Read on for some details, and more embarrassing photos.

As Autumn advances we take our fingerless gloves off the display and replace them with long fingered gloves to keep you warm on the morning commute.  We also stock up on brighter lights and full coverage mud guards.  The guards won’t keep you dry in a downpour but with Melbourne’s changeable weather they are great because they let you ride just after some rain without getting a wet slick up your back.  We also carry beanies that fit under your helmet, ear warmers and cycling caps.

The biggest change since last winter is that we are stocking different jackets.  WE now have a full compliment of  Specialized Deflect Hybrid jackets in high-vis yellow and Fitzroy safety black.  They are great jackets – light and breathable but also shower-proof and they really help take the sting out of the wind.

They have a good range of pockets, including one at the back so your stuff won’t fall out while you ride.

The sleeves zip off so you can use them as a vest.

And finally, they very sensibly have reflective piping on them.

Check the jackets out here.

Read on for more details.

We chose these for a few reasons:

First, they are a very simple but good quality bike with very few things that can go wrong.  None of the parts are short cuts, and as parts wear out the bike is worth spending the money on to upgrade as required.

Second, the Coda has 8 speed running gear.  This means that the physical distances the derailleur and cables move with each click is greater, and so there is a larger margin for error for adjustment.  Thus your bike stays in adjustment longer and needs less tune-ups.  It also means that replacement chains and cassettes are nearly half the price of 9 speed chains and cassettes.

Third, unlike the higher-end Codas they have a steel fork.  Not only is this a little more durable and reliable than a carbon fork, but the carbon fork on the higher-end models does not have room for the wide tyres and guards we like on commuting bikes.  The steel fork also has all the necessary eyelets for from racks, so if you need to carry a lot of gear to work, or even want to try some weekend touring the bike will be up to the task.

Fourth, the frame is made of Reynolds 520.  This is a high-quality Chromoly that is often found on much more expensive bikes.

Fifth, they come with our favourite commuting tyres – Vittoria Randonneurs, as well as the cranks we most often fit when we’re replacing worn ones, so they fit with our view of what is good value and reliable.

Out of the box we make a few modifications to the Coda.

We also fit the bikes with racks, mud guards and security skewers.  The security skewers only add a little bit to the price tag, but stop any opportunist or vandal from taking your wheels.  The rack and mud guards make the bike far more practical for commuting allowing you to carry panniers or a basket and keeping you and your bike’s moving parts drier.  The rack we use is the Topeak Supertourist DX, a strong stiff rack that has 2 sets of rails so that your panniers sit lower and so you can carry panniers and also something on top of the rack.  The mud guards are Planet Bike Cascadias.  They are a tough chromoplast guard with excellent mounting hardware.  We’ve tried many different mud guards and these have remained our favourite everyday mud guard.  Once the bikes are fitted out like this they represent our ideal for a good value commuter bike.  We sell the whole package for $800.

Read on for more.

This is going to do some serious touring, so  it’s kitted out with some great racks – a Surly Nice rack on the front and a Tubus Logo on the back.  For really heavy touring this is one of our favourite combinations.  The Nice Rack lets you carry two panniers and some bulky light stuff on the front and the Logo is a very stiff tough rack that lets you do the same on the back.

This choice bars also made running V-brakes and a gear hub more straight f0rward than they would have been with drop bars.  The most common controls for both the gears and the brakes are designed around MTB sized bars.  The V-brakes are very easy to adjust on the fly while touring and are very powerful.  The gear hub is very low maintenance and offers a good range with trouble-free shifting.

The bars give our customer a range of hand positions that are all similar in feel to a flat bar setup.

Like a lot of the Surly bikes we put together it has mud guards.

This bike looks like it means business!

Look here for some of the other Surly bikes we’ve made.

Read on for details.

It wasn’t quite how he wanted it though – the chainstay bridge was not drilled because it was designed for the old English clip-on fenders.  He wanted cable stops instead of cable guides for his rear brake, he wanted a second set of water bottle bosses and he wanted to use a small front rack, so he needed some braze-ons to mount it.

We checked the alignment and made sure that the corrosion was all superficial then made the changes for him and now he’s going to get it repainted.  Once it’s painted and built up we’ll post more photos.

We ran the cable stops under the top tube so he can lean on the top tube without damaging his paint.

