CX in Melbourne continues to grow and here we have a grab-bag of tid-bits of news about it, photos of bikes we’ve built for it, and info about where to go and do it.  Read on if you like the idea of slipping over in the mud and hurting yourself.

First of all, we wrote a little piece about DIY cyclocross conversions that was published in Treadlie Magazine.  Here’s a page to give you a taste:

The magazine is on sale pretty widely, including at our shop.  We built the bike that the article is about and Jed raced it at the Dirty Deeds Prologue.  It’ll be given away at the end of the series.

Huw is also racing on a bike that regular readers of our site will have seen photos of.  It’s a nice vintage Batavus painted in team colours with most of an M900 XTR group set on it.  Here’s how it looked after the Prologue:

No wonder it looked like that.  It was ridden through through this:

At about the same time we built a bike at the opposite end of the CX spectrum for one of our customers – a very modern super-lightweight Focus CX bike.

Here’s how they look side-by-side.

Then somewhere in the middle is a Crosscheck we built up for another customer.  This one has a great-value SRAM Apex  group set on it.

Here’s another Crosscheck we built with wheels that use a new rim we’re excited about – the H+Son TB14.  The rim is nice and wide, has eyelets and a welded joint but is still around the 500g mark.  It’s sufficiently strong for anything short of mountain bike use or loaded touring. Kristan, who had only picked up the bike on the Friday morning of the Prologue, “never wins anything” (his words) yet managed to take out his handicap event. He was going so fast this was the best shot taken of him on the night. Photo: Cory Boardman.

These rims were also used on the Focus where we laced them to Phil Wood single speed hubs.  The hubs had seen a heap of use and were 120mm spaced, but because they are Phil hubs they were in perfect mechanical condition and it was a simple matter of getting replacement caps to convert them to 130mm for the new bike.  This toughness and adaptability means that Phil hubs like these will keep seeing use for at least the riding life of their owner.  They’re the sort of component you might hand down to your grandkids.

All these bikes are being ridden at the Dirty Deeds series.   Even if you miss this (or if racing isn’t your thing) then there are still a bunch of good rides going on now that a CX bike would be perfect for.

If racing is not your thing, or you feel you need some practice first, Karl is organizing the CX Social series - short fun rides around the Yarra trails with a BBQ and beers afterwards.

Then, for those not afraid of getting up really early to do lots of kilometers and climb lots of hill there are the There Will be Dirt rides.  But beware – Angry, who organizes the rides, has always ridden a single speed and has always been faster than he admits, and has never been daunted by distance, weather or hills.  Now he has gears!

For those intimidated by the length of the rides, and the early starts he and Blakey have organized a bimonthly Gravel Grinders ride.  These rides start later, are shorter, and leave from a train station, so that the whole ride takes place somewhere nice among the trees.

If none of this sounds weird enough for you, there’s always cyclocross’s ugly half-breed cousin Monstercross.  Monstercross bikes are like CX bikes but are designed to take larger tyres than are sanctioned for CX races.  Monstercross is less about racing and more about using a fairly minimalist bike where you might otherwise use a mountain bike.  We wrote about Rawland a while ago, who make some monstercross bikes.

Another good basis for a Monstercross build is actually the Surly Crosscheck, which can takes tyres up to 45mm wide.  Here’s a photo of a customer’s Crosscheck built up in true Monstercross style – Schwalbe Marathon Extremes and wide flared bars so you can throw the bike around in the drops without hitting your wrists on the bars.

We’ve gotten a few Gilles Berthoud products in.  Among them is a saddle that I’m very excited about.   The saddle is a Gilles Berthoud.  It looks at first a little like a Brooks, and it’s this similarity that excites me.   The Berthoud is made from very thick high quality leather, which is screwed down to the saddle body.  Where the Brooks saddle body is all metal, the Berthoud has metal rails and a plastic back (called a cantle).  The plastic cantle is reputed to be amazingly strong and is designed to have a tiny bit of flex for extra comfort.  The looks of the plastic might put some people off though.

Overall the quality looks incredible.  Whereas Selle Anatomica saddles have tiny little bunched bits of leather between the rivets, the Berthouds are totally smooth.   This suggests that the leather has been perfectly shaped before being attached to the body of the saddle, and the screws just hold it in place, rather than having to tension it.  Hopefully that means it’s immune to the failure mode you see on old Brooks, where the leather starts to crack and tear around the rivets.

