Freewheelin' Sheldon Brown

It's got a flip flop hub... that's a rear hub with a thread on both sides so you can mount a cog on each side and change between two gears by "flipping" the rear wheel. It came from the shop with a freewheel on one side and a fixed cog on the other.

To start, I just rode it how it came out of the box, set up to freewheel, and apart from some bar ends and toeclips, I didn't really do much to it. Then after a while the chain started to sag a bit and the cranks creaked a bit and everything needed a bit of a tightening.

So I thought: "Since I'm loosening off the back wheel, I'll try turning it around and riding with a fixed wheel".... I was almost hooked. It felt really good riding up hill, smooth and connected to the road. It was wierdly interesting riding slowly and stopping, like I had more control but more potential for disaster. I was definitely getting a good work out and my legs hurt in new and unusual ways. But it was wrong for going down hill. The strange feeling of walking down giant stairs trying to keep in control, I wasn't game to build up any speed in case some kid or car came out in front of me and I couldn't stop in a hurry... Some people ride without brakes!!? Mostly it was too slow. As soon as I started down hill I was beeing overtaken by grannies on hybrids and everyone else. And when I flicked a stick up off the road that got in my spokes and I thought about the dangers of anything catching in a fixed drive train, I realised that the freewheel is actually a safety device... part of what was originally mean by a safety bicycle?

If I was twenty years younger and not so worried about loosing skin and breaking wrists, I might have stuck with the fixed gear and learnt to go fast and do track stands and ride backwards. If I lived in Melbourne or New York or some other place with no hills I might have given it a bit more of a go but I think there are reasons why there seem to be very few people riding fixies around Brisbane. So I went back to the freewheel.

Now I was just a little bit too old when the BMX craze hit. My first bike was some sort of kids cruiser made by Repco. It was red and I don't remember much more about it. I'm pretty sure it hand "back pedal brakes". My next bike was a "Ten speed racer"! White Toyosha frame (made by the Toyota auto company) with shifters on the down tube. I rode that through high school, got a car and after a while got into mountain bikes. So I'd never really looked at a screw-on freewheel before my wife bought me my on-line single speed.

It didn't take much searching before I found Sheldon Brown and now I know everything.

    ...about everything!