories, and easy to travel with. They don't break or crumble, and the flexible plastic-bag packaging allows them to slip easily into a even a pannier that is already packed full.

Best of all, they're versatile and really good. We ate them with peanut butter and bananas for breakfast, with cheese and avocado (or more peanut butter) for lunch. We sometimes ate shredded rotisserie chicken with mayonnaise and Cholula hot sauce rolled up in tortillas for supper. That is a good meal.

It was also fascinating to watch the tortilla supply change as we traveled. There were many brands available in California, but even more in Arizona and New Mexico. Some stores in those states had most of one aisle devoted to tortillas. The selection gradually declined as we headed east in Texas. By the time we reached Mississippi, there was often just one selection to be had--Mission brand, the Wonder Bread of the tortilla universe.

We carried a small folding isobutane stove and a one-quart aluminum pot, which allowed us to have hot tea in the morning and cook simple meals. One favorite was smoked sausage boiled with rice and sliced sweet potato. We always carried a couple packages of ramen noodles and foil pouches of tuna for times when nothing better was available.

By the way, you can make an excellent convenience-store gorp by crushing a medium-size bag of Ruffles potato chips until the fragments are cornflake-sized, then adding two miniature boxes of raisins and a small bag of mixed nuts.

Our last campsite, at Anastasia State Park in St. Augustine. Somewhere back around Warrenton, Texas, one of Phil's panniers--the one with all his clothes--fell off his bike. He went back and looked for it, but never found it. He rode the last 1,200 miles with a soft-sided Wal-Mart beer cooler, filled with replacement Wal-Mart clothing, zip-tied to his rear rack. It does have a certain charm.

2. Bikes, Gearing, and Luggage

Phil rode a long-wheelbase Rans recumbent, and he seemed very comfortable throughout. He was certainly faster than me. Not sure about the details of his gearing, but I did notice that he almost never used his granny chainring. Is that a recumbent thing? I'll have to ask him.

I rode a 1981 Miyata 1000. I'd thought about going with my triplized PX-10, but ultimately decided to give the Miyata--a legendary loaded touring bike of its day--a chance to do its stuff. It worked really well. I had it set up as a half-step-and-granny, with 48-44-30 chainrings (on the original 86 BCD Sugino crankset) and a 14-16-19-23-28-34 Suntour freewheel.

I never wished for a higher gear, but I would have liked to have a slightly lower one during a couple of long climbs. A 46-42-28 crankset might have been a slightly better choice. (As it happens, I have exactly that gearing on the triplized Model 93 on my Raleigh Gran Sport.)

Both of us tried to cut our luggage to a bare minimum, and it paid off. We didn't have anything we didn't need (except for our 6 pounds of tools and spare parts, most of which went unused), and never needed anything we didn't have.

My base load, including the tent fly, cooking gear, tools, clothing, and sleeping bag and air mattress, came to about 32 pounds. That includes my panniers and trunk bag, but not the bike-mounted racks. When we added food and a gallon of water apiece--as we sometimes did in West Texas, where it watering holes might be 50 miles apart--I must have been carrying 45 lbs or more.

Guesstimating by pannier volume, it seemed to me that many of the other riders we saw along the way had to be carrying carrying twice the weight that we were, the poor devils.

I was able to fit all my stuff in a pair of smallish 1980s vintage front panniers and a trunk bag on a rear rack. The steering felt "heavy," but the bike handled very well once I learned to equalize the side-to-side load between panniers. If the load wasn't balanced, the bike developed a bad speed wobble at about 15 mph. (I had heard that it's possible to dampen a speed wobble by pressing a knee against the frame's top tube, and was relieved to find that it does. I'm not sure how I would have managed the 4,000-foot descent into California's Central Valley otherwise).

Overall, I much preferred the setup I used to the feel of rear panniers alone.

Phil, on the other hand, just used a set of rear panniers and a small handlebar bag. At least he started with a set of panniers--he finished with one pannier and a soft-sided beer cooler. I hope someone in Texas found the one he lost and is putting it to good use.

In Greenville, Florida, boyhood home of the great Ray Charles. You can see from my expression that I'm wishing I had brought my tuxedo.

3. Clothes

I have always felt that non-cyclists are put off by riders who are decked out in spandex, colorful cycling jerseys, and wraparound sunglasses. That's not necessarily because they're being unfriendly. If you're dressed like a racer--or at least wearing what a non-rider thinks of as racer garb--the non-rider is likely to assume that you're in a big hurry, and probably don't have time to stop chew the fat.

Is that a wingnut idea? I have no data to support it, but makes sense to me

Anyway, both Phil and I made an effort to wear fairly normal-looking clothing. He mostly wore t-shirts and a pair of pants with zip-off legs (no need for cycling shorts on a recumbent). I wore a white cotton dress shirt, black long underwear, two pairs of liner shorts, and a pair of unpadded mountain-bike shorts. (The liners were thin and cheap, so I had to wear both pairs to get adequate padding. I washed the outer pair every night, put on the clean pair first the next morning, and moved the previous day's inner to the outside.) I convinced myself that the combination of black long underwear and black shorts looked something like regular long pants if you didn't look too closely.

And we did have lots of fun conversations with the locals at markets and convenience stores. That wonderful talk we had with the overall-wearing guy in Poplarville, Mississippi? Who rode across the country on an Indian motorcycle in 1960? Would that have happened if we'd been wearing cycling clothes?

Heck, I don't know, maybe it would have.

A memorable desert campsite outside Lordsburg, New Mexico. Neither of of us had kickstands, but we found that our bikes would reliably hold one another upright if we leaned them together head-to-tail, like horses standing in a pasture.

4. Sleeping

According to my notes, we spent 4 nights with friends, 8 nights with Warm Showers hosts (www.warmshowers.org), 14 nights in motels, and 27 nights camping. Our motel stays most often happened because we were in an urban area at nightfall with no other options, but there were a few occasions when we were just tired and wanted to sleep in beds. Two of the motels nights were timed to avoid heavy rain and lightning.

