These are images from the Kurilpa Derby which starts under the bridge near my house and finishes with bike polo and novelty races down the main street of West End.
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This post is about a bike I built from an idea. It's about the way bicycles work and the way the universe works. It's about why you may be able to have what ever you want, but you can't neccessarily have everything you want. It's the story of the Crayzee-Eye vintage Dacordi, Sturmey Archer 2-speed kick shift coaster commuter. It all starts with these rims....
I posted this picture before, when I was looking to replace a wheel I broke in a drain cover. These rims made me smile when I saw them. They're velocity deep V image rims with a pattern called "Crayzee-Eyeballs". Velocity started as a small company making bottle cages and then rims in my home town of Brisbane. Like many Australian manufacturers, they have since moved their business overseas. Unlike most companies that go looking for cheap labour and production costs in Asia, Velocity have moved to Jacksonville Florida.
They don't make image rims anymore. A brief, bright moment in cycling fashion, now past. The rims were made in Australia, then shipped to the US to have the image coating applied, then at least some were shipped back to Australia to be sold. The company stopped making them and they started to go out of stock just when I started looking for one. But I managed to find one of the last ones in stock.
Is it Karma?
When I first heard of Karma I understood it mostly as the way people who believe in reincarnation explain the influence of one life time's actions on the circumstances of the next. But now I understand it encompasses a more subtle concept as part of the hindu/buddhist doctrine of cause and effect.
The philosophers of the ancient east believed that things happen as they do because of the things that have happened before them. In fact every thing happens because of every thing that has happened before it. We exercise free will, but our choices have consequences whose effects echo on through time.
In the classical European religions, there was a different idea. The capricious gods sent good and bad fortune to humankind on a whim. Often with callous disinterest, as they dealt with their own godly concerns, and barely if ever susceptible to human understanding or influence. Later they were replaced with a god who was personal and vengeful, even though it's motivations were mysterious, but in the enlightened, secular cosmology that followed, the idea of randomness persisted and the mathematics for dealing with unpredictable events developed the "laws" of probability. You know. Like tossing a coin.
But that doesn't sit very well with the idea of a clockwork universe. There's nothing inherently unknowable about tossing a coin. All the movements of it's spinning flight are controlled by fairly simple laws of physics. If we could precisely control and measure the position of every thing involved, and the force exerted by the finger on the coin, we should be able to predict it's path. But we explain randomness mathematically as if events had no cause at all, as if, all things being equal, the result could just as easily go one way as another.
Surely if we are confused by the universe it must be because we don't have enough information. If we could just define and measure and keep account of everything and work out the rules of the machinery that governed it, we could master the universe. If we can't predict and control every thing in our lives it must be because we are not trying hard enough.
After that I saw the world differently.
Chaos Theory blew our minds with concepts like the butterfly effect and the wild visuals of mandelbrot sets. To me, the transformatory insight from chaos theory was that deterministic systems can behave unpredictably. That means that even for a simple mechanical system, governed by clearly understood laws of physics, whose behaviour can be described by a few algebraic variables and the equations that describe the relationships between them, it can be impossible to predict the state of the system more than a short time into the future. We used to think that there were two ways things could go in the universe, deterministic and predictable, if you knew everything about what was going on you would know what was going to happen, and random, no way of telling. But chaos was a new, third way, unpredictable but structured, deterministic but incomprehensible.
In the mathematics of chaos theory, complex system, like the weather or the world economy, can be modelled as shapes in a multidimensional phase space. The mathematical variables that are used to describe the measurable aspects of the system can be plotted on different axes of a graph just like the y=2x+c graphs from high school, except the simplest chaotic systems have at least 3 variables and would have to be graphed as a 3D shape in space, instead of a line on a piece of paper. More complex systems, with 4 or more variables, are represented by virtual, higher dimensional shapes that can only be draw in hyperspace.
Truly random behaviour is completely unpredictable, but chaotic behaviour is often constrained by a strange attractor, parts of the system's possible phase space where the system is unpredictable from moment to moment, but tends to trace out a defined shape within the space. The detail appears random but we can understand how the system works overall.
It turns out that truly random behaviour is extremely rare in our universe's natural systems. Things are either ordered and predictable like clockwork, or chaotic. Not random, not predictable, but still structured and shaped by the laws of cause and effect. Things don't happen without a reason. What you send out comes back to you. It's karma. When I made the decision to use those "Crayzee-Eyeballs" rims, I didn't know exactly what the end result would be, but I knew it would be shaped like a bicycle.
From the initial intention in choosing the rim, one thing lead to another.
Firstly, the Deep-V rim is not all that deep. The main feature of the bike is a 30mm wide strip of eye balls. The rims were available with a machined braking surface for use with a conventional rim brake, but that would take away about a third of the pattern and ruin the look. So I went for a matching, black Deep-V rim with a braking surface on the front and no rim brake on the back.
