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Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

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Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#201

Post by pja »

aluhut wrote: post #134
johnny99 wrote: post #119

I used to be a bike mechanic, and have gotten to work 90% by bicycle for the past two decades, so I'll take a stab at some of the questions: - Belt drives are great. They're sturdier than chains, cleaner, and something I love, quieter. The angle of the belt doesn't change, the way a chain does, which means you can add a chain guard, as this bike does. Which keeps it yet cleaner. You can ride to work without worrying…

I have question for you. Before my actual bike, I had a mountain bike for something around 15years. I never changed or did anything to the chain. It was perfect. Now I bought a new one. After 2 years I went to the shop to have it checked. They had to change the chain. When I told them my story with the old bike they told me: "that's how it is today. Chains are not what they were". I'm still in disbelieve. Can you con…

Modern bikes have a greater number of gears on the cassette on the back wheel, which in turn requires a thinner chain. Thinner chains wear quicker.

It’s one of the reasons hub gears (or, for the true hipsters as the stereotype goes, a fixie) can be so completely bombproof - the lack of dérailleur gears means the chain can be made much heavier duty & lasts much, much longer.

That said, your mountain bike probably did have quite a bit of chain wear, it just hadn’t reached the point that the chain had started to skip. How many gears did it have on the cassette?

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#202

Post by bane »

bane wrote: post #63
mtdewcmu wrote: post #12

Can anyone figure out why it's so expensive? Here's a fancier-looking 26" bicycle on walmart.com for $79.97 - $249.00. [1] [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/26-Roadmaster-Granite-Peak-Men-s-...

I grew up with a slew of craptastic second hand, thrift store and K-Mart level bikes since it was all we could afford (and as I grew, the bikes grew). We used to beat the living snot out of those bikes and I don't remember any of them costing more than $150 new and they either never broke or were easy to repair. I would expect to pay no more than around $300 for a similar quality of bike these days. The last time I w…

Can't edit my original post, but here's a decent review of a crappy Walmart bike by a dedicated rider.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3vI2bYhCrk

For the record, I'm probably a slow beginner leisure rider on beginner trails, I probably wouldn't be doing even half of the things in the video so I wouldn't be very alarmed.

He has some other tests of the bikes and what kind of realistic destruction these kinds of bikes can endure.

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#203

Post by aluhut »

exDM69 wrote: post #173
aluhut wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have question for you. Before my actual bike, I had a mountain bike for something around 15years. I never changed or did anything to the chain. It was perfect. Now I bought a new one. After 2 years I went to the shop to have it checked. They had to change the chain. When I told them my story with the old bike they told me: "that's how it is today. Chains are not what they were". I'm still in disbelieve. Can you con…

Chains might not be what they used to be but the multi-geared sprockets with tight tolerances definitely aren't. It's cheaper to change the chains sooner than to wait until they wear out your sprockets badly enough that you can't fit a new chain on it and need to change both. 2 years of life out of chains sounds reasonable to me if you drive a lot . Exposure to dirt, salt (from de-icing), moisture, etc can shorten th…

I'm up to 900km (559miles) per year again. It this "a lot"?

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#204

Post by taeric »

ghaff wrote: post #198
taeric wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to this, don't ignore survivor bias. It is amazing how so many things are ignored if they are normalized. An easy example, right on red. Statistically, this has been shown to be dangerous. Chance of convincing people of this... Pretty much nil.

I'm not sure anyone would dispute that there's some incremental danger to allowing right turn on red. After all, it wasn't the norm for a long time in the US. (It became widespread in the 1970s as a fuel-saving measure.) Similarly, we'd certainly be safer with lower speed limits. But we collectively make tradeoffs which may even be informed by some level of data.

To that end, I agree that rhetoric that many "bargain" and "thrown together" bikes are "death traps" does little to help the conversation.

That is, I would expect that quality bikes are safer. I still expect many did just fine on them. (Myself included.)

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#205

Post by castratikron »

david-given wrote: post #190
johnny99 wrote: post #119

I used to be a bike mechanic, and have gotten to work 90% by bicycle for the past two decades, so I'll take a stab at some of the questions: - Belt drives are great. They're sturdier than chains, cleaner, and something I love, quieter. The angle of the belt doesn't change, the way a chain does, which means you can add a chain guard, as this bike does. Which keeps it yet cleaner. You can ride to work without worrying…

My elder brother used to build bicycles out of bits he pulled out of a river. Like, literally. He once built a bicycle that was so awful that it lasted him a complete undergraduate session at university, then a complete postgraduate session at a different university, and then I got it and it lasted me a complete (four-year) undergraduate session at a third university, and didn't get stolen once . I only managed to ge…

Back in college I got rid of my old bike by just leaving it unlocked outside. It was gone in a few days.

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#206

Post by bane »

SwellJoe wrote: post #183
slewis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were expensive bikes back then too. There are cheap bikes now. It depends where you look.

