We bumped into current round-the-world record holder James Bowthorpe at the Cycle Show, and he'd brought his bike along for everyone to have a gander. In case you weren't aware it's a pretty special machine: a Santos Travelmaster 2.8 sporting a Gates Carbon belt drive and a Rohloff Speedhub. Riding the Santos, James knocked three weeks off Briton Mark Beaumont's time.
It's one thing to set off on an expedition like this on a standard machine, quite another to attempt it on a platform that's unproven in distance cycling. However, the belt performed pretty flawlessly throughout the trip, and one of the upshots of James' trip – backed up by plenty of hard work by MD Robbert Rutgrink at Santos HQ – is that Rohloff have now recognised Santos as an official supplier of Gates-driven Speedhub bikes. There were others on display at the show but using the belt without Rohloff's approval will invalidate the warranty on your hub should it go wrong. Not that they ever seem to.
So what does a round-the-world record bike look like? Well, a bit dusty and with some odd-looking appendages, but the Travelmaster has seen off its 18,000 miles without major incident. The belt only needed to be changed once during the whole trip, in Perth, and James was really happy with the performance of the drivetrain. The 14-speed Rohloff hub gives a gearing range equivalent to a triple chainset – over 500% – and it doesn't require any lubrication. Getting the belt properly aligned (it's much more critical than with a chain) and tensioned (it requires much more tension to work efficiently) are the main issues, but given that we're seeing plenty of the belts coming through onto production machines now it seems that many manufacturers, Santos included, think the benefits for certain applications outweigh the problems.
James ran a Schmidt dynamo hub into a home-made transformer mounted onto the bars. The transformer converts the AC power from the hub into DC to run the lights and charge electrical equipment including an iPod for those long days in the saddle. If it looks a bit Heath-Robinson then, well, it is. But it lasted the trip, which is more than can be said of James' right hand grip, which had to cope with 18,000 miles of twist shifting and as a result looks a little the worse for wear!
Other kit on the bike includes: Schwalbe Marathon XR tyes (which lasted 12,000 miles), a Brooks saddle, Magura Hydraulic rim brakes and a home-made rear rack platform that doubled as an iPod mount.
The relatives might of course disagree, but in general I'd countenance a relatively light sentence* if only we could fix it so that those who...
Id forgotten that I got a second hand set of project two's for my getting to work bike over twenty years back.
I listened to the BBC R4 prog "Should cyclists stay in their lane" and it was pretty much what you'd expect from the BBC, a well-informed cyclist...
Of course you don't actually want to spend money intended for infrastructure on infrastructure, you want to spend it on plans for infrastructure,...
My bet is that all these tires popping off are from people with bad pressure gauges or they're simply just putting too much air in on purpose. ...
You have to add images via a reply to yourself after the topic is created. One at a time too.
“Plus, riders who pair CarBack to their smartphone using the Trek Accessory app can enjoy even more features, including the ability to see the...
David9694 - you were right! These new autonomous vehicles really are conspiring to run out of control!...
Decathlon have the Garmin Varia RTL515 on offer at the moment for £129.99: https://www.decathlon.co.uk/p/rearview-radar-varia-rtl515-65-lumens/_/R-...
So when you said "all Jews" you didn't actually mean all Jews, just religious ones. However even that distinction is erroneous, as you must surely...