The cool and hip thing to do would be to run a fixed gear drivetrain to control the rear wheel. But I live on a steep hill, I don't have a background in track cycling, I'm entering my late 40s and I want to coast. I tried riding a fixe on the road and I didn't love it. I'm also aware of the danger, not just of falling off from bad riding technique, anything caught in the drive train will bring the bike to an instant stop! You can even loose a digit spinning the wheel in the workshop. But riding around with a freewheel and no rear brake is only cool until your front brake fails, so I wanted either a disc brake or some sort of hub brake.
Disc brakes were new and exotic when I was riding mountain bikes in the 90s and I never had the chance to work on them. For a variety of reasons they are now about as new and exotic for road bikes as they were for MTBs in the 90s. So to use disc brakes I would either need a 29er style MTB frame, or some kind of new and exotic hybrid, road or cyclo-cross frame. Not really the look or price range I was thinking of.
Some kind of drum brake, or coaster brake, like the back pedal brakes on kids bikes? Crazy or "crayzee" but it makes sense. It's karma.
Now hub brakes are usually fitted on cruisers and utility bikes. These usually have sturdy wheels with a standard 36 spokes, but the "Crayzee-Eyeballs" rims are a "high-performance" style, 32 spokes. As far as I could find, at the time, there was only one shop in the world that could sell me a 32 spoke coaster brake hub junkyrustybikes.co. When I saw that they had a 32 hole version of this... I new it really was karma...
That's a Sturmey Archer S2C hub. In my head I hear the words "Sturmey Archer" in my father's voice, remembering the stories about old bikes he told me, while showing me the basics of fixing mine a long, long time ago. The venerable company, established in 1902, was going the way of most British engineering when it was bought by Sun Race in 2000 and now has a new range of products manufactured in Taiwan. This one is a 2 speed-kick shift coaster hub. It has a direct-drive low gear and a 130% overdrive, engaged and disengaged with a small backward movement of the cranks. The brake activates with increased backwards pressure and stops the wheel without touching the rim. No cables or hoses, no handles to mount, just that extra anti-rotation arm to clamp onto the left chain stay.
Then I needed a frame.
There are lots of old bicycle frames on ebay or wherever at any time, but not too many in my town, and even I'm not silly enough to buy an old frame without even looking at it. I needed horizontal dropouts or track forks and a frame spacing that would suite the narrow 116mm rear hub. But it didn't take long before the right frame came along.
Some one had an old italian track frame under their house that they had lost interest in. The 58cm seat tube was a little smaller than I have been riding but a smaller frame would show off the wheels better. The chromed front forks had been drilled for a brake, but the back hadn't. The frame was nice and clean with no braze ons or guides for cables or controls. It had daccordi, stamped into the seat stays, and a flying-D on the sloped fork crown. The head set said "suntour supurbe track" and the bottom bracket turned around alright but needed a bit of cleaning, some paint on one side showed that it wasn't completely removed when the frame was resprayed white. I liked it. I probably paid too much for it. The rear frame space was exactly 116mm.
I'm not going to try to tell you how to build wheels. I'd never done it before and probably won't ever do it again. When I got the "Crayzee-Eyeballs" rim, it was built onto a velocity, sealed bearing front track hub. I took that wheel apart and used the hub to build a front wheel with the black Deep-V rim. Using a radial spoke pattern made it relatively easy, but I still had to undo parts of it a couple of times. Then I stepped up for the rear wheel and built the fancy rim onto the Sturmey Archer hub using a stronger three cross pattern, thankfully no dishing was required.
These are the instructions I used but I can't honestly recommend that you do it yourself because of the potentially dire consequences of catastrophic wheel failure. If you do give it a try here's my one hot tip. It can be quite awkward to get the nipples that hold the spokes lined up with the inner holes of a deep profile rim, without them going missing inside and rattling around till you can shake them out.
Fine surgical instruments might help.
But then I thought to thread them backwards onto a spare spoke to feed them through. I wish someone had told me that one before I started.
The bottom bracket was a bit of a surprise. When I cleaned it up I could read "nadax" and also "FAG"?
It turns out to be a swiss, servicable, sealed bracket, with labyrinth seals. Which might have looked like this, if I'd taken it completely out.
I pulled it apart enough to find this inside. Then I cleaned it up put on some new grease and put it back together.
The problems getting the bottom bracket out, went along with the idea that I might see how the bike rode before I spent extra money on a paint job, to help make the decision to leave the frame as it was, chipped white, with chrome forks.
I put the "supurbe" head set back together, and the rest of the parts were simple, shiny, steel. No name parts from Taiwan, and an old saddle I had taken off one of my wife's bikes. (One of the bikes of my wife, not the bike of one of my wives.)
Luckily I had some short reach caliper brakes that lined up with the rims, if I adjusted them as short as they would go, and turned the brake blocks upside down. The old track frame was made with minimal clearance between the wheels and the frame, and not designed to have any brakes at all. With the front brake mounted, the gap was so narrow that my final choice, what tyres to put on the bike, was limited to what I could find that would actually fit. These are 700 x 20mm, Michelin Pro4 service course clinchers. There's about 2mm between the tyre and the brake arms.
