This Space for Rent

Those must be some seriously good donuts. (Pause to suppress awful pedant in head who wants to spell it “doughnought”.)

They’re pretty good donuts, yes; they aren’t world-shatteringly good (Portland doesn’t have very many donut shops, but some of the local ones are very good and don’t require an 85km round trip to get to) but they are worth the trip just for sentimental reasons; before the bears were born, and when they were smaller, we’d drive up to Mount Hood (which seemed like it was a long way away from Portland when sitting in a car. Riding the bicycle out takes longer in clock time, but it doesn’t seem like it’s that much distance until I’m working out how to get back – and even then coming back from Sandy is a bunch of 4-5km steps until I get back on the Springwater trail and have to ride 12km before I turn up 17th Ave towards home) on the weekends and that shop would always be closed – I think we got donuts there once, but every other time it would be “sorry, we’re all sold out, try again later!”

And it’s a challenge. 99% of the people who own xtracycles use them for errands (and that’s certainly what they’re marketed as; I suspect that the number of people who’ve got drop handlebars on their xtracycles numbers in the low handfuls, and that the number of people who’ve hacked their free radicals to fit onto aluminum road bikes is not much higher than one,) so why not make my little diy populaires into some of the world’s most ridiculous shopping trips?

A fine and enviable madness. :)

Definitely know what you mean about the perceptual time with riding the bike versus more mechanized travel arrangements. My strongest version of that was the trip to the metro zoo, and finding some of the remaining in-city-limits farms. Didn’t begin to feel like it took 2 hours.

I took a long look at the Xtracycles pages when you linked them while you were making the conversion. It’s a cool idea, but I don’t think I could get it to work so much bending didn’t happen in use.

The current bike benefited from the learning experience with the first one (a succession of five rear wheels) and got the hand built heavy-duty wheel right away; instead, I bent the cranks (a little) and the largest chain ring (extensively). (Sigh.) Even in very very good shape, I’m not going to get under 100 kg, and this does not seem to be a common target size for bicycle design.

Both bikes are Giant hybrids; they do a good frame size for me, but I’d expect that the long tail approach would be way more trouble than a trailer for me. (Which is not to say that the prospect of trailers fills me with joy, but at least some of them can convert into a cart for the two tripods, etc….)

I think my high point for weight was about 105kg and I did manage to ride my unadultrated Trek at that weight without damaging it in any way. If I was going to do it again, I’d (modulo the fiscally insane idea of having a framebuilder build me a custom longtail randoneering frame) buy a Surly Big Dummy frame and build it up as a touring bike; I’ve seen pictures of people carrying multiple adult passengers on a Big Dummy, so 100-odd kg of you and 30-odd kg of lenses, tripods, and other implements of destruction doesn’t seem like it’d be much of a strain on one of those frames.

The maximum load I’ve put on my Trek is 90kg (not my current weight; I’m now just a bit under 82kg) of me plus about 35kg of groceries, and that wasn’t even enough to deform the tyres to the point where I start to worry about pinchflats. The part of the xtracycle I’d expect would fail is where the front lever arm clips onto the chainstays (and I’m not worried quite so much about that on my Trek because I had to have the lever arm clip shortened to fit, so there’s almost no moment arm between the clamped part of the chainstays and the bottom bracket or the lever arm and where the clip clamps to them.)

I never really considered the trailer option. There are some nice ones out there, but it would have been another thing that I would fret about when out on the line. A larger bicycle, on the other hand, is still just one thing.

I’ve just thought of another way to get a longtail with a good weight capacity; start with a tandem, and replace the stoker compartment with an extended frame. A lot of couples use tandems for fully loaded touring, so that would point to them having a ridiculously large capacity right there.

Surly Big Dummy appears to maxes out at 22" on the frame and 26" tires, which makes me squeem a bit; I’m used to 23" and 28" and would hate to give that up. I probably could give that up, but I’d be taking a bit of a gamble, trying; various bit are much happier if I’m not trying to pedal when hunched.

