I've made a change to the Trek 560 I recently built.
As you may recall from earlier posts, I'd equipped the bike with a Velosteel rear coaster brake hub. Well, I swapped it for a single speed rear hub.
I might use the Velosteel hub on another bike, perhaps an old mixte or mountain bike. I hadn't quite gotten used to its idiosyncrasies They include the "dead" pedal stroke of half a pedal revolution I experienced when I started pedaling again after braking and that when I backpedaled, it seemed that the hub had to find its "sweet spot" before the brake engaged. (Other coaster brakes I've ridden would stop the bike as soon as I backpedaled.) I suppose that if I rode the hub more (I put about 200 miles on it.) I'd get used to it.
But even if I were to grow accustomed to, and like, riding with the hub, I don't think I would have wanted to keep it on the Trek--assuming, of course, I decide to keep the Trek. It's a good bike, but a little bit too large for me. Plus, for a winter/beater bike, I think I'd rather have something that can accept wider tires.
One thing you might have noticed is that some of the spokes are silver and some are black.
I didn't plan it that way: It just happened that I had 28 silver and 12 black spokes in the length I needed, and the wheel needed 36 spokes. I used all of the black spokes and 24 of the silver ones. So, every third spoke is black.
Somehow I think that might actually be a selling point!
Today I commuted on the Trek 560 I just built.
In a way, I picked one of the worst possible days to ride it. When I started, the day was cloudy. The weather forecasters hinted at a chance of rain. But I figured I'd get to work before the precip.
We all know how such plans work out--especially when you're riding a bike without fenders. I didn't mind the bike getting cruddy--after all, the paint is pretty rough on the frame.
When weather reporters say "passing showers", what they really mean is that you are passing through the showers. Such was the case for me today: I think that once the showers came, they stayed. I'm the one who had to pass.
Oh well. At least I know two things: The tires (Panaracer Ribmos) grip well. And using a coaster brake on a rain- (and, in stretches, oil-) slicked street is another skill I'll have to master if I'm going to keep the bike as it is.
One thing that worked surprisingly well was the Nelson Longflap bag on the rear. For one thing, as this frame is larger than the others I own, there is less seatpost protruding from it than on my other bikes. So I wasn't sure whether there would be enough room to mount the bag and fill it without it rubbing against the tire. And I don't have any kind of rack or bag support on the bike.
Because of the bike's geometry and the saddle position, the bag mounts almost horizontally, so that the flap opens almost at the rear. (Rivendell's Sackville saddle bags seem to be designed to work that way.) So, I put my U-lock in the "bottom" (the back, if the bag were mounted vertically) of the compartment. It acted as a reinforcement that kept the bag from sagging--just enough. On top of it, I stacked folders with students' papers, books, lunch, my purse and a pair of dress shoes.
The bag stayed put. And, although the bike felt a bit squirrelly in the rear, it was still more stable than I expected it to be with the load, which the frame--at least in terms of geometry-- is not designed to handle.
If I were to commute regularly on this bike, I'd probaby install some sort of rack or bag support. And, although the coaster brake itself is unaffected by the weather, I'm not so sure it'd be my first choice on a regular commuter. I don't know whether this is a common trait of coaster brakes, but when I stop, sometimes I have to pedal about half a rotation "in neutral" before I can accelerate the bike. It's similar to what happens when you shift a three-speed into the nether zone between gears, or when it's out of adjustment. Plus, using handbrakes is more of a natural reflex for me than kicking back to brake.
Anyway, taking the Trek to work was an interesting experience. I might try it again--on a day when there aren't "passing" showers!
As you may have guessed, the wheel Marley "helped" me build has found a home--for now.
Yes, it's on the Trek 560 frame I "rescued." Today I took it out for its first run--a visit to the doctor's office, with a stop at the Donut Pub on the way home. The trip is about six miles each way.
About half a mile from my apartment, I had to make my first stop, for the traffic light before the entrance to the Queensborough Bridge. I had to think for a split-second: I don't ride coaster brakes regularly, so I had to "re-learn" the impulse to pedal backward. Obviously,it's very different from stopping with a handbrake, but it's also not as much like coming to a halt on a fixed-gear bike as one might expect. On a coaster brake, you backpedal for about an eighth of a crank rotation. Once the brake engages, you can't backpedal any further.
On the other hand, when you want to stop your fixie (without hand brakes), you actually tense your legs up and shift that tension backward and downward, toward your heels. You can't really backpedal unless you're unbelievably strong or are willing to live with two broken legs for a long time.
Once I got used to the backpedaling motion, it wasn't hard to control my stops: The Velosteel brake works quickly and smoothly.
As for the bike itself: The jury is still out. Not surprisingly, it's accelerates pretty quickly, as the wheelbase and chainstay lengths are about the same as those of Arielle and Tosca. However, the frame is made of heavier tubing and, more important, the seat tube is about 1 cm longer, which I noticed somewhat on dismounting the bike. The most significant difference, size-wise, between the Trek and my diamond-frame Mercians is that the top tube is about 2.5 cm longer. One consequence of that is that I'm using a stem with a shorter extension, which makes the steering less sensitive than it is on any of my Mercians except, possibly, Vera.
