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Third one in a week – I can’t get the 8-speed hubs fast enough, so I’m building them in strict order. This one looks lovely in the sunshine – it’s a superlight, with 8-speed hub, and the no-longer-available Stelvio tyres (I’ve run out now).

This is the latest incarnation of the 8-speed conversion, using Sturmey’s own chainset which is very tidy…

Using up the last of my Pantour hubs – blurry iPhone pic, sorry 😉

For general reference, here’s the instructions I wrote for fitting the 8-speed. The chainset bit might vary depending on what chainset I can get hold of.

Fitting the back wheel:

– Take off your old back wheel, and swap the tyre, tube and rim tape onto the new wheel.
– Take off the original tensioner, and all gear cables, including the pulley for the gear cable on the right side.
– Slide the new wheel into the dropouts – it should go with the cable guide pointing upwards – it can only go in one of two ways, so it should be obvious which way is right.
– Slide the two tabbed washers onto the axle, with the tabs going in to the slots in the dropouts. Important: use the new washers supplied with the kit, not the original ones from your old wheel. Fit a Sturmey nut on the left side, and the plain nut on the right, and tighten.
– Slide the chain tensioner on on the right, then fit the thin washer, and the other Sturmey nut. Only do this nut up hand-tight, you’ll want to take it off again when you fit the cable.
– Pump up the tyre.

Fitting the chainset and chain:

– Take off the pedals and chainset.
– Fit the new chainset, and fit the pedals.
– the chain may not be the right length – with the standard 20t sprocket, 33t chainring, and latest tensioner, the chain should be 100 links long.
– if you fit a new chain, fit either a 7/8-speed derailleur chain, or a narrow single-speed one like the SRAM PC-1.

Fitting the shifter and cables:

– Fit the shifter to the right handlebar – you’ll need to cut down the handlebar grip a bit, and it should go with the cable to the front of the brake lever, not behind. If space is cramped, you can usually move the brake lever inboard a bit too. Make sure the shifter doesn’t restrict movement of the brake lever.
– Thread the outer gear cable through the plastic cable gatherer behind the stem, down alongside the other cables, behind the chainset and through the cable guide there, through the cable guide on the chainstay (going from outside to inside, like the brake cable) and up through the square tube that used to hold the plastic pulley, before curving down towards the cable guide on the hub – depending on your handlebars, you will probably need to cut a bit off the cable to make it the right length.
– Thread the gear cable through the outer cable. It’s easiest if you don’t put the outer cable into the cable guide on the hub yet, you can do this later.
– Fit the cable clamp as in the Sturmey instructions – put the shifter into 8th, and fit the clamp 105mm along from the end of the outer cable. Cut off the spare cable.
– It’s easiest if you take the tensioner off again for this bit – push the plastic cable clip on the hub backwards so you have some slack, and clip the cable clamp in place. Try operating the shifter to make sure the cable clip rotates around the hub correctly.
– Adjust the gears as per the Sturmey instructions – in 4th gear, make sure the yellow dot is in the centre of the window, on the back of the hub on the right-hand side.
– Re-fit the tensioner, and try again – operate the shifter a few times while pedaling, and check again that the yellow dot is in the centre of the window – adjust the barrel adjuster on the gear shifter if necessary.

That should be it 😉

With a bit of bodging and machining special parts, I’ve fitted a Schlumpf High Speed Drive to a Brompton…

It took a lot more bodging than I thought it would, but I’ve just finished the first Brompton with the new wide-range Sturmey Archer 8-speed hub. Now I know how to do it, the other 10 on the waiting list will be easy 😉

This bike also has a Mountain Drive…

Also in the stack of old brochures I found was this Neatwork brochure. Neatwork were one of the very first reumbent companies, based in Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, and they had a really fun weekend event every year with pub crawls by bike, trips around the countryside, the chance to try out lots of expensive toys, and camping by the river.

Unfortunately they were too ahead of their time, and went bust more than a decade ago. As have, unfortunately, every manufacturer on this brochure 😉

(Well, Kingcycle didn’t go bust, but they quit making bikes a long time ago)

I found an old brochure, from when Kinetics was called Griffon Cycles (there was a good reason, but I can’t remember what it was), more than 10 years ago.

The interesting thing, though – check out the price of a Streetmachine, add on 10 years of inflation, and see how good value they are now 😉

I found a small stack of these old postcards amongst some bike papers – I think my parents found them a few years ago…

Just fitted a Rohloff hub to an Optibike electric bike – the internal cabling was a bit fiddly, but it looks very tidy…