In California, Arizona, and New Mexico, it was simple to get out of sight of the road and pitch our tent out in the desert. Texas was another story. There's practically no public land, and the private land is tightly fenced to within a few yards of the road. We tented mostly at RV campgrounds--often on miserable little patches of gravel--but we also stayed in one lovely county-run campground on the Nueces River and a state park or two.

We could have wild-camped here and there as we got further east, but for one reason or another we never did, except for one night by a levee outside Simmesport, Louisiana. The Florida state parks, we thought, were great.

I was a little bit surprised to find that all state parks and RV campgrounds had showers, which meant that we only went unwashed on our wild-camping nights.

Is Richards in Central Texas or East Texas? The map doesn't say. The guy on the right is our friend Dave, who rode with us from Austin to the Louisiana border.

5. Navigation

The Adventure Cycling Association maps are excellent, but they necessarily cover only a narrow strip of territory. That can make it difficult to detour off the established route or put your location into any sort of big-picture context. Digital natives might be able to do that with a smartphone, but the required zooming in and out made us queasy.

We relied on old-school road maps. The problem, we quickly discovered, is that printed road maps aren't easy to find today. Except for Louisiana and Florida, even the state welcome centers didn't have them.

While wandering around the vast urban sprawl of metropolitan Phoenix, hopelessly off the ACA route, we stopped at a dozen or so convenience stores before two helpful women who worked at one of them rooted through the magazine display and triumphantly came up with a tattered Arizona highway map. But because it lacked a computer bar code, they couldn't figure out how to sell it to us. The store manager came out of his office and rang it up manually, remarking "We haven't sold one of these things in years."

It took us until Mississippi to realize that all drugstores carry a wide variety of printed maps, often in regular and large-print editions. Who uses road maps these days? Old people. Who spends a lot of time in drugstores? Old people. If we weren't so old ourselves, we might have figured that out two thousand miles earlier.

Is it possible to drive from Florida to Maine without visiting South of the Border? Evidently not. We didn't want to stop there, but did anyway. I even bought a stupid and overpriced hat.

6. Coming and Going

At the start of the trip, Phil and I met at a motel a few hundred yards from the start of the bike route. To avoid handing our bikes over to the airline's baggage handlers, we boxed and shipped the bikes to ourselves at the motel a few days before we arrived, using a service called BikeFlights (www.bikeflights.com).

When we arrived in St. Augustine in the middle of April, we considered flying back to New England (Phil to Maine, me to Vermont), but weren't enthusiastic about having to find bike boxes, transport them to the airport on our bikes, and dismantle and pack everything for shipment there.

I had priced one-way car rentals back in February, and found that it would set us back something like $300 apiece. But because this seemed so much simpler than flying, we looked into it again, figuring that it might be worth the added cost.

Amazement! A one-way rental for an economy car--from St. Augustine to Rockland, Maine--was $3 per day, with unlimited mileage. The guy at the rental company explained that there was always a huge surplus of cars in Florida in the spring, and that it was cheaper for the company to get customers to drive them north than to load them on a car carrier and pay to ship them where they were needed.

It ended up costing us a bit more than that, because we needed to rent an SUV to accommodate Phil's recumbent. But at $16 a day plus gas, it was still a screaming deal.

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Team Peugeot Rides Again

10/17/2016

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That's me on the left, Tom on the right. His PX-10 has the fancy Nervex lugs, mine has the plain ones. I do wish I had a photo of Tom from back in the day, when he had a spectacular Bill Walton-style nimbus of hair. Sic transit gloria mundi!

In 1976, my old friend Tom marked the end of his stint in the Peace Corps by joining a couple of fellow volunteers on a bike ride from the west coast of Mexico to Guatemala City, in south-central Guatemala.

A 2,000-mile ride is noteworthy on any kind of bike, but the really remarkable thing about this one is that Tom managed it on his 1974 Peugeot PX-10, still equipped with its original gearing: A 52-45 double chainring setup combined with a 14-15-17-19-21 freewheel. (He did, however, swap the original tubular rims for clinchers.)

How does a person climb mountain ranges on a loaded bike with a 55-inch low gear? The answer, Tom recalls, is with a lot of very hard low-cadence mashing and a little bit of trickery. On one murderously steep mountain road between Saltillo and Monterrey--a stretch known to locals as La Cuesta de Los Muertos, in tribute to the truck drivers who died while crossing it in winter--they got help from an unexpected source.

While grinding painfully up a particularly steep grade, they were slowly passed by a heavy truck. One of the three cyclists--Tom doesn't remember who--had the inspiration of pouring on burst of power, catching up to the laboring vehicle, and grabbing onto one of the ropes that secured the tarp covering the load. Steering as best they could with one hand, awash in dust and exhaust fumes with bike just tires inches from the spinning truck wheels, they gained an unnerving but pain-free mile or two.

At that point, the grade moderated and the truck picked up speed to the point where it was just too terrifying to hold on. The truck moved on ahead as our heroes slogged along in its wake.

But yes! Some distance ahead the grade steepened again, Tom and friends caught up, and grabbed onto the side ropes until the next flat section. The same sequence repeated itself several times more until Tom--his legs by now utterly played out--just couldn't close the gap with the slow-moving truck and started falling behind.

I wasn't there, but this part of the story always reminds me of the final scene in the 1958 Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones: Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, as escaped convicts, are running to catch a freight train that they hope will carry them to freedom. Poitier's character pulls himself aboard, but the wounded and exhausted Tony Curtis can't quite grasp his outstretched hand. (The scene starts at 2:08 in this trailer from the film.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBrw8dmgarM

Anyway, at this critical point, one of Tom's companions--a massively powerful rider named Jim--went one better than Sidney Poitier by dropping back, grabbing the stem of his bike, and dragging him ahead to the truck.

The descent was easier.

Fast forward to October, 2016, when a mutual friend invited a group of old pals to a weekend foliage-season bike ride at his house in New York state, just across the border from southwestern Vermont. I had just built up a PX-10 of my own from my stash of old parts and a recently-acquired frame, so I proposed to Tom that he and I form a team: If he'd drag his old bike out of the woodshed, I told him, I'd clean it up and knock the gearing down to a reasonable range for an older gentleman.

