Ride Lugged

So when I’m not mucking about riding bikes, reading old books, or setting up my studio for the upcoming year, or sneaking slices of cake out the fridge or driving around on my lawn cause I can, or cursing those round weeds that my rotary mower wont cut, or drinking beer downtown, or squishing earwigs in my helmet, I’m thinking about bikes, and about traditions, and how those old frenchies got their bikes so damn light without titanium, or plastic, or computers. 15 lbs for a bike with lights, fenders, clips and straps, normal spokes, leather saddles, ect, is just nutso. My XO-1 weighs maybe 26lbs with a rear aluminum nitto rack, no lights, two cages, and a brooks professional, sans ti rails and lightweight fenders.

I don’t have anything overtly heavy, a light cassette, a lightish bb… nothing stands out as a culprit of weight. I mean, I know those really lite French bikes had all aluminum bolts, but that adds up to under a quarter pound savings, I know cause I looked it up, and its fucking pricey, over 80 bucks for every bolt to be ti or aluminum, which is a lot of money for a little savings. All I can really think of is a Ti bb, an Action Tec one, not too pricey, with sks bearings, would save a quarter pound, and would outlast the Shimano unit by years…

But that still doesn’t account for that ten pound discrepancy… ok a lighter frame, yeah they had that, a lighter saddle, they had that too, with aluminum railed ideal saddles saving maybe a quarter pound. Ok so that’s maybe 2 lbs savings, max, and they didn’t have ti bbs… lighter cranks ok, but not by too much, lets say 200 grams… tires no lighter, tubes definitely not, spokes not, hubs maybe, but freewheels not. Rims maybe, but I have 390 gram Valiants… that’s light. I just don’t get it. I don’t get how they did it, and I don’t get how Shimano or Sugino or whoever cant fucking get on the ball and do it again, but for less money. Maybe we’re lucky they don’t try, it would probally all look shitty if they did. It would have to look contemporary, read ugly, and would look old before the year was out…look at Shimano Saint, whose ascetics have tragically descended to the whole Shimano lineup, making everything look like Honda designed it. No, scratch that, a Honda intern designed it.

Why, when Sugino is making the halfway decent TA copy the PX, does Shimano insist on making everything look like a car door handle? Their cranks are so thick, so boxy, so antiBIKE that they seem to insist on being installed on a carbon crap pile with fat tubes and big shitty graphics that some high schooler couldn’t pass off as a graphic design project. The goddamn cranks wouldn’t, couldn’t look good in a steel bike. Shimano might as well be an American company. They should design suvs. Maybe they do. All the other Japanese companies love beautiful and functional products, and many go out of their way to make contempory, nice copies of old parts, see Nitto’s racks, stems, posts, ect, Sugino’s XD and PX cranks, MKS’s pedals,
Diacompes brakes and shifters, panasonic’s alex singer copy commuters that cost 700 bucks with hammered fenders and lugs…

Shimano acts more like a Taiwanese company, not making what makes sense, but making products that Americans gobble up, but only because shimano lets them. Shimano could make a touring grouppo and pass it off as the next big thing, use skinny cranks and normal bottom brackets, and a nice brushed finish, but they don’t. It must be too easy to dupe the American customer into making that other shit. Sugino used to make derailluers, they should get back on the bus.

I am thinking about making a 4 speed rear cluster. Using action-tec cogs.
It would be light as fuck, never wear out, and be super fuctional with my new gearing set up. I just worry about how it will look with an 8 spd rear cassette hub… I also wonder if I can score a fatter bushing chain from mel pinto, in silver… did they even make silver chains 20 years ago? Ok here’s the gearing plan, its straight old school cyclotouriste, 46/26 up front, 14, 18, 22, 26 out back.

I tried it out on a recent ride, just skipping over the gears in back that weren’t part of the program, and it was fine, the jumps took a bit of getting used to, but it wasn’t lumpy feeling or anything. With only 4 gears out back, I can custom tune the chain-line like all get out, and make the 46t front shift perfectly over all the gears in back.

I wanna get a TA pro 5 vis crank:

But they are spendy. Good news is they work with English bbs, which means I can rock them with an action tec bb… they cut out the weight of a traditional spider…I guess traditional spider isn’t the word cause the ta style crank predates contemporary spiders…
They arms are skinny as hell so I imagine they arnt heavy at all…

I have an old campy 90s ft mech that’s a total turd, ie its powder coated and ugly and its just a front mech, not something special, so I’m gunna carve it up some. Old French derailluers never had the connecting bolt on the tail of the mech. Also, their outer cage plates were very minimal. So its off to the hacksaw for it…

That’s about it for now. Keep up the postings, I like this better now.