The leather on the Berthoud is much thicker than that on a Brooks, so over the long term it shouldn’t develop the little areas of sag at the back near the center which a Brooks seem prone to.  The tension adjuster at the front is operated with a 5mm Allen key, rather than the Brooks open ring spanner.  The internals are hidden by plastic, and though the mechanism underneath it might be the same as a Brooks, it looks less agricultural – or less charming, depending your taste.

When I chose my saddle I compared it to my Brooks Professional and picked the wider of the two available options because it was the most similar.  I was worried at first because the nose is a little wider and it felt uncomfortable to begin with. But I quickly got used to it.  Also, whereas on a Brooks I prefer the nose tilted up more than on a Rolls or a Flite, on the Berthoud perfectly flat was the ticket for me.  Once these were sorted out the saddle was comfortable, though very hard.   Over the long run I’m assuming it will soften a little, though the thickness of the leather makes me think it will take a long time.

We also have Berthoud bar tape, leather dressing and a small range of handlebar bags.  The bags are beautifully made, and have well-thought-out pockets and straps.  The bar tape is softer than Brooks leather tape and has nicely chamfered edges so that it doesn’t have bulky ridges where it overlaps on the bars.

The downside to the Berthoud gear is predictable enough.  It’s very expensive.  In my view the high quality of their products makes it worth it.

We’ve just finished an exciting build. We used a 650B randonneur/porteur frame made by Velo Orange, called the Polyvalent. Ours might be the first in Australia. We’ve built it up as a showcase for some of the VO gear we stock (and as a great bike in its own right). It has a big VO Porteur front rack, VO cantilever brakes, headset, saddle, rims, etc. It has a dynamo hub, is shod with Grand Bois Hetres and stays upright while stationary thanks to a Pletscher bipod kickstand. It will soon have a VO chain guard.  We installed a B+M Lumotec IQ Cyo just under the floor of the rack, and a B+M tail light on the rear mud guard.

We lent the bike to Blakey, a local bike aficionado, friend and sometime customer.  Here’s a link to a flickr set he’s made to document his weekend with the bike.  You’ll notice we’ve stolen some of them for this post – he  takes a nice photo.  Blakey loved the bike and raved, in particular, about how it rides over rough ground.  Not surprising since the bikes that it’s inspired by were used by Parisian newspaper deliverers over rough cobbles.

It’s a great bike for taking medium-sized loads and is prefect for around town.  This is thanks to the frame geometry, which is optimized for carrying a load on the front, and running large-volume tyres, just like the old French bikes that inspired it. Blakey says it earned a lot of admiring looks, and it certainly looks right with something nice in the bidon cage.

This build came in at around $2500 and  is going to another of our favourite customers, but we’ll be building more. If you’re interested, drop by and have a talk – because the frame is so versatile, radically different builds are an option – it could be run as a single speed or with a gear hub.  I would really like to build one with drop bars and a small front rack that could be used for fast commuting and day trips in the country.

]]> http://commutercycles.com.au/news/2010/velo-orange/feed/ 4 http://commutercycles.com.au/news/2010/bicycle-quarterly/ http://commutercycles.com.au/news/2010/bicycle-quarterly/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 07:17:16 +0000 Tristram http://commutercycles.com.au/?p=1158

We’ve been quietly stocking Bicycle Quarterly for a while. Bicycle Quarterly (BQ) is our favourite bicycle magazine. It started out life at Vintage Bicycle Quarterly and dealt mostly with old French Randonneur bikes, as well as the people who rode and still ride them. As the magazine has progressed there has been a growth in interest in this world, and new more builders have started making bikes inspired by the classics (Herse and Singer, most famously), so the focus broadened to include these. I believe that Jan Heine started the magazine on his own, and over the years has gotten help from Alex Wetmore, Frank Berto and others.

There are a number of reasons that it’s our favourite bike magazine. For one, we’re interested in the bikes and people they talk about. But as much as that, it’s how thoughtful the articles and reviews are that really endears BQ to us.  The reviews are always based on long, serious test rides of the bike, and are always very thoughtful and considered. When they find a problem with the bike being reviewed they often suggest solutions to the problem – in one issue the bolts attaching a mud guard jiggled loose and they suggested that the problem was that the bolt had too small a head to get sufficient torque with the appropriate allen key – how many other magazines look at details this small. 

We also like that the articles are opinionated in the best possible way – there’s a very clear type of bike that they like, and very clear preferences, both aesthetic and functional. The fact that they overlap to some degree with our own leanings is nice, but more than that, the preferences are cogently expressed, sensibly defended and clearly the result of real experience and testing. They are also very good at marking potential conflicts of interest – often their reviews come with little notes stating that the product being reviewed is sold by someone who advertises in their magazine. This is a very welcome contrast to magazines in which content is indistinguishable from advertisement.