The old veteran of La Cuesta was looking a little rough. A fair amount of rust was showing through the paint. The original Simplex derailleur hanger had been hacked off the frame a decade earlier, courtesy of a mechanic at a local bike shop who crudely lowered the gearing by bolting on a cheap mountain-bike derailleur and Shimano Megarange freewheel.

But with some grease, new cables, and replacement parts-bin derailleurs (a Huret Duopar in back and a nameless Huret front--not exactly original spec, but at least French-made), it started looking better. A longer spindle, a 42-tooth triplizer with a 32-tooth granny ring on the old Stronglight 93 crank, a 14-34 Suntour Narrow 6 freewheel, and voila! A PX-10 built for hill climbing, no truck required!

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The History of the World in Gearing Charts

3/14/2016

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This chart now makes my eyes swim, although it wasn't so bad when I was younger. Note that you had to line up the desired cog and freewheel counts with whatever wheel size you were using. The image is from Eugene A. Sloane's Complete Book of Bicycling, published in 1970. I'm not sure where he got it from.

When I first began riding a lot—back in the days when snakes had legs and a ten-speed drivetrain had two chainrings and a five-speed freewheel—I quickly learned to appreciate gearing charts.

At the time, generating a custom gearing chart required going to a reference book and finding a printed chart of gear-inch ratios for all possible combinations of cog and chainring tooth counts. Then you’d write down the values that matched the tooth counts on your own bike.

True story: when my daughter was ten or eleven years old, she found my old manual typewriter up in the attic. After I explained what it was and how it worked, she insisted on bringing it downstairs and setting it up on her desk, next to the computer. She spent the next few days excitedly typing out notes and labels of various kinds. “This is awesome,” she told me. “When you write something, it goes right onto the paper. You never have to print anything!”

Finally, you’d assemble those gear-inch selections into a grid, using an ingenious machine—common at that time, as I recall—known as a typewriter.

You could also write it out by hand, although this didn't look so technologically advanced.

Okay, I admit it-- I mocked this up for the photo. I would have used the typewriter, but the ribbon is pretty much shot. Sorry about the sloppy handlebar tape.

I followed the crowd on all this, mostly because it felt kind of cool and the good riders were doing it.

But it actually turned out to be pretty useful. Powering up hills in your 58.4-inch gear—while proudly glancing down at the “58.4” written on the handlebars from time to time—turned out to be a great way to develop a sense of what a 58.4-inch gear felt like, and learn when you’d be likely to need it.

Later, when you moved up to a better bike--or had the local bike shop build up a new freewheel for your existing bike--you’d have a pretty solid basis for knowing what you wanted for gearing. You might, for example, decide that your high and low were about right, but your cruising range was slightly too low. Would going from a 14-17-20-24-28 freewheel to a 14-16-19-23-28 work better? Let's have a look.

(Opens book, checks gearing chart.)

Yeah, that oughta work pretty well.

Regular visitors to this blog, if any, may notice that this chart is recycled from a previous entry about gearing for Eroica events.

I still remember how delighted I was, in the early days of the Internet, when I found Sheldon Brown’s web site. In addition to all kinds of other useful information, it had a feature that let you make your own custom gearing chart by selecting your wheel size and entering cog and chainring tooth counts into a series of little boxes. Push the “calculate” button, and up popped a colorful gear chart like the one at left.

Presto! No more pulling numbers out of the printed gearing chart with a straightedge and magnifying glass! Sheldon’s gear calculator even allowed you to print out a reduced-size chart designed to be taped to your handlebars. This feature never seemed to work, but you had to admit that it was a great idea.
By that time, though, gearing charts were already falling out of fashion. As cassettes replaced freewheels and the number of possible cogs climbed to ten or eleven, the spacing between gear ratios got steadily smaller. There was less need to map out the gearing you wanted, since any old ten-speed cassette would probably contain every gear you’d ever need. The gearing chart, it seemed to me, was headed in the same general direction as the phone book.

So I was pleasantly surprised, a few months back, to stumble upon a new (or at least new to me) gear calculator that’s most convenient I’ve seen yet. You can find it at http://www.gear-calculator.com/ (see screen capture below).

Instead of keyboarding in the tooth counts you’re after, all you have to do is slide the chainring and cog icons into back and forth along a series of horizontal bars. The resulting ratios change instantly in response. It’s user-selectable for just about every possible wheel and tire size, and it even allows you to calculate speeds across a wide range of cadences.

That input approach saves time and effort, but what's really striking is the way the program displays the output information visually

The screen-capture image, for example, shows the (non-original) half-step-and-granny setu on my old Gitane. The positioning of the pointers for the gear ratios make it immediately obvious that the five ratios you get from the middle chainring fall almost exactly midway between the five from the big ring.

And as any gear nerd know, that's what half-step is all about: It lets you choose between a full step—by advancing one freewheel cog while staying on the same chainring—or a half-step, by shifting between chainrings while staying on the same cog.

Brilliant! A work of genius!

I’ve always liked half-step gearing for the way it squeezes some additional closely-spaced gear ratios out of a five- or six-speed freewheel. But I’ve struggled to explain the concept to others, and the old grid-type chart didn’t help all that much as a visual aid. (Note to old-bike types desirous of social success: never lose sight of the fact that half-step gearing is a subject of surprisingly little interest to the general public.)

The next time someone asks me about half-step gearing—don’t laugh, it could happen—I’ll just pull up this chart and show it to them.

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Gearing for L'Eroica, Part II: Triple Cranks

3/13/2015

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Golly! It sure is nice here in Tuscany!

Are you going to need a triple to ride the Eroica? Hey, don't ask me. Maybe you’re younger and tougher—or just tougher—than I am. But there are a lot of hills and some dirt road. I’d need one if I were riding it.

A triple crank has two small advantages over a double, and one big one. It gives you a few more gear combinations, which is kind of nice, and the jumps between gears are also a little smaller. That’s also kind of nice. But the big reason people switch to a triple is that it gives you at least a couple of gears that are substantially lower than what you could hope to get out of a standard double.

