In article <[email hidden]>,
(Donald Gillies) said:Quoted message said:"Peter Cole" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Quoted message said:I've rehabbed several bikes from the 60/70/80's. The old stuff doesn't
stack up well at all against the new.
When I removed my 1997 Shimano SIS Schwinn Moab-2/Deore bike from the
garage last weekend, to ride to the park, I reflected upon this bike
which has only seen about 500 miles in of usage. I was struck by
three things about the "new technology" :
1. The plastic pedals which broke off (literally) at 50 miles
I had some pretty long-lived plastic pedals on my high-school mountain
bike (that's me: young enough to have owned a mountain bike in high
school, old enough to race Master's), but plastic pedals are not
reflective of anything found on decent, modern mountain bikes. Shimano,
in fact, doesn't really make any plastic-bodied pedals. Some of their
caged SPD pedals use plastic outer cages, but the important axle and
bearing bits seem to all be metal. Their only purely flat pedal is an
all-metal "DX" unit aimed at the BMX and freeride set.
Quoted message said:2. How can a shifter refuse to shift half a gear range after 500 mi?
AND IT DOES THIS AT RANDOM TIMES (Deore grouppo)
That's an extraordinary experience. I have LX and XT stuff with many
reasonably severe miles on them, and have had no shifting problems.
Since the rest of your bike got rusty, maybe this is a cable corrosion
issue.
Quoted message said:3. How can a chain and half the bolts rust in a garage after only 5 years
??
Well, I don't think anyone can make the case that modern stuff rusts
faster than old stuff, especially chains. The answer is that my bikes
get surface rust on chains after a winter in a reasonably dry shed. As
for really rusty-looking chains, you'd be surprised how functional they
become with enough oil (that said, the cost of chain is such I'd
strongly recommend replacement).
Quoted message said:I'm not even going to talk about how shimano grinds down its
chainrings to "improve shifting" (you mean shifting profits doncha
shimano?), or how every 2 or 3 years the entire drivetrain changes
forcing you to buy a whole new drivetrain, nay, a whole new bike, when
just the simplest thing happens like your indexed gear system system
brain decided it was time to throw the derailleur into the spokes to
force a quarterly dividend at the Shimano corporation.
I have done some very interesting experiments, my favourite being the
one where I took a very ordinary late-70s touring bike with an
all-Suntour drivetrain (V-GT, I think), and replaced the contemporary
6-speed freewheel and chain with a recent Hyperglide freewheel and some
properly-sized chain, probably a Taya. I left the friction shifters and
derailers to do their thing.
The difference in shifting performance was night and day: faster,
smoother, quieter shifting, and fewer missed shifts. It was so good I
felt no need to add indexed shifting to that bike, and it is now in the
happy hands of my father (there's a Mega-7 freewheel on there now, which
gives him some really low gearing, too).
I did something similar to my Bianchi commuter, which is currently
friction-shifting an 8-speed Hyperglide freehub. I should say that the
ARX derailer either doesn't have the range or isn't adjusted right to
hit the big cog at the back. I haven't fixed it because I don't need
that cog, and the wheels' real purpose is as the second set of wheels
for my race bike (8-speed with STI).
In practice, overshifting an indexed derailer is no more common than
doing the same with a non-indexed derailer, and maybe less common. There
are still (redundant) limit stops on the rear derailer, and there's also
the adjustment of the indexing points using the several standard ways of
adjusting the cable tension (multiple adjustment barrels and the initial
clamping of the cable by the rder). If either adjustment is correct, the
derailer can't get into the spokes.
Shimano is rightly derided for the un-repairable shifters it sells, but
the life of those shifters is commonly measured in tens of thousands of
kilometres.
My comparisons of old to new, including demented hybrids of both, have
convinced me that the compromises made in the new stuff (nonreversible
cogs, complicated shifters...) are paid back by a superior riding
experience. You can certainly make a credible argument that neither
indexing nor brifters are necessary for non-racers, but they're still
nice to use.
--
Ryan Cousineau, [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com
Verus de parvis; verus de magnis.