There are some sample articles on the BQ site which will give you a good sense of the range of things talked about.  This is the first page of the BQ review of the Long Haul Trucker, a bike we build a few of. BicycleQuarterlyLHT-1.

Jan has also published two books, one about French Constructeur bikes called The Golden Age of the Hand Built Bicycle, and one with a more general range of bikes used in a variety of elite competitions, called The Competition Bicycle. Whereas BQ is printed in black and white and has a lot of technical discussion, the books are beautiful and lavish with much more of a focus on full-colour studio shots and archival photographs of the bikes with less accompanying text. We’ll soon have a shop copy of each, if you’d like to take a look.

Having stocked a few issues, we’re planning on increasing our order, so if you’re interested in a copy shoot us an email and we’ll get even more.

Sealed Grand Bois tyres

The first Grand Bois we tried was the 650x32b Cypres. It was an amazing tyre. Very comfortable, but still fast and precise-feeling. Their whole range have very supple casings and reasonably thin treads. This results in a tyre that rolls very nicely, even at relatively low pressures.

Newly arrived box

The main reason for the order was a 650b Porteur bike we’re building using a Velo Orange Polyvalent frame. The tyre for this bike had to be Grand Bois’s most-raved-about tyre, the Hetre. It’s 42mm wide, has red/orange horizontally ribbed tread, and constantly gets recommended by anyone who has ridden one (Jan Heine raves about them in Bicycle Quarterly on a regular basis). They are also perfect for the bike we’re building (more on this bike in a later post). Here’s a picture of a pair we sold to one of our customers.

We also got some 700c tyres – the 28c Cerf. One pair was for stock and one pair for is my bike. Like all Grand Bois they are supple and light for their balloon size, they have old-fashioned natural tan sidewalls, and roll beautifully. I’m running them at 80psi, and they feel terrific on uneven road surfaces, taking the edge of all the bumps and feeling hard enough to inspire confidence while cornering.

Hetre on top

The pair for stock sold in no time – to someone who came across town to talk about 650b, buy a Pletscher kickstand and a VO bell. We’re always excited to meet like-minded bike nerds. But no need to worry, because in a few weeks we’ll have pairs of each on the shelf.

They come out at about $80 each, which seems good for a high quality boutique tyre, especially one that comes in hard-to-find sizes. When you think about it, that’s about the same as a Rubino Pro.

If you can’t make it into the workshop to pick up a pair, feel free to give us a call.  We’re happy to post interstate.  (Here’s a photo of some loaded up for a trip to the post office.)

Starting on Friday, 30^th October 2009 there’s

Death Becomes Her

A ‘Girls-only’ alley cat race. Registration and ride starts at 6pm from Melbourne Museum. To  get on board bring $10 for entry for teams of two. You’ll also need your bike lock, bag and spare gold coins. As it’s Halloween, dress the part for this ‘Ghouls-only’ event. Prizes for best/worst dressed (you could even score a free service from us!).

And if you’ve still got legs, Borrow Grampa’s bike from the shed and join us on Saturday 31st November for the

2009 Woodend Annual Vintage Bike Rally

The ride starts at 2:30 at the Woodend Clocktower, and meanders 23kms to the historic gardens of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, Trentham. Refreshments are available at the halfway pit-stop - The Pig and Whistle Hotel, Trentham. For those who over hydrate at Cosmopolitan Hotel, there’s a courtesy bus to take you (and your bike) back to Woodend.

If you want to join the Commuter Cycles team, we’re getting up there a little early to make a day of it.

Meet us at the Commuter Cycles workshop for a 10:00 (sharp) departure. We’re taking the 10:35 Vline
service from Southern Cross to Woodend.

More details, Give Rus a call on 0423 388 167.

And if you’re not completely funned out, Otesha are having a

Spring Garden Party

on Sunday 1^st November, from 12 to 5pm at 79 Gladstone avenue, Northcote.

The event is a Otesha fundraiser. For $10, you get a lazy day’s entertainment and the warm fuzzy feeling that your helping Otesha and it’s youth education programs about sustainable consumption.

Performing on the day is Monique Brumby, the Unconventional Cellist, TheTaylor Project and Pete Coles.

Just bring you picnic rug, there’ll be food, drinks and plenty of other activities. Otesha guarantee there’ll be something for everyone.

More info at Otesha.org.au

See you when we open again on Wednesday!