Of course, there’s also a significant disadvantage to a triple, in that shifting is a little fussier. Feeling your way between three front chainrings takes a lighter touch and more practice than just throwing the front-shift lever all the way in one direction or the other, as you can with a double.

Long-Cage vs. Short-Cage Derailleurs
I’m often asked whether converting a double crank to a triple also requires a switch from a short-cage to a long-cage derailleur.

The answer—you knew this was coming—is “it depends.”

Rear derailleurs have two key attributes. The first has to do with the largest freewheel cog they will accept. Many short-cage derailleurs of the 60s and 70s can handle a 28-tooth cog, although some—like the Campagnolo Record or Nuovo Record—top out at 26 teeth.

The Campagnolo Rally derailleur was basically a Record model with different graphics and a long cage. Most Campy Records will accept an aftermarket cage patterned after the one on the Rally.

The second is something called "total capacity," which measures the ability of the spring-loaded derailleur cage to keep the chain acceptably tight as it moves between cogs of different sizes during shifting.
The capacity of a given gearing setup is simply the total difference between the tooth counts of the largest and smallest chainrings and freewheel cogs. For example, the difference between the largest and smallest rings of a 52-42-28 triple is 52 minus 28, or 24. The equivalent figure for a 14-28 freewheel is 24 minus 14, or 10. Add the two figures together and you get a total of 34.

If your derailleur has a total capacity of that much or more (judicious use of google should help you find up the manufacturer’s rated capacity of any rear derailleur you’re thinking of using), you’re home free. Provided that your chain is no longer than it needs to be to handle the 52-28 combination of big chainring and big freewheel cog (more on this a little later), it will have enough “takeup” to keep the chain from going slack even in the 28-28 small-to-small combo.

Generally speaking, derailleurs with capacities of 32 to 40 or more teeth are considered to be long-cage, and those with capacities of 26 teeth or fewer to be short-cage. A smaller mid-cage category includes those with capacities of 30 to 32 teeth.

The "B" adjustment screw is visible just to the right of the derailleur mounting bolt in this back view of the venerable and much-loved Suntour VGT Luxe

"Cheating" on Derailleur Capacity--How and How Not To
But manufacturer-specified capacity figures tend to be pretty conservative. (Their "largest cog" specifications, on the other hand, are usually just about right.) Most derailleurs will take up a bit more slack—typically a tooth or two more—than the spec sheet says they will. You can often pick up another tooth or two by tightening the derailleur’s “B” adjustment screw as far as it will go, so the body of the derailleur is rotated as far back as possible.

The official capacity figure also assumes that the derailleur needs to keep the chain taut at all times, even when it’s parked on granny chainring in front and the smallest freewheel cog in back.

But because we’re experienced cyclists, you and I would never use that combination anyway, since we know that it puts the chain at an extreme angle and causes rapid drive-train wear.

Come to think of it, we would never use the granny ring with either of the two smallest freewheel cogs, given that better-aligned approximations of the same ratios are usually found on the middle chainring.

And if you’re willing to make a firm policy of staying out of the smallest cogs in combination with the small chainring, your derailleur effectively gains a few additional teeth of capacity--enough, perhaps, to allow your short-cage derailleur to work acceptably with a triple crank.

Although this setup officially requires a derailleur with a capacity of 30 teeth or more, a careful rider can pare that figure down to 26. Be sure the chain is long enough to handle the 52-32 combination! Although you won't be able to use the 32-14 or 32-16 combinations, note that the 42-18 and 42-21 combinations offer pretty much the same ratios.

Let's say, for example, that you have a nice old Campy-equipped Poghliaghi that's currently set up with 52-42 chainrings and a 14-16-18-21-24 freewheel. (Or call it an old Gitane if you'd rather--the numbers work out the same either way.) Let's further imagine that you have some reservations about powering over the Eroica's hills in such tall gearing.

But wait, happens if you remove the existing inner ring and bolt on a 42-tooth triplizer and a 32-tooth inner ring? Will the existing Record derailleur—which as we’ve seen has a capacity of 26 teeth—play nicely with the resulting 52-42-32 triple?

I’ll cut to the chase here: It will, but with little or nothing to spare, and only if you make sure to stay out of the 32-14 and 32-16 combinations.

The math looks like this: Subtract 32 from 52 to get 20, which is the total tooth spread of the chainrings. Now subtract 18 from 24 to get 6, representing the tooth spread of the freewheel cogs you’re actually going to use with the granny ring. (The 14- and 16-tooth cogs, remember, are off-limits.)

Add 6 and 20 and you get a capacity figure of—who knew this would work out so neatly?—26 teeth, which is the maximum that the Record derailler can accommodate. Note that we're right up against the limit here; going to a 30-tooth inner ring instead of a 32 would let the chain go slack in the 30-18 combination.

If you know the maximum capacity of the derailleur you'll be using, you can use the same simple math to figure out whether it makes sense for the gearing you have in mind, and whether you'll have to forego a cog or two at the low end to make it work.

Don’t Forget the Big-Big
But there’s one important—nay, crucial—rule to keep in mind when making any drive-train changes: THE CHAIN MUST ALWAYS BE LONG ENOUGH TO ALLOW IT TO SHIFT ONTO THE LARGEST CHAINRING AND LARGEST FREEWHEEL COG.

Like the small-small combination, of course, this is a set of ratios you wouldn’t ordinarily use. But Murphy’s law—which states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong—is ignored at one’s own peril. Everyone who spends enough time on a bike will eventually shift into the big-big combo by mistake, no matter how much they plan not to.

And if the chain isn’t long enough to let that shift happen cleanly, one of several things--all of them bad--can happen very suddenly. The chain may snap, and if you’re pounding hard uphill at the time it may pitch you over the handlebars when it does. The too-tight chain may shear the teeth off the big chainring, or blow up the rear derailleur.

