So happy to see this featured here! Had been tinkering with bikes a long time before finding Sheldon’s site, but when I did I was dumbstruck by the amount of insight. And to top that, what a person he was. RIP
Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#42I learned wheel building many years ago from Sheldon's website and that lead to many great memories fixing other racer's wheels around camp fires in my 20s. A fantastic resource!
Similar story. As a student I bought an old bike and restored it thanks to lots of info I found from Sheldon. And building a wheel was such a fun but weird experience. Part mechanics, part art.
I ended up writing my thesis on bicycle wheels after this. Or, it's a thesis on optimization algorithms, but I managed to play around with optimizing wheels as the "real world application". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410813
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#43Used to be my worship place along with the crazyguyonabike and Ken Kifer
Ken Kifer wrote a bunch of amazing bicycle content! Here's a mirror of his pages: https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#44A web site as old as the internet, and still relevant.
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#45R.I.P. Sheldon https://www.wired.com/2008/02/sheldon-brown-w/
Ah that’s the reason why reading several articles on the site it felt out of date. For example the website states “Disc brakes have become increasingly popular on mountain bikes and are gaining some popularity for other bicycles” whereas in my experience disc brakes are popular for all kinds of bicycles.
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#46Random tidbit, his daughter is a researcher/mathematician at OpenAI.
...and his widow, Harriet Fell, is a CS Professor (emerita) at Northeastern[0], and an accomplished cyclist who completed Paris-Brest-Paris (a 1200km ride and to qualify you have to complete 200km, 300km, 400km, and 600km rides in the 8 months leading up to it.) 0: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell/
I TA’ed for Harriet, she’s awesome!
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#47R.I.P. Sheldon https://www.wired.com/2008/02/sheldon-brown-w/
I’m a little surprised to learn that Jobst Brandt outlived Sheldon Brown. He was 9 years older than him and Brown died at 63.
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#48I lost my "Clear Creek Bike Book" in the 1980's but eventually Sheldon made me not miss it at all.
It's not as comprehensive, and more corporate than Sheldon's site, but I currently love Park Tool's youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@parktool). They shamelessly mention their tools, but they frequently give alternatives like, you can get this park tool for pushing your disc brake pads back into place, or you can just use a plastic tire tool.
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#49There is (was?) a bike shop in Pittsburgh, Kraynick's Bike Shop [1], where you could bring your bike and use their tools. It was nice, and I appreciate the DIY ethics and generosity. [1] https://kraynicksbikeshop.weebly.com/
I get the sense that there are a good number of these around the world. There's one I go to Melbourne sometimes, it's awesome.
Re: Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
#50I always loved this quote from here: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/stuck-seatposts.html > To update an old saying, 28 grams of prevention are worth 454 grams of cure.
I have a vague recollection of someone using a cheap old saddle and a rubber mallet to unstick a seat post.
Friends don’t let friends put aluminum posts in steel frames. Especially if those friends ride in the rain instead of wussing out and calling for someone to pick them up.