Anyone giving you sensible advice about building a bike would tell you to start by considering what type of riding you are going to do. They wouldn't tell you to get fascinated by some shiny fancy wheel rims, and build a bike to show them off. Now that I'd built the bike what was I going to do with it? Had my chaotic approach to bicycle design given me something I could actually ride, or was it only good for hanging on the wall, or pulling apart and starting again?
At first I put some funky little mousachioed track style handlebars on it and I found it a little "over responsive", almost uncontrollable at low speeds or when riding out of the saddle. But with a bit of practice and some wider, road style drop bars, I started to master it and even appreciate the maouverability.
The 2-speed coaster hub took some getting used to, until I learnt to not let my feet turn backwards at all while I was coasting. I started to like the quick and definite shifting without having to take any weight off my hands. If your'e not sure which gear you are in by feel, you can tell from the sound the hub makes.
The skinny tyres give you a great "feeling for the road"... every little bump! They look fast, they feel fast, but that might be an illusion. They're not fast to get on and off the rims and usually need 3 tyre levers. (There is an alternative for converting a tight clearance road or track frame using slightly smaller 650B wheels, which would create another problem of finding non-standard size tyres.)
It was a fun bike to ride. I had thought at first, that I wouldn't use the coaster brake much, but would mostly use the rim brake on the front wheel, but I soon got to like it so much, that I usually only reach for the hand brake on down hill corners. So I put the lever in the handle bar drops.
It wasn't really the best bike for weekend group rides. The 2 speed hub, with only 130% range would leave me either spinning out on the flats or struggling on the climbs, and dropping off the back of the group.
The bike would look good leaning on a post outside a hip cafe, but it's minimal lines, with nowhere to mount accessories or luggage, weren't very practical for running down to the local shops, picking up the take away or carrying kids around.
The other ride I regularly do is my commute to and from work. Two or three times a week, depending on my schedule and family logistics, I leave the car behind and take a bike to work. On the map, work is only a couple of kilometers away, but to avoid the big hill in between, and to get in a bit more riding, I head the other way and follow the bend of the river around to my destination.
On the banks of the river's city reach, the split personality of Brisbane cycling is on display. On the South side, the bike path runs past the Gallery of Modern Art and the Museum, State Gallery and Performing Arts complex, into the South Bank Parklands redeveloped from the World Expo 1988 site. There's the "Brisbane Eye" giant ferris wheel, a sandy, artificial beach open for swimming and, except in the very early morning, hundreds of people walking around, buying ice creams, taking photos of each other, riding in pedal cabs and promenading on shiny cruiser bikes and wobbly roller blades. The speed limit is 10km/h, and is rumoured to be occasionally enforced by police with speed guns.
On the North side, the Bicentennial Bikeway efficiently separates the cyclists from the traffic and the pedestrians, and carries a steady stream of commuters down, under the Riverside Expressway where funky urban graphics direct cyclists past the old quays and beside the mangroves to their city destinations and the Gardens Point university campus. A ruthlessly efficient Mr Hyde, opposite the South side's sunny Dr Jekyll.
The South bank is the more direct route to work, but after I was T-boned by a giggling youngster on a retro step-through coming, out of control, off a spiral ramp, I decided to ride on the other side of the river.
I ride from home, down and around the sweeping bend of the river, then climb, over the Go Between Bridge, and follow the almost pedestrian free, bikeway to the car free, Goodwill Bridge, which takes me back to the South side near my work. It's a shade over nine and a half kilometers, mostly flat, except for the two short bridge climbs and the slope from my house to the river, and mostly on good smooth dedicated bikeways.
And the Crayzee-Eyeball bike loves it! The twitchy little track frame flicks around obstacles and through the gaps between pedestrians in the shared spaces and then settles down to roll fast and smooth on the bikeways. The 2 speed hub lets me hit the bridges and change down without having to move a finger or shift my riding position. The skinny tyres are ok on the smooth bike path surfaces and the heavy duty 1/8" drive cog and chain are more durable than those used on most multi speed bikes. That suits a frequently used commuter bike, and with the gears and rear break enclosed in the hub, relatively weather proof and maintenance free, there's a pretty good chance the bike will be functional when I pull it off the rack, running for work in the morning.
I was very happy riding to work with my bag over my shoulder, but as the weather got warmer my bag started developing a salt crust from lying on my sweaty back. My clean, uncluttered frame didn't have any fixtures to mount a rack, but I'm obviously not the only one with that problem. I found one that straps to the seat stays with a locking ratchet. "Thule Sweden", it says on the top, and underneath "Designed in New Zealand". Sweet as Bro!
Here's a picture of the bike, set up with luggage deck, 'king bright light with top tube battery pack, blue break cable, a red bell mounted under the stem and matching anodised chain ring bolts.
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| Crayzee-Eye, vintage Dacordi, Sturmey Archer 2-speed kick shift coaster commuter. |