An accidental shift onto the small-small combination, by contrast (and this is why cheating on derailleur capacity in the direction of too long a chain is acceptable if you're careful about it) provides no excitement whatsoever. In most cases, you’ll be alerted to the mis-shift only by the faint sound of slack chain rubbing over the drive-side chainstay. Shift up to the next biggest cog in back and the problem goes away, with no harm done except for some imperceptible wear to the paint.

You Can, But Do You Really Want To?
So am I saying that running a triplized crank with a short-cage derailleur is a good idea?

Not really. The short-cage-with-a-triple approach has the advantage of letting you continue to use your original derailleur. And let's face it, it looks pretty cool. The Eroica is a celebration of old racing bikes, and old racing bikes are supposed to have short-cage derailleurs. Sure, maybe you do have a triple up front, but that's a lot less obvious. You can hardly see the granny chainring behind the two outer ones, can you?

But cheating on derailleur capacity does mean that you'll spend at least some time riding around with excess slack in your chain, since you're sure to unintentionally shift into one of the off-limits combinations from time to time. That carries some risk of your chain derailing, which is inconvenient at best.

And when you come right down to it, the 35.4 inch low in the 32-26 setup charted above isn't really all that low. In fact, if you're running a Stronglight 93 crankset, you can get a comparable low from a double by installing a 37-tooth small ring (see the previous post for more on this).

The bottom line is that the short-cage option probably makes the most sense for staunch Campagnolo adherents, whose 144 BCD cranksets limit them to a 42-tooth small ring in the standard double configuration.

But if you can live with the look of a long-cage derailleur--which will let you use a granny ring of as small as 24 teeth--you can provide your old racing machine with the same low gearing you'd find on a modern touring bike.

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Gearing for L'Eroica, Part I: Double Cranksets

3/2/2015

6 Comments

An Eroica ride is a combination costume party, vintage bike show, and a great group ride over a memorable route. Come prepared for some gravel road and dust, as in this segment of a recent ride in Tuscany

Eroica events are mass rides designed to celebrate the heroic age of bicycle racing. The flagship Tuscany ride has been held each October since 1997, but the organizers have since added similar rides elsewhere, including Great Britain, Japan, Spain, and California. (More information on the California ride--which will be held for the first time in mid-April of 2015--is available at http://www.eroicacalifornia.com/.

Because these are vintage rides, they're restricted to road-racing bikes (or at least road-racing type bikes; the rules seem to leave a little wiggle room here) manufactured before 1987. No clipless pedals are permitted, and all bikes must have exposed, non-aero brake cables and down-tube shifters. Wool jerseys, shorts, and similar period dress is encouraged. Riders can choose from three courses ranging from 40 miles or so to a bit more than 120 miles. All include an abundance of hills and significant stretches of gravel road.

The whole thing sounds like a lot of fun to me, and I'd love to ride in one someday. So far, though, my participation has been limited to selling chainrings to riders who are going, and providing some suggestions on modifying their gearing. Here are a few gearing recipes that should work well for those who want lower ratios for an Eroica ride:

Chart 1. This brutal set of ratios is the actual catalog spec for the 1974 Peugeot PX-10. That's a 57-inch low gear! That was too high for even the younger version of me, and it's way too high for the current one.

122 BCD Doubles with French Derailleurs

If your vintage ride is a 1960s or 70s French-made road racing machine, there's a good chance that it came equipped with a Stronglight Model 63, 49D, or 93 crankset, all of which accept 122 BCD chainrings.

Rings as small as 37 teeth are possible in that size, although the smallest that Stronglight officially made was a 38-tooth version. But many, if not most Stronglight doubles of that era left the factory with 52-45 rings. When coupled with the typical narrow-range freewheel the resulting gearing is heroic indeed (see Chart 1). The 57-inch high is just too tall a gear to carry most non-racing cyclists over long climbs without a lot of suffering, and probably some walking.

Chart 2. To get seven unique, evenly-spaced gear combinations from this setup, stay on the big chainring through the first three or four freewheel cogs, then double shift by dropping to the small ring in front and shifting to the 17- or 20-tooth cog in back.

The first possible solution is about as easy as it gets--just swap out the original inner chainring for one of our 37-tooth rings, and replace the narrow-range freewheel with a readily-available 14-17-20-24-28 cogset.

The resulting gearing, charted at left, is much more humane. The Simplex "Prestige" rear derailleurs supplied with most French (and many non-French) bikes of this era have the capacity to handle this setup with ease, provided that the chain is no longer than necessary to handle the 52-28 combination.

It's a good thing, too, because changing rear derailleurs on an older French bike can get complicated. (For more on this, see the earlier blog post "Derailleur Hangers Demystified.)

Chart 3. The tighter freewheel called for by a Campagnolo Record derailleur yields even spacing between gears, but slightly higher ratios compared to the setup in Chart 2, above.

122 BCD Doubles with Non-French Derailleurs

For bikes with 122 BCD cranksets and Campagnolo Record derailleurs,the situation is slightly different. The crankset will accept a replacement 37-tooth inner ring in front, but the 28-tooth freewheel cog may be a bridge too far for the rear derailleur. Some Campagnolo Records will shift onto a cog of that size with ease, while others will clatter madly and fail to get over the hump.

The ability—or inability—of a Record derailleur to handle a 28-tooth cog depends the length of the derailleur hanger and perhaps other factors. The best way to determine whether the combination will work on a given bike to bolt it on and give it a try. If it does make the shift, be aware that the combination of a 14-28 freewheel and 52-37 front exceeds the total capacity of the Campy Record rear by several teeth, meaning that the chain will hang a bit slack in the small-to-small 37-14 combination. But provided you stay out of that gear (as you should anyway, since it forces the chain to run at an extreme diagonal) you should be fine.

If a 28-tooth doesn't work with your setup, a 14-26 freewheel almost certainly will, although--as you can see from Chart 3--that will take a couple of gear-inches off your low.

Another choice is to replace the original Campagnolo Record cage with an aftermarket long cage from Soma Fabrications, which will reportedly handle freewheel cogs of up to 32 teeth. (You can find more information on Soma cages here. I haven't yet had a chance to try one myself, but I've heard good things about them.)