The cheap bikes are much cheaper today (in terms of build quality, though there are some that are, inflation-adjusted, lower priced than the cheapest bikes when I was a kid). I mostly had cheap bikes as a kid, and they held up really well. The quality was lower than that of a "good" bike, but not remarkably so. My first two bikes, a Huffy (from K Mart) and a Ross Piranha (from Toys R Us) had Chromoly frames and forks…

Maybe that's it? Maybe the shitty bikes I remember from my youth were actually just better than the equivalently priced bikes of today?

I sold my last bike for $50 after a decade of really hard city and trail riding, even taking a couple dives off the edge of a 20 foot fall and getting in a minor car accident.

That owner kept it for another decade and outside of normal part wear and repair, used it well for some pretty hardcore trail biking. It's now on at least it's 3rd owner and last I heard was going strong.

I bought that bike new in the late '80s for no more than $200 IIR, but the story of the bike sounds more like what I hear from modern $2k-$3k bikes...except without most of the fuss.

I feel like the market has really bifurcated into two segments:

a) what I'm willing to pay, but not made well

b) more than I'm willing to pay, and offers more performance than I'd ever conceivably use

I, and I'm sure many consumers, really would like some kind of middle ground.

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#207

Post by valueprop »

abrax3141 wrote: post #159
factorialboy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Amsterdam, you can either buy a cheap Chinese made bike which breaks down often or an expensive but reliable Dutch bike. Needless to say, both are likely to get stolen within the first six months. ;-)

Why are bikes still getting stolen? So many bikes are stolen that you'd think the market for stolen bikes, and parts, which can't be THAT huge, would be saturated.

There's a demand, so there's a market. The problem is other people buy stolen bikes. I would also call those thieves, even if they don't do the stealing by themselves. As long as one buys something without original papers, they support the guys who do the stealing itself.

PS: 2 of my bikes were stolen.

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#208

Post by nrjdhsbsid »

ayuvar wrote: post #194
nrjdhsbsid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chains are great if you drive a car to 125k miles and junk it, but I've recently started preferring belts since I try to make mine last 200. Eventually the chain tensioners wear out and changing a chain is enough work that I usually scrap the car at that point. Belts are much easier to change, and perhaps more importantly, inspect.

Not to mention that a lot of chain-drive cars often choose cheaper or substandard materials for chain guides. You end up with a choice between sounding like it's broken and having to spend a good chunk of a weekend dismantling it.

I've driven a lot of cars beyond that point where the chain guides don't exist... The sounds of a chain sloshing around are unmistakable :). If you're lucky it will skip a few teeth one day and give you a chance to fix it.

Unlucky, it skips a bunch of teeth and bends all the exhaust valves. I managed to salvage one of those too by driving around at high rpm until the valves had...Hammered themselves mostly straight again. Wouldn't recommend, usually you'll get an iffy cylinder or two after that that mysteriously only fire above 2000 rpm

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#209

Post by pja »

kyberias wrote: post #71
brndnmtthws wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of your braking 'power' comes from the front brake. Under hard braking in ideal conditions, this is closer to 100%. You can safely remove the rear brake from most bikes. This is a common misconception [1]. The same is true for motorcycles. [1]: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brakturn.html

That link doesn't provide any explanation why front wheel breaking is superior. Only states that it is superior. Why is it?

It’s a consequence of the geometry of a pushbike: The centre of gravity of bike + rider is above the point about which the bike will rotate when braking (The front axle). This means that any braking load will put a torque on the bike that pushes down on the front wheel & lifts the back wheel up. This places a limit on how hard you can brake with the rear brake, i.e. the point at which the upward torque reduces the friction between the rear wheel and the road so that no greater braking force can be applied - at this point the wheel locks & just skids along the road surface.

When you use the front brake, you can brake harder because this torque is pushing the front wheel into the ground. Instead, the limit on front wheel braking is the torque required to toss the rider over the handlebars. This is a function of their weight & how far back behind the saddle they can get their backsides:)

(This second limit means that a car can significantly outbrake a cyclist. Bicycles need more stopping distance than cars do if they need to carry out an emergency stop.)

Re: Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA

#210

Post by wiredfool »

aluhut wrote: post #203
exDM69 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chains might not be what they used to be but the multi-geared sprockets with tight tolerances definitely aren't. It's cheaper to change the chains sooner than to wait until they wear out your sprockets badly enough that you can't fit a new chain on it and need to change both. 2 years of life out of chains sounds reasonable to me if you drive a lot . Exposure to dirt, salt (from de-icing), moisture, etc can shorten th…

I'm up to 900km (559miles) per year again. It this "a lot"?

I look to replace chains at about 1-2k miles in winter, or 2k+ in the summer. Ymmv.

Honestly, unless you're on a 11sp, chains are cheap compared to any of the other parts.

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