I have no doubt this could be a very good errand, city or winter bike. I just wonder how comfortable it will be for me. And, of course, I will have a more difficult time riding in a skirt than I would on Vera or Helene.
Whether or not I keep the bike, I'm going to hold onto the wheel I just built, as well as the front one. I'd also probably take the saddle, and possibly the handlebars, off the bike before I sell it or otherwise give it up. But I'm not going to make that decision before I ride it at least a few more times.
Now I'm going to tell you a little more about the wheel I was building--and Marley was "inspecting."
As you may be able to see, the appendage hanging from the hub is a coaster-brake arm. (That's the kind of brake you backpedal.) The wheel I built with it is going on the rescued Trek frame.
I don't know what possessed me to go and buy the hub--one of two new parts I've bought for the bike--or to decide that it was going on the Trek frame. After all, I haven't owned a bike with a coaster brake in about 40 years.
At least I know that I will end up with a very simple bike. In fact, the only way I could make the bike simpler would be to use a fixed-gear wheel in the rear--without brakes, of course. I had such a bike in my youth, and rode it on the streets. There's no way I'll do that now!
Anyway, the hub is a Czech-made Velosteel. From what I understand, the owners of Velosteel purchased the machinery used to produce the classic German Fichtel-Sachs coaster brake hub before SRAM bought out Sachs.
Three things are immediately noticeable about the Velosteel hub: the weight (definitely more than a Shimano coaster-brake hub), the shape and structure of the shell, the lush chroming and the way the cog is attached.
On most coaster brake and internally-geared hubs, the cog is splined, slides onto the hub body and is held in place with a snap ring. In contrast, the cog screws onto this hub in the same way as a track (fixed-gear) cog. Another feature this hub has in common with a track hub is the reverse-threaded lockring. In other words, the cog screws on one way (clockwise) but there is a second set of threads on which the lockring attaches counterclockwise. This prevents the cog from unscrewing when you backpedal or do a "track stand".
And, yes, you can use track cogs and lockrings--as long as they're not Campagnolo or Phil Wood.
While looking at the above photo, I'm thinking of the very first fixed-gear bike I ever had: a converted Peugeot UO8. In those days, very few people (at least here in the US) were riding "fixies," and I couldn't find any instructions on how to do such a conversion in any of the books or magazines I owned or borrowed. (Remember, we didn't have the Internet in those days!) So, I screwed a track cog onto the Normandy hub that came with the bike and tightened a bottom-bracket lockring as hard as I could against the cog.
I got away with riding it for about a year before I did an unintentional "track stand" while stopping for a light. Whomp! I just-as-unintentionally found myself spread over the frame's top tube after the cog unscrewed and my legs imitated those of a collapsible table!
But I digress. The Velosteel cogs and lockring look to be well-machined, if not as nicely finished as the hub. Another interesting feature of the hub body is that it's cast as one piece, as the better road and track hubs are. Most other coaster-brake hubs have flanges that are pressed onto the hub shell. I once had a rear hub (non-coaster brake) with pressed-on flanges that collapsed into each other. While this may have been an unusual occurence, I've never heard of such a thing happening to hubs with one-piece shells.
And one-piece construction makes for a more elegant shape, and allows the nice chrome finishing you see on the Velosteel.
I built the hub onto a Mavic rim that had previously been laced to another hub and sat in my closet for I-don't-know-how-long. It has the older grey "hard anodized" finish which, to my knowledge, Mavic no longer uses. So I had no "mate" to this rim, which is one of the reasons it's been entombed in my closet for so long.
To mate the Mavic rim to the Velosteel hub, I used Phil Wood spokes. Guy Doss of Elegant Wheels--from whom I bought the hub as well as the spokes--recommends Phils for the Velosteel hub because, like other steel hubs, it has thinner flanges than alloy hubs, so spokes designed for alloy hubs (such as DT and Wheelsmith) won't fit as well. If you build a steel hub (whether Velosteel, Shimano or an old Sturmey-Archer, SunTour or Sachs three-speed hub) with one of those brands of spokes, you should use spoke washers under the spoke heads.
In time, I'll find out how the hub works and lasts. For now, I like the look of the wheel and it seems to fit nicely into the old Trek frame.
By the way: I highly recommend Guy Doss. He's very helpful and personable, and can also build you a wheel from a Velosteel hub if you've neither the skills nor the inclination to do it yourself.
N.B.--Apparently, Velosteel offers a coaster-brake hub with a cog that slides on and is held in place with snap ring: the same configuration most other coaster-brake hubs, and most traditional internally-geared hubs, use. However, I don't know whether Velosteel's slide-on cogs and snaprings are interchangeable with those of other brands. At least the "track" configuration I bought can use cogs and lockrings from a number of other manufacturers.