We put a waterbottle boss in his chainstay bridge so he doesn’t need a nut and bolt for his fender.

Read on for info about both.

The basic course will be run by Val nagle.  It is a four part series with a small group of up to four people.  It will be hands-on, and the idea is that you bring your own bike and work on it, so that the information you take away is more squarely relevant to your bike, and so that you can leave with a bike that’s working better than the one you came in with.  Having other people present with different bikes also means you’ll be exposed to some variation and get a sense of some of the different sorts of parts and set-ups there are out there.  The series of courses is designed to be completed in order, but it would be fine to skip one, or to just pick one out that is relevant to an issue you’re already interested in.

The series of courses will run as follows:

The first session will be an introduction with basic principles, a rough guide to how a bike works, appropriate position on a bike, and then some time repairing punctures.  This is the day-to-day maintenance stuff that you’ll find yourself doing fairly regularly and should make you a bit more independent.  The key aim here is for you to feel confident about repairing your own punctures.

The second session will be focused on brakes.  We’ll show you how to replace brake pads and brake cables and how to tune brakes as well as talk about brakign technique.  Because we’ll be showing you on your bikes you’ll get directly applicable knowledge and because there will be other people with different set-ups you’ll also get a bit of an overview of the other sorts of brakes people use.

The third session will be focused on gears.  Again we’ll show you how to clean and lube your chain, how to replace your gear cables and how to tune your gears.

The final session will be focused on wheels.  We’ll teach you to replace the bearings in your hubs, to adjust the bearings, and to do basic wheel truing.

All of the sessions will go for 2 hours and will include plenty of time for questions and discussions on the topic of the day.  They will run every second week from 2:00 until 4:00 on Saturday afternoons.  The first series starts on 21/4/12 and runs until 26/5/12.  Each session will cost $60 and the whole series will cost $200.  Bookings will be essential because of the small class sizes, and we will require payment in advance.

The more advanced course will be a 3-part series on wheel building.  The first session will be all theory and give you an overview of the issues involved in specing a custom wheel.  It will help you to choose the parts you’ll use to build your wheel as well as help you to decide how to build the wheel.  We’ll also help you to calculate the length of the spokes you’ll need.  The second session will be all about lacing, and we’ll teach you some techniques and principles then get you to lace the wheels we helped you to spec in the first session.  In the last session we will teach you about spoke tension and wheel truing then show you some techniques and get you to finish building your wheels.  You should finish the course witha  good grasp of the theory behind wheel building as well as the necessary experience to build another wheel set later, should you choose to do so, and of course a new set of wheels custom built to suit your riding.

The advanced course will have fewer participants, and really only makes sense as a series.  It will also cost $200 and again bookings will be essential.

We stock their Dutchi – a take on the Dutch city bikes exemplified by Gazelles, and their Mixte – a take on the classic French step-thorough design.

Read on for more info.

Like a lot of the bikes we stock Linus frames are made from steel – Hi-tensile for the cheaper models and cromoly for the more expensive ones.  This means that they last a lot longer than aluminium bikes and can be built with skinnier tubes than aluminum, without sacrificing strength or stiffness.  They are elegant simple-looking bikes with a single colour paint scheme, fairly minimal branding, hub gears and nicely integrated parts.

Like all our favourite bikes they are very practical and comfortable in all conditions thanks to reasonably wide tyres, mud guards, racks to get your load off your back, a fairly upright riding positions and good, smooth-rolling, reliable parts.

All of the Linuses we stock have gear hubs which help with the sleek looks and keep the frequency and cost of servicing to a minimum.  They also all come with racks and mud guards, so you can put them to use straight away for commuting in any weather.

The Dutchi at the name implies is a Dutch-inspired bike.  It is their most upright and has swept-back bars that come up and back towards the rider.  The 3 speed model comes in two sizes and the 8 speed model comes in one size.  Both are available in a few colours.

The Mixte is a French-style Mixte like the old Peugeots that are still getting around.  It is still failry uproight, though less upright than the Dutchi.It comes in 3 and 8 speed models.  The former has two sizes and the latter has one.

Come in and test ride one.

If you want to read more check them out here.

