h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What a concidence! I just added an entry on bike gearing.
Yours is very nice. I hadn't heard of Dawes and Claud Buttler for years. Touring sounds so civilized. I'm strictly a roadie. If I stop to so much as blow my nose, I won't see my "friends" for the rest of the ride. They stop for nothing! Certainly not a tea shop or ice cream.

Mines here http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A579396 if you're interested.

The CTC always say "we never leave anyone behind." I regularly see a road cyclist on the way home fomr the office, riding a rather spiffy looking machine with carbon fibre rims and everything. I always exchange a cheery greeting as I overtake hime

Unless the rider you passed was "on his chin strap" from hours of riding without a pack to draft in, he's probably not a serious racer
Have you read "It's not about the Bike" by Lance Armstrong? (I'm waiting for the paper back. Only read excerpts so far.)

The only bike book I ever read was "Richard's Bicycle Book"

Even if you're not interested in racing, it's an inspirational book. He came back from cancer (brain, lungs) to win the Tour. For anyone to win the Tour means not having a bad day - for two weeks.

Tour as in TDF? Wow! I just read your entry on gearing. Timely, as I'm currently re-gearing my Claud Butler Super Dalesman (a fine machine, 531ST throughout, including chainstays).

Being an older bike the dropouts are 126mm over locknuts, so I'll have to have the rear forks reset to 135mm over locknuts (which is straightforward as 531 can be cold-set over this kind of angle).

I'll be keeping (for now at least) my 41:40:52 Stronglight/TA chainset and fitting a Shimano HG70 13-23 8-speed cassette, new Shimano long-cage rear mech and indexed bar-end shifters. At the same time I'll lose the 27x1 1/4 Rigidas in favour of 700C Mavic rims on Shimano hubs (with a generator hub at the front). The wheels are being build with double-butted stainless spokes at the front and single-butted at the rear. Sadly I can't use 32/40 hole hubs, so it's 36 holes front and rear.

Hopefully the closer ratios will give me a bit more speed on my journey to work. At the moment I only use about five of the 15 gears, and two of those are so close as to be indistinguishable (77" vs. 78.1"). Top at 100" is just not enough at 60km/h, and I need more ratios for better cadence in the 28-40 kmh/h range.

Is your entry in Peer Review? I've found a good way of presenting gear ratios as a table:


Cogs >1314151617192123

Rings52108.0100.393.687.882.673.966.961.0

4083.177.172.067.563.556.851.447.0

3164.459.855.852.349.244.139.936.4

% shift7.1%6.7%6.2%5.9%10.5%9.5%8.7%

Wow - thanks. I'll have to study all of that.

I'm looking for a new bike. I have to have STI shifters! Or, if it's a pure Triathlon bike, then maybe shifters up on the aero bars.

I submitted it for peer review - perhaps too soon.

I used a table of course, but didn't do anything fancy with spacing or colours.

Missing info: the grey cells are the unusable ratios (too much chain flexion) and the yellow ones are the % ratio difference. Between 6% and 9% is great, certainly less than 15% is highly desirable.

You can also get sequential epicyclic gears, 14 speeds, made by rohloff ([url removed by moderator]). They look rather good, but the intervals are higher than I want.

Hi again,
I found some time to try out your table (using "PREVIEW"). It had a lot of quotes missing from around the attributes and the tag was un-matched every where. Did you do a view source and copy & paste? Somehow all this important stuff got stripped off. Anyway - it's another view, and it shows the bad combinations nicely (grey - top left and bottom right) but I also wnated to show the ratios in ascending order. I'll use some of your techniques (better cell alignment and background colouring).

Ah, that's because the table was generated by a Domino web server - which has the annoying habit of missing out quotes and the # before RGB triplets, and using to put in blank space. Sorry.

Pas de problem! I didn't need any spaces in mine, but a non-breaking space would have been sufficient. I wondered what had generated it.

We Domino programmers have made a request to Lotus to fix these problems in HTML validity. It's fixed in the next release, which is currently in beta, but I don't run the beta software on my server at home.