Winners And Losers – Bike Snob NYC

Further to yesterday’s post, here’s what’s going on with that cassette:

To review, it’s a 7-speed hub, and an 8-speed Hyperglide cassette, yet it lacks a lockring.

As some of you pointed out, there was a brief time where Shimano hubs had both the outer threads portion for Uniglide and the inner threads for Hyperglide, like those weird prehistoric fish that could breathe out of the water:

[Via Sheldon Brown, where else?]

So it would be tempting to think that the cassette is simply held on with a Uniglide small cog, and at first that’s where my mind went too. But if you’re familiar with Uniglide you know that’s not what it looks like. The small cog is flat and you can kind of see the splines under it:

[Via here.]

This is where I got stuck. So I asked Paul of Classic Cycle what was going on, and here’s the answer:

That is some component chicanery from the ’80’s. 

So it’s a Shimano 7-speed cassette hub with most of a later generation XT 8-speed cassette on there.  The 8-speed cassette would naturally take up too much space, so in place of the last cog and the lockring you have the last two cogs from a Suntour winner Pro cassette (or freewheel, I don’t remember which) threaded onto the end of the Shimano freehub body holding everything in place!

Here’s a Suntour Winner Pro freewheel:

[Via eBay, the world’s greatest photo repository for vintage cycling components]

And here’s how the cogs affix to the freewheel, via (where else?) Sheldon Brown:

I can’t relax on a bicycle if I don’t know how everything works, and the suspension components on the AMP were already causing me enough anxiety, so not knowing how the cassette was set up on top of all that was keeping me up at night. So now that I understand it I can finally sleep again. The Suntour thumbies shifting a Shimano derailleur across a hybrid Sun-mano cassette also further endears me to the bike.

Moving on, did you know that in Japan forcing someone to ride a bicycle is a violation of their human rights?

Just ask the “Unnamed Postman,” who dropped his motorcycle and was forced to complete his rounds on a bicycle in oppressive August heat:

In an interview with national broadcaster NHK, the unnamed postman recounted how his work motorcycle had fallen over while parked in August, causing minor damage to Japan Post property. Following the incident, his supervisor ordered him to complete the same delivery route on a bicycle.

Here’s a photo of a Japanese postal worker delivering mail by bicycle, which is tough to think of as a human rights violation since it looks like the sort of thing you’d be likely to find if you were scrolling through the Rivendell Instagram:

I must say I’m doubly disillusioned. Not only is my favorite leisure pursuit considered so awful that it’s a human rights violation right up there with sex trafficking and torture, but like everyone else I learned everything I know about Japanese culture from watching 1980s films like “Gung Ho,” so to learn that self-flagellation, collective shaming, and ritual abuse are no longer acceptable there has completely undermined my entire worldview.

Next you’ll tell me the phrase “Gung Ho” isn’t even Japanese!

Finally, speaking of being soft, winter bikes are no longer a thing because nobody rides bikes in winter anymore:

Basically, the people who say you need disc brakes on your road bike because of the superior foul-weather performance are the very same ones who retreat to the trainer at the first sign of any form of precipitation:

Perhaps the main reason people no longer own winter bikes is simply that they don’t need them anymore. The popularity of Zwift and other indoor training platforms, combined with the reducing price of smart trainers, means that more and more people simply ride in their homes, in a virtual world instead, and in all likelihood get fitter and run a lower risk of crashing and general misery as a result.

This is a shame, because you can get an old road bike for about the price of a crabon handlebar and ride it all winter long. Consider this Trek, for example, which came stock with Biopace Wheel Technology:™

I honestly thought someone had slipped me a hallucinogen and it had started to kick in when I walked by that one.