The tandem is a good idea. Guy who built wheel #5 commented that he’d never seen one of those going on a non-tandem before, and it’s held up nicely. Wheel #5’s twin is on a Giant Cypress LX, along with better-than-stock cranks, now. Bought that one for the disk breaks after brake issues and a broken scaphoid, and like it fine when I’m not trying to lug anything that stress the panniers.

Have to talk to the folks at the bike shop, should money come again.

Me (110kg), food, clothes, water, camera (20kg, maybe) and the (total doodle, except for the escarpment) Niagara river ride are what did in tire #4; I am probably between 105 and 110 now, and don’t have any realistic expectation of reducing that, rather than moving some of it around.

Keeping track of a trailer bothers me a lot less than the usual attachment methods; they seem to be made of “oh no” should anything go wrong.

True, if you don’t have the short stubby legs that distinguishes the Parsons family, the BD might seem to be kind of small (my Trek has a 52.5cm seat post, which was as small as I am able to be comfortable on, but it’s still a bit of a pain for me to swing my feet over without having a handy curb nearby) even after the oddities of mountain bike sizing are translated into road bike sizes.

As for the 26" wheels, I think that’s an artifact of the mountain bike mentality that Xtracycle carries around; Surly says that the largest 700c wheel you can fit into their frame is a 28mm + fenders, which I strongly suspect means that you can fit up to a 40mm tyre if you’re willing to cut into the fender to fit it around the brakestay. And it’s not as if you’re going to need 40mm unless you’re planning on doing cyclocross with the bicycle, nor will you need 26" wheels.

(I do find the Xtracycle mountain bike mentality a bit annoying; When I bought my Free Radical, I could not get one of the 700c versions at all because, apparently, Xtracycle kept telling their stores that they weren’t ever going to make 700c frames ever again, and the stores helpfully passed on to me that they weren’t ever going to try to order them ever again. So I got a 26" part and a 300 gram metal piece that adapted the 26" cantilever posts to 700c (which ended up being useful because it gave me a place to drill a mount for the dia-compe sidepull that came with the Trek) and have lived with extremely poor rear wheel braking since then (the longer-term plan is to get a disk or drum brake because those are better suited as drag brakes on long hills.) I think that Xtracycle [and Surly] are so committed to cargo == mtb == 26" that they’re unconsciously talking down those nasty 700c road bikes without any basis.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that smaller wheels are faster on pavement, because you’re not spinning up quite so much mass every time you start. They get a bit bumpier when you’re off the road, though.

Poking around found me http://www.konaworld.com/08_ute_c.htm which looked very interesting until I hit the “frame: one size” part. I can hope it does well and they expand the line, I suppose.

I have reasonably proportional legs for being 6'3", and I’ve probably been spoiled by the Giants in that I can get a full leg extension, ankle downflex and all, but the wheel height thing is at least partially pedal clearance for diverse concrete obstacles; mostly parking delimiters but some curbs. Not being able to clear those (wheels through the narrow gap between) with the pedals flat would really suck. So, no, probably don’t need, strictly, 26" wheels, never mind the 28" I’m used to, but I like them. The relatively upright posture trades off a lot of drag for comfort, but I don’t think I mind that a lot.

Extremely poor rear wheel braking would scare me; Toronto isn’t particularly hilly, nor, I suppose, by west coast standards particularly wet, but there are a bunch of long downgrades where wet pavement and poor rear braking would be really bad. (Downside of all that mass; I pick up lots of speed on downhills…) Part of that’s irrational, I suppose; caliper brake failures have produced all my bad bike accidents.

What I really need to do is try to figure out how I think the whole thing should work, and then try to find someone who is making that.

I think one of the side-effects of the geometry of a longtail is that the rear wheel doesn’t brake very well because your weight is more centered than it would be on a traditional safety bicycle. That’s one of the reasons I keep looking at drum and disc brakes for the rear wheel; I can use the rear brake as a drag brake on hills without worrying about overheating and destroying the rear rim of the bicycle (If I was doing more heavy-duty cargo hauling, I’d go the tandem route and have both a drum brake and a clasp brake on the rear wheel) and continue to use my front brake as the traditional “ohshitgottastopNOW” brake (which it does very well with the new geometry.)