They are an example of the new breed of road rims that is 23mm wide but still light and intended for road bikes.  The idea is that a standard 23mm road tyre has a rounder profile on these rims and is less inclined to pinch-flat and doesn’t squirm as much while cornering.  They are also stiffer side-to-side than narrower rims.  We love them because they are perfect for running slightly wider tyres and are a little stronger.

The Archetypes are 450g (only a little bit more than Open Pros) and use an aero profile with a reinforced inner edge rather than eyelets.  Like all H Plus Son rims they have beautiful rim joins and fantastic machining on the braking surface.

We’re looking forward to building some up for customers, but don’t be surprised if you see them on our own bikes.  We already have plans for a White Industries – Archetype wheel for one of our customers.

Vivente are an Australian company that traces its origins back to an older company called Gemini who also made the World Randonneur.  Over the years the bike industry has changed and the parts available for touring bikes have changed so the World Randonneur has evolved.  Production has shifted, the parts on the bike have changed and the geometry of the frame has changed, but the bike has retained some consistency all along.  It is a steel touring and commuting bike designed to take loads, be comfortable on a long ride and handle serious use.  To this day the old 80s Gemini World Randonneurs are a common sight, still in use.

The first thing we noticed about the bikes when we were putting them together was the unbelievable spec level on them.  They come standard with DT Alpine III spokes in the rear wheel – a really tough touring spoke.  They have a Tubus rack fitted on the back – pretty much the rack we recommend for most serious touring builds.  They come with nice polycarbonate mud guards.  They come with Schwalbe Marathon tyres and even come with a dynamo hub and light.

These features are normally upgrades that add hundreds of dollars to the cost of other touring bikes, and they mean that the World Randonneur is ready to go touring almost anywhere right out of the box.

These features are on top of a spec that is all-round good and solid.  The frame is double-butted cromoly with all the braze-ons you could possibly imagine (and a few you probably couldn’t, including a mount for a bugle horn (supplied with the bike believe it or not)).   The parts are all high quality, with Shimano LX hubs and other parts, nice WTB saddles, Shimano SPD pedals and so on.  Their smallest size comes with 26” wheels to avoid toe overlap and other compromises needed to fit large wheels in a small frame.

The World Randonneur also comes in 3 variations – two drop bar models and one with trekking bars.   The two drop bar models have Nitto bars – one of the bars we often finding ourselves fitting in place of the stock bars on Long Haul Truckers.  They differ in the shifters they use and the price – one uses bar end shifters and the other slightly more expensive model uses STI shifters.  The trekking bar model uses what we call butterfly bars and different brake levers and gear levers as a result.  As well as this being a good option in its own right it opens up possibilities for customizing the bike without having to buy new levers.  Between the two models we can fit pretty much any style of handlebar without having to replace too many other parts.  From time to time we will have a trekking bar model which we’ve swapped to swept-back bars on the floor ready to test ride.

To us, the first question that the Vivente raises is how to choose between it and the Long Haul Trucker.  There is one case in which the decisison is easy – if you don’t already have a rack, mud guards and lighting and you are looking for a touring bike for less than $2000 then the Vivente is almost certainly the better choice.  Outside of this situation there are lots of small pros and cons and the decision will come down to how you want to set the bike up so come in and talk with us about it.

We’re directly involved in a few aspects of Bikefest. Together with Allegro, we’ll have a stall at the Treadlie Market – a three day event nestled within the Sustainable Living Festival ‘Big Weekend’. The Bikefest Treadlie Market will feature everything you need to fuel a life of two wheels (including coffee!).

We’ll have some of our favourite things on display and there is a special track for test riding the Allegro bikes we’ll have built up. The market is at Birrarung Marr will run Friday 17th (12-8pm), Sat 18th (10-6pm) and Sunday 19th (10-5pm). The wonderful “Roll Up” Bicycle Valet crew will be in attendance, so you won need to bring three locks. Find all the details here.

We’re also running a Bike Swapmeet on the Saturday. Together with some other horders we’ll be opening up our sheds to make some room for new projects. Come down to Birrarung Marr between 11am and 3pm and you might just find yourself a bargain.

Of course, there are a bunch of other great events, so make sure you check out the full program here. See you down there.

The deliveries are piling up out the back as we hardly have time to open them, but stay tuned for details of the Gilles Berthoud bits we’ve got in, as well as World Randonneur bikes and a new addition to the Commuter dream team…

Happy 2012!

Huw and the gang