144 BCD Campagnolo Doubles

The 144mm bolt circle diameter Campagnolo used for its Record and Nuovo Record cranks from 1967 until well 1985 or so limits the user to cranks of 41 teeth or larger. Practically speaking, that means 42 teeth, since 41-tooth rings are scarce, costly, and in any case pretty much indistinguishable from 42s when climbing a hill.

Combining a 42-tooth small ring with a 26-tooth freewheel cog (which, as we’ve seen is the largest that a stock Campagnolo Record derailleur will reliably handle) gives you a low gear of about 43 gear inches. If you’re determined to keep the Campagnolo double crank, the only way you can go lower is by switching to a higher-capacity derailleur (or the Soma aftermarket cage mentioned above) and a wider-range freewheel.

If you can live with a 93-inch high gear (like the preceding charts, this one assumes 700 wheels and tubular tires; with beefier clinchers all the ratios will be a bit higher), you can put together a home-brewed compact double with a triplizer ring and the 74 bcd inner ring of your choice.

Unless, that is, you’re the mechanically adventurous type, and want to assemble what could be described as a “triplized double:” This involves installing a triple bottom bracket spindle and mounting a triplizer ring and attached granny ring in the inner position, with a toothless “bash guard” in place of the usual outer ring. I’ve done this with a Stronglight 93 crankset—it’s described in detail in the blog post “Installing a Triplizer as a Compact Double”—and there’s no reason it shouldn’t also work with a Campagnolo crank.

But really, if you’re going to install a spindle suitable for a triple crank—as the Chart 4 setup requires—it probably makes more sense to install a third chainring in place of the bash guard and get the even wider gearing range.

I’ll discuss some Eroica-appropriate triple setups in my next post.

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Some Thoughts on Spelling, One-of-a-kind Chainrings, and Non-Red-Clover-Components Triplizers

11/17/2014

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A 110 BCD triplizer from Interloc Racing Designs. The design is a little swoopy for my taste, but it does the job.

The Red Clover Components site has been on its feet for just over a year now, and has had enough visitors that it pops up at the top of the results page when you go to Google and type in the word “triplizer.”

On the other hand, the variant spellings “triple-izer” or “tripleizer” don’t take you there so directly. I might be able to help the search engine along by including those spellings on the site from time to time, but I've resisted doing that because I don’t like either one.

The first is awkward, and the second—if you adhere to the sturdy old i-before-e-except-after-c rule—would be pronounced “triple-azer.” (Or—if you follow the example of the word “seize”—“triple-ezer”.) After 30 years as a writer and editor, it’s hard for me to deliberately misspell a word, even if it works to my benefit.

My top-of-the-search-results position means that I also hear from quite a few riders who want to know if I’d consider making 46-tooth 151 BCD triplizer for pre-1967 Campagnolo cranks, a 38-tooth 128 BCD triplizer for an old Nervar crank, or maybe a 35-tooth standard ring for a 116 BCD 3-bolt Campagnolo crank.

The answer, I regret to say, is “no.” It evidently is possible to run a successful small business machining one-of-a kind rings on a custom basis--Highpath Engineering in Wales once offered this service—but that’s not a business I know how to make work.

So although I may expand my product line a bit someday, for now I’m only making three specific rings—two triplizers and one low-tooth-count inner ring for a double—that have fairly broad appeal for old-bike nerds, which allows me to make them in batches of a couple of dozen or so at a time.

Oh, what the hell! Make that “two tripleizers or triple-izers and one low-tooth-count inner ring for a double.”

Google, please take note.

Other Triplizers
In my capacity as Triplizer Czar, I also get fairly frequent inquiries from people looking for triplizer rings for current-production 110, 130, and 135 BCD cranksets. Here I can offer some good news: I don’t make triplizers in those sizes, but only because several other manufacturers already do. If you’re looking for a triplizer in one of those three sizes, here’s where to find it.

Interloc Racing Designs/IRD (http://www.interlocracing.com/) makes a 110 BCD chainring that comes in 36- and 34-tooth versions. The IRD triplizer is compatible with any five-arm 110 BCD cranks except modern Campagnolo “hidden bolt” models, which have four mounting bolts on a 110 mm circle and the fifth at 112. It accepts any 74 BCD inner ring.

The French component manufacturer Specialities TA (http://www.specialites-ta.com/gb/produits-rte.html) makes a 110 BCD triplizer ring called the Zephyr K, which is available in 36-, 38-, and 40-tooth versions. TA also makes the 130 BCD Alize K triplizer ring—available in 38, 39, 40, and 42 teeth—and the 135 BCD Vento K in 39, 40,and 42 teeth.

All of the TA triplizers have permanently swaged-in-place chainring nuts for the 74 BCD inner ring. That makes assembly a bit easier compared to the IRD and Red Clover Components triplizers, which use separate inner nuts, but if you manage to strip one of them you're out of luck.

None of the TA triplizer rings seem to be readily available in the U.S., although several online retailers in France and the U.K. will apparently ship them internationally. If you’re sufficiently determined and not in a big hurry for delivery, you should be able to find a source with the help of our old friend Google.

Finally, Stronglight (http://www.stronglight.com) makes what it calls an “intermediare porteur triple” (a phrase unhelpfully translated by Babelfish as “triple bearing intermediate”) for 130 BCD cranksets. It comes in an unusually wide range of sizes: 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, and 46 teeth, making it a promising candidate for some half-step-and-granny setups. It’s carried by XXcycle (http://www.xxcycle.com), a French online retailer that I’ve had good experiences with when ordering some other hard-to-find components.

Cognitive Dissonance
Unfortunately, pictures of the Stronglight triplizer leave me baffled. It seems to me that the inner arms on the chainring—which contain the mounting holes for the inner granny ring, and are aligned with the outer 130 BCD mounting holes—would unavoidably interfere with the “ledges” found on the inner face of most crankset spiders. (The Red Clover Components 144 triplizer—like the now-discontinued TA triplizer of the same size--uses a similar in-line design, but incorporates a rectangular “window” to accommodate the crankarm ledges.)

