Just Riding Along - the blog

We're hosting a monthly Dr Bike clinic during the summer, free for any one to bring their bike for a safety check. Run by Sheffield Cycle Boost and Recycle bikes they can help get your bike on the road for free.

Sheffield Cycle Boost

What does it do
"The bike doctor will give your bike a full safety check. We will fix any minor repairs on the spot for free and if we find anything more serious we'll give you a prescription to take to your local bike shop."

When
Saturday 9.30am-1pm
25th May
29th June
27th July
7th September

Just drop in no appointment needed, while-you-wait or collect later if its busy.
email: fix@sheffieldcycleboost.org if you need more details.

Busy workshop is looking to recruit a new staff member to provide support in warehouse, picking, packing, stock keeping and general upkeep of premises inside and out.

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Field Cycles at Bespoked Bristol

We are back and finally recovered and tidied up after Bespoked Bristol last weekend. As well as our own stand we built wheels for some frame builders and built wheels for the live build demonstration.

The show was packed, especially on Saturday with around 4000 visitors attending, and 2000 on the Sunday. Jon joined up with Klaus from Sapim for the live wheel build demonstration on Sunday morning, it was surprisingly nerve-wracking with people watching but it went well and we ended up with a pair of wheels for the live build bike (a lucky raffle winner won a bike to be built during the show).

Most of the time we were too busy to take photos but managed to grab a few at the end:

We built wheels for these frame builders:

DMO frameworks - titanium bike packer
Shimano Alfine 8-speed hub laced to NoTubes ZTR Crest 29er rim
Chris King ISO disk hubs laced to NoTubes ZTR Arch 29er rims

Field Cycles
American Classic disk 130 & 225 hubs laced to NoTubes Crest 29er rims
Hope Pro3 Mono hubs black laced to H Plus Son Archetype grey rims

Rusby Cycles
Hope Pro3 Mono hubs gunsmoke laced to H Plus Son Archetype black rims

Slate Cycles
Hope Pro3 Mono hubs laced to H Plus Son Archetype rims, all black

Single-speed parts, White Industries freewheel and Surly cogs and singulator

Singlespeed mountain bike hubs come in three varieties, cassette-style where the freewheel mechanism is built into the hub, screw-on freewheel where it’s built into a sprocket which screws on to the hub, and fixed, where the sprocket attaches directly to the hub - there is no freewheel and you have to keep pedalling as long as the bike is moving.

We’ve found that the cassette type hubs need a lot more looking after than screw-on freewheels, so for the ultimate in low maintenance reliability we recommend a good quality screw-on hub such as Paul Components with a White Industries ENO freewheel. The ENOs come in 16-22T versions, last for many years and are fully rebuildable if a part wears out.

For the ultimate in low maintenance the fixed option should also save you some brake pads as you can control your speed to some extent with your legs. Unfortunately riding fixed offroad is pretty tricky and is only for a diehard few.

Surly Singulator      £39.99
Surly Cog cassette fit     £22.49
Surly Cog screw-on     £22.49
White Industries ENO freewheel     £69.00

Surly Clown Shoe rims on Hope Fatsno hubs

It's hard to look at these wheels without smiling, they are so utterly crazy but they are going to be used in a very serious race where I don't think grinning and clowning around get you anywhere. Aidan Harding contacted us for sponsorship for some wheels for his new Singular fatbike, the Puffin, to be used in the 2014 Iditarod Invitational. Note the 1 year testing period. None of the usual "can you get me the wheels for the race this Sunday" business.

It's hard to get a sense of scale for these wheels from the photos so here are a few factoids:
Rims are 26" diameter (559mm), although with the 4.7" Big Fat Larry or the 4.8" Bud and Lou tyres they measure up at 2 inches bigger diameter than a normal 29er tyre. (782mm against a 29er at 736mm). They are 100mm wide, that's 4 times the width of a normal mountain bike rim. The rims weigh in at 960g each, which sounds a lot but they are so big they actually feel quite light when you pick them up. Recommended tyre pressures are something like 6-10psi (1/2 to 3/4 bar). When you inflate the tyres, the rim tapes bulge through the holes and look cool. You can get different coloured rim tapes for this reason. Lacing the wheels was straightforward enough and the rims are nice and round out of the box. Truing them pushed our wheel stands to the limits, both for the hub width and rim width.

If you're not familiar with the Iditarod, the full distance is 1100 miles across Alaska in February and March - there is a "short" 300 mile race too - but Aidan holds the singlespeed record for the 1100 miles of 17 days, 9 hours, 15 minutes for the southern route. That's only 3 hours behind the geared bike record. I don't think gears count for much in that kind of snow. Aiden also holds another record, the only article I've read from start to finish in Privateer (about the Grenzsteintrophy).

Keep up with Aidan on his own website http://www.aidanharding.com/

buy Surly Clown shoe rims or contact us for custom wheel builds (Snow bike parts are not in our online builders yet ! )

Industry Nine road hubs

New products are coming in the door almost faster than we can get them on the website, here's a quick look at the Industry Nine road hubs, build photos coming soon for these straight pull hubs.
buy front > buy rear >

Pacenti SL23 rim

Our first batch of the new Pacenti SL23 road rims arrived today, and we are impressed. Certainly in terms of features it has a combination which outperforms most other rims. 456g weight, 26mm depth, 24mm width, tubeless-ready profile, flawless finish as well as all the usual "should haves" - machined braking surface, clean well finished spoke holes and rim wear indicators - not to mention reasonably tasteful graphics.

Of course the proof will be in the pudding and we'll be getting some built up soon.

buy the Pacenti SL23 rim here > build custom wheel builds online or call for advice.

If you ever wondered what processes go into making rims this movie from H Plus Son should clear a few things up (except for a big black square where they seem to have censored something during the rim rolling section).