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While most people associate March 2020 with the start of that whole coronavirus thing, for me it will always represent the month in which I took delivery of my very first Rivendell:
While in those early days it had the jaunty countenance of a country gent out for a ramble in the English countryside, it soon proved indispensable, and so it gradually evolved into something of a workhorse:
It was the bike I’d choose for commuting, and for wet-weather riding:
And eventually its beauty lay concealed beneath a thick layer of grime:
So this past weekend I took the opportunity to…well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I washed the Homer, but I did hose it down:
I also changed the saddle to something a little more wet weather-friendly–and more significantly, I made some drivetrain modifications. See, as you may recall, I am now the curator of the world’s largest vintage eccentric chainring collection:
And while most would be content simply to look at them, or maybe throw them at the wall occasionally to see if they’ll stick, I believe it’s a shame to squander their wobbly, misshapen potential, and so I installed a couple of them on the Homer:
And if you’re tempted to comment on the height of the front derailleur, please note the following:
Owing to the large ring’s eccentricity, gaps between it and the derailleur will look more or less pronounced depending on where it is in the rotation
I can only lower the front derailleur so much before it contacts the chainstay
Anyway, so far it’s working just fine. Maybe when I finally get around to changing that disgusting chain I’ll also change the derailleur, but then again, maybe I won’t.
As for those of you who were not overly distracted by the derailleur position, you may have noticed I’ve mixed both Shimano Biopace and Sugino Cycloid chainrings, a wildly irresponsible and potentially lethal combination:
However, the grandparent ring is still the original round one, but only because I couldn’t find my crank puller. (In typing the term “crank puller” it occurs to me how suggestive it is, and that since its inception this very blog has been nothing more than a long and highly self-indulgent exercise in crank-pulling.)
So how does it work?
Well, I’ve only taken a short ride so far, but starting out in the middle ring (they Cycloid one) the effect was immediately noticeable, and it was extremely weird–almost like some sort of e-assist was kicking in at a certain point in the pedal rotation. At this point I should probably note that on the Cycloid ring there is no marking that tells you how to position the crank, and so in determining how to orient it I employed like 30 seconds of Internet research and some common sense (to the extent I possess common sense, which is minimal). But it does seem to give a little boost when the right-hand crank is in about the 1:00 position, which is basically the opposite of what happens when I shift into the big ring, which does have position markings. (It’s hard to read very much about elliptical chainrings without falling asleep, but as I understand it the Biopace concept was different from the concept behind the oval-shaped chainrings like Cycloid that are once again popular today.) This discrepancy only multiplies the weirdness.
I’m sure I could experiment with chainring positioning to get exactly the effect out of both of them that I want, but that’s even less likely than my replacing that disgusting chain.
By the way, lest you mistake my overall laziness for contempt, you should know that workhorse duty and the grime that comes with it is the highest honor you can bestow upon a bike. Consider the Milwaukee, whose drivetrain I ground into a fine paste:
Yet its day eventually came, and it is now the newest and shiniest of all my bikes:
It also feels thoroughly modern to me, but as I ventured out onto the popular roadie routes this past weekend and eyeballed the bikes of my fellow riders I realized its now basically an antique. Rim brakes? Vanished. Metal frames? Few and far between. Metal forks? FORGET ABOUT IT. And things are only going to get worse:
He for one welcomes his AI overlords, and a dystopian future in which your fork adjusts its suspension settings according to crowdsourced trail maps:
Presumably, for the system to work even better, it will need to be proactive, so ‘looking ahead’ rather than reacting to jumps and drops, rocks and roots.
This will need plenty of trail data to work effectively, and might mean crowd-sourcing is required, to ‘teach’ the system what’s coming round the corner.
Mountain bikers really are the worst.
