Alligt Kruiser (my new bike): first changes¶

Tags: cycling

I’ve barely got my new second-hand bicycle for half a week and I’ve already made several adjustments. Poor bike.

• The front brake wasn’t really working. Barely any braking action. The shimano roller brakes and the wheel size are similar to that of my flevobike bike, so I exchanged the whole front wheel. Tadaah, working front brake.

• Did I say “exchanged the whole front wheel”? That also means the narrow swalbe marathon something tire got replaced by a broad big comfortable vredestein Perfect Moiree tire. Just as speedy (several tests actually say it is more efficient!) but in any case at least twice as comfortable.

• I couldn’t get the rear derailleur to reach the highest gear. And the 1 and 2 both selected the number 1 lowest gear. So I did some tweaking with the assorted screws on the derailleur and got it to select all gears again. There’s quite some give and take in the derailleur, so the action wasn’t terribly smooth. Coupled with my screw-tweaking, this led to near-disaster this morning as the chain (after cycling some 8km with it already) suddenly went to gear number 0. Which means NO gear so it wedged itself with heart-breaking noise between the gears and the spokes. And again 100m later. Poor bike and poor me.

• I did the screw-screw bit again and made the derailleur safe again. Looking at it when at home, I saw the obvious change I had to make: swap the rear wheel + hub for the flevobike bike’s other wheel. The wheel with the 7-gear internal hub. Pure mechanical reliability. Switching gears while standing still. Switching action smooth as molten butter. It took me the whole evening to get everything done properly. Did one small test ride: my morning commute will have to serve to as a shake-down cruise. Pretty exited.

Some TODO items:

• Add a ventisit seat. I’ve measured the seat already, but I’ve still got to convert the measurements to a simple drawing that I can send over to Ventisit.

• Add the reelight always-on magnetic induction lights.

• Add the two former Alligt Kruiser wheels to the now-wheelless flevobike bike. The derailleur is actually the same, so that one’s easy. And dig up a flevobike seat somewhere as the current one is partially-broken after some 15 years of service.