I think the Ute is larger than the 18"/20" size they give (the 2009 Ute now comes in two sizes) because of the low seat tube. But bicycle sizing is like clothing sizing; they publish numbers which mean absolutely nothing, so you have to actually ride the silly thing to see just what they mean by 20". I thought about a Ute for a little while, but decided against it because I didn’t have the slightest idea how big it actually was. The Utes are really short, and can probably fit into places where even my shorter-than-the-average-bear Trekracycle can’t. (A Ute with drop handlebars, one of those terrifyingly expensive 14-speed internal hubs, pedals with toe clips, and a good saddle, now that would be an interesting bicycle to ride, but at that point you’re flirting with a US$2500 (dunno what it would be in CAD, but I presume that now that the Tory government is safe for another 5 years that the exchange rate has flipped back in favor of the USA) vehicle, which is kind of silly for a fast truck.

Dollar is currently at about 78 cents, USD. Which is at least delaying the destruction of the Canadian manufacturing sector. Security of the Tory government is unclear. Iggy’s perception of his options is highly unclear, shall we say. (Possibly to him…)

I’d probably like better fore-and-aft weight balance, because I tend to get far too much of my weight over the rear wheel. I definitely prefer disk brakes to caliper brakes; not only do they do drag braking better, they don’t seem to care if it’s wet. One experience with near-freezing water making the wheel rim frictionless was about two too many. The only plausible problem I’ve had with the discs is that panic stop mode has to adjust; the traditional application of grip-strength has the front fork suspension drop to the stops. (And, presumably, if one does not let go, bad things start to happen just after that point.)

My preferred bike shop is a Kona dealer; I’m sure they’ll have Utes in, and I can at least form a tangible impression.

Why an internal hub? My (doubtless highly limited) understanding is that one is trading elegance for a nasty tendency for things to snap and start making useless clicking noises in there.

I suspect that the most practical way for me to get a right-sized long tail would be to go to one of the bespoke bicycle frame places in Guelph and give them disturbing amounts of money. (No idea why they’re in Guelph, but at least Guelph is easy to get to.)

“Kinda silly for a fast truck”, well, everything is tradeoffs; if I want to have a standard bicycle for errands, recreational rides, rides for purposes of birding, and potentially commuting, I’d rather like it to have both the truck nature and the fast nature. If you’re after a standard bicycle for health mileage and errands, the health mileage really benefits from you not getting bored.

Why an internal hub? It has the “neat gadget” aspect, it moves the moving parts out of the weather, so they don’t fall out of alignment and fall off the gears or stop shifting (my front derailer has decided in the last week to stop shifting if I’m in the upper gears. I can fix it, but it’s still annoying,) it lets you set up the chain on a direct line from the crank to the hub gear, and you can shift it when you’re stopped. And the german hub I’m thinking about is apparently very reliable (the commentary I’ve read from people who like it is uniformly worshipful) and can be field-patched into a fixed-gear hub (which would be kind of sucky for me, because I like being able to coast, but the difference between “you have to pedal to move” and “you get to walk” comes down in favor of fixed-gears) if something inside breaks. The downside is that it’s barkingly expensive – it’s cheaper than a bespoke frame from an established framebuilder, but not by much, and that would roll a US$800 Ute up over US$2200 just by itself (the cost of a new leather saddle, drop bars, and toeclipped pedals is probably US$300, and I don’t know what I’d have to buy to use as a tensioner.)

The only thing I’ve seen mentioned as bad about a front disk brake is that they run the risk of tearing the spokes out of the rim if you stomp on them when you’re heavily loaded (I think that the xtracycle people mention this in their list of unfortunate things that can go wrong if you carry a load and don’t brake both wheels.)

“Change gears while stopped” is entirely sufficient, right there, because I am not good at remembering to shift down while stopping and find myself stopped, pointed uphill, and in high gears way too often. Chain on a direct line sounds good, too.

I effectively never brake front-only; typically it’s either rear, or both. So I am only wondering a little about a couple of the front spokes that had inexplicable pinging noises happen to them the last summer.

Very educational discussion!