I can imagine that the Stronglight triplizer would work if those crankarm ledges were removed with a grinding wheel. But I can’t imagine that a manufacturer of Stronglight’s stature would sell a chainring that requires structural modifications to any crankset meant to accept it.

Is there anyone out there who has actually used Stronglight’s intermediare porteur triple? If there is, please get in touch and explain to me how it works. My curiosity is strong on this point--although not quite strong enough that I’m ready to buy one of the rings and puzzle it out for myself.

What am I not understanding here? How can this possibly fit on a standard crankarm spider?

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Installing a Triplizer as a Compact Double

7/8/2014

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I’ve been asked several times lately if it’s possible to attach a triplizer—either the 122 Stronglight version or the newer 144 version—to the outer position on a crankarm, then bolt a 74 BCD inner ring to the triplizer to create a compact double with a 42-tooth big ring.

That just won't work. The space where the inner ring would fit under that scenario is already occupied by the crank spider arms. (In fairness to the questioners, that problem is immediately apparent if you hold a crankarm and a triplizer in your hands, but it’s a lot less obvious when you’re picturing the situation in the abstract.)

With a suitable chainring guard and a triplizer ring, any Stronglight 93 crank can be set up as a double with much lower gearing that you could get with conventional rings. The catch is that you're limited to 42-tooth big ring and an inner ring ranging from 26 to 34 teeth. It works well, and to my eyes the setup even looks pretty good.

But cheer up! You can do pretty much the same thing by mounting a triplizer and an attached granny ring in the usual inner-ring position, using the same spindle or bottom bracket cartridge you’d ordinarily use for a triple.

If you’re not the fussy type, you can just leave off the outer ring altogether and secure the triplizer with a set of single-ring chainring bolts instead of the double-ring bolts you’d use if you were including an outer ring. After bolting the assembly in place, all you have to do is adjust high-gear limit screw on the front derailleur so it won’t shift onto the now-absent outer ring before riding happily off into the sunset.

The only drawback to that approach is that it looks just awful to run a crankset—especially a nice-looking vintage crankset—without an outer ring. The usual way around that is to install what’s various known as a bash guard, pants guard or chainring guard in the outer position. That used to be a fairly common setup back in the 1960s and 70s. Stronglight actually made a great big chainring guard that came as standard equipment on the Raleigh Super Tourer, among other bikes. Whatever you call it, it’s basically just a toothless chainring, sized to be slightly larger than the next ring inboard. (If the chainring guard is too large, it will get in the way of the front derailleur and prevent the chain from shifting onto the large ring.)

Here's a Model 93 with an old-school Stronglight chainring guard mounted in place of an outer chainring. The chainring guard and both inner rings--a 52 and a 42--are mounted on the same set of extra-long chainring bolts. The guard and big ring are separated by the crankarms, and the inner ring stands off from the outer with a set of spacers. See how the front derailleur just clears the edge of the chainring guard?

Compare the original-style chainring guard to the homemade version at right. Using the big one with a 42-tooth ring would have necessitated mounting the front derailleur much too high to be functional. I fashioned the smaller guard by cutting the teeth from worn-out a 47-tooth chainring. A lathe would have been faster and neater, but as a character-building exercise I did the job with a hacksaw and a file.

Being an inquisitive guy, I recently set up one of the bicycles in the Red Clover Components Test Fleet with a homebrewed compact double setup, using a 42-tooth triplizer and a 28-tooth small ring. I had an original 70s-vintage Stronglight 122 BCD chainring guard--and a big dinner-plate sized chunk of aluminum it is--but since it was designed for 52-tooth ring, it was no use to me here.

Instead, I improvised one of the right size by digging up a worn-out 47-tooth 93-pattern chainring, cutting off the teeth one by one with a sharp hacksaw, and carefully rounding off the resulting rough edge with a double-cut file, followed by a single-cut file and some fine emery cloth. The whole process only took about an hour, and to me the result looks pretty good.

Assembling the inner ring, triplizer, and chainring guard was a snap—the whole thing just bolted together.

Here's a view of the setup from the back side. Notice how the triplizer ring and chainring guard are mounted on the same set of bolts, with the inner ring on its own smaller bolt circle. The toothless 47-tooth ring is just the right size to cover the 42-tooth triplizer. A 48 would probably also have worked, but a 50 would have been too big. If you look closely you can see that the 47-tooth ring (now the chainring guard) must have been run for a long time with a badly worn chain--the chain sideplates wore little scoops in the edge of the chainring below the level of the original teeth.

I installed a 7-speed 13-15-17-19-21-24-28 freewheel in back, mostly because I happened to have one handy. With the 42-tooth triplizer ring in front, that gives a high gear of only about 86 gear inches with 28C tires. That would be too low for a lot of people, but I’m old and feeble—the gearing on most of my bikes tops out in the high 80s or low 90s—so it’s adequate for my needs. Rejiggering the gear ratios for a 12-tooth small cog (as I probably will when I have the chance) would give a high of 93 or so; an 11 would bring it up to 102 gear-inches. The setup I chose gives a nice even gearing progression, with a double shift in the middle from the 42-21 combination to the 28-17 then back up to the 28-28 from there.

After bolting on a circa 1981 mid-cage Suntour Vx in back and a matching front, I took the bike out on a hilly 25-mile test run. The rear derailleur shifted perfectly, as I had expected. And I was pleasantly surprised by the crisp, accurate shifting in front.

Why surprised? Conventional wisdom says that a front derailleur should work best when the curvature of cage--as viewed from the side--conforms closely to that of the outermost chainring. Like most road fronts, the Vx was apparently designed for use with a 52-tooth big ring; in the photos at the top and bottom of this page you can see that it describes a significantly larger arc than the smaller 42-tooth ring I actually used.

Even so, it shifts just fine. I can't say for sure that the same setup would work equally well with any front derailleur meant for a road double, but my guess is that most road doubles should work.

Although I haven't tried it yet, I'd expect the same compact double configuration to work nicely with a 144 triplizer in a Campagnolo crankset or Campagnolo clone. As it happens, an Oregon company called BBG Bashguards (http://www.bbgbashguard.com/Cyclocross.html) seems to make a reasonably-priced 144 BCD bash guard sized for use with a 42-tooth ring. That could do away with the need to fabricate one from an old chainring, making the 144 conversion even simpler.

I know this photo makes the fork look a little bit bent. But believe me, it's really not.

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Triplizing a Campy Double: You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice

5/4/2014

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In my opinion, a triplizer ring is the best way to add a third chainring to Campagnolo cranksets—or Campagnolo clones—that use the old Campy 144mm bolt-circle diameter. No surprise there, since I’m just completing a first production run of 144 BCD triplizer chainrings based on a similar but no-longer-available ring once manufactured by TA (see preceding post).

Here's Nuovo Record crank fitted with a conventional outer ring made by TA, a TA triplizer ring in the middle position, and a TA granny ring bolted to the triplizer. Note how the "arms" of the triplizer ring are slightly wider than the crank spider arms themselves. This shows most clearly at the arm in the 9:30 position.

Thanks to Bob Merrill at The Freewheel Spa for the photo.

But I will point out that there’s also another well-established method of adding a small granny ring to 144 Campy crank arms: You can have the drive-side crankarms drilled and tapped to receive special conversion bolts that make it possible to mount a small inner ring.

Bob Freeman at Elliot Bay Cycles in Seattle (elliott baybicycles.com) has been doing this conversion for the last twenty years, and has a reputation for doing great work. A nice step-by-step pictorial of the conversion process is available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/8379107@N03/sets/72157622574585267.)
Edit as of 4-27-2015: I recently learned that Bob Freeman's shop closed for good this past September. It's possible that someone else will take over Bob's tooling and continue to offer the same service, but I don't have any further information at this time. JV

Tighter Spacing
In one important respect, Freeman's approach is an improvement on factory-made
Campagnolo Record triples, which were manufactured from about 1973 until the mid-80s. Those original Campy triples used the same basic design and mounting-bolt system, but were drilled for inner rings with an oddball 100mm BCD.

Rings in that size were available only from Campagnolo, and only in a 36-tooth version. Framebuilder and machinist Jim Merz later produced aftermarket rings in sizes down to 31 teeth. (For an interesting look at the history of crankset design—and why Campagnolo, among others, once seemed to have so little interest in offering reasonably low gearing—see http://janheine.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/history-of-aluminum-cranks.)

But when mounting bolts are tapped into an existing double crank, their placement is somewhat flexible. It's possible to stay with the old Campy 100 BCD standard if originality is the goal, although in that case it would probably be better to find a factory-produced triple. The old 84 BCD standard used by Stronglight and SR until the mid-1980s is another option, and will allow use of inner rings as small as 28 teeth. But the most convenient option by far is to drill for the modern 74 BCD standard, which allows the modified crank to accept a wide range of currently-manufactured chainrings in sizes down to 24 teeth.

A factory-drilled Record Triple, made for the exclusive-to-Campy 100 BCD inner ring. Note how the fluting on the crankarms stops short of the bolt holes.

Photo lifted from Ebay.

Things to Think About
As best I can judge (but remember, as a guy who make triplizer rings I'm hardly impartial), here are the pros and cons of the two approaches:

Cost: If you buy it directly from me, a 144 BCD triplizer will cost you $86. You’ll also need an inner chainring--which will probably cost about $40 if you buy one new--and a $20 set of comventional chainring bolts and 3.8 mm spacers. The inner ring is a stock item--no need to modify it in any way.

Elliott Bay charges $40 for drilling and tapping the crankarm, plus another $40 for the specialized 6mm conversion bolts needed to fasten the inner ring to the arm. They’ll provide a generic inner ring in 28-30 teeth for $30, or a TA ring in 26-32 teeth for $60. That includes drilling and counterboring the holes in the inner ring from the original 8mm to 10mm, as required by the conversion bolts. If you later want to switch inner rings, you'll have to take the new ring to a machine shop and have it drilled out the same way.

In either case, you'll also need a new, longer bottom bracket. A modern square-taper Shimano cartridge bottom bracket--at $20-30--is the most economical option. If you have an existing cup-and-cone bottom bracket you're happy with, you may be able to find a longer spindle that will allow you to keep using it, although mixing and matching between manufacturers may take a fair amount of trial and error. (See the "Installation Notes" section of the web site for more detail on this.)

Flexibility: For the time being, at least, the 144 triplizer will be available only in the 42-tooth size. That should work for most users, but those who want a 44-, 46- or 47-tooth triplizer ring for an old-school half-step-and-granny setup are out of luck, at least for now. I may add rings in those or other sizes later if there’s enough demand.

A drilled crankarm, on the other hand, will accept any size middle ring. Crossover, half-step, step-and-a-half—any sort of wacky setup is possible as long as it’s based on standard-sized middle and outer rings.

Compare this photo (also shamelessly lifted from Ebay) to the image above. You have to look closely to see it, but here the bolt holes in the crankarms extend through the longer flutings, indicating that they were retrofitted into what was originally a double crank. The holes themselves are spaced for a bored-out 74 mm ring.

The extra mounting holes don't seem to have any effect on the strength of the crankarms of either the factory-drilled or modified versions. I've never heard of one breaking there.

Appearance: To all but the most discerning eye, a drilled Campagnolo double is pretty much indistinguishable from a factory triple.

The "arms" of a triplizer ring, on the other hand, extend slightly beyond edges of the arms on the crankarm spider, giving the assembly a subtly—but if you really look, noticeably—different appearance (see photo at top). That looks fine to me--but of course, it would. What really matters is how it looks to you.

Intangible, But Decisive for Some: Quite a few old-bike dweebs, including me, just don’t like to drill holes or otherwise permanently modify nice old bike parts. They (or I guess I should say “we,”) are happy to make any kind of nut-and-bolt modifications, as long as those changes can later be reversed. If you fall into that camp, you may prefer to bolt on a triplizer ring rather than having holes drilled in an original double.

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Gearing for L'Eroica, Part I: Double Cranksets

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Installing a Triplizer as a Compact Double

Triplizing a Campy Double: You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice

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