As a car design enthusiast, I can’t fathom justifying the current road & dirt trend even further from triples to 1x systems- literally moving weight from the middle of the bikes to the back. Insane. And creating a bunch of non-straight chainline friction? Idiotic. But idiots can’t work two shifters at once and tend to have more money than sense.
As a non-racer, I really don’t get any justification for more than seven cogs in the back, regardless of if you’ve a 2x or a 3x front.
I do really love 32mm tires. Anyone who thinks they’re too big probably has spectacularly smooth roads. I sorta envy you folks, but I think I might eventually find riding in your town daily to be a bit boring from what I’m used to.
I have a bike with one of Tektro’s first hydraulic disc systems from c.2010 (cheap, early tech) and one with a 105 rs550 hydraulic disc system from 2016 (evolved, not-cheap). Not much difference in performance between them, and neither are better than a well set up rim brake with KS salmon pads on alloy rims on sunny days. Disc brake screech on rainy days? No thanks. Salty winter days- rim brakes win by a long shot due to how salt packs into disc pads and renders them useless after a couple weeks of daily use.
I won’t further waste bandwidth elaborating on cloth & plastic in lieu of metal tubing for frames.
I’m pretty much a Rivendell customer with a Kona budget.
———
People who don’t bike much more than fifty miles a year, two years out of every twenty are the customers that bike shops sell most new bikes to.
Disc brakes, thru axles, motorcycle tires, seventeen cog rears, and dropper posts are how you sell someone a road bike that keeps up with what the Jones’ have strapped to the roof of their Mercedes in 2020.
It’s these sort of people that have kept the cycling industry afloat through the decades and made a bunch of nearly NOS frames from the 70s-80s available for me to put cartridge BB and fresh wheels on to hammer the heck out of.
I feel bad for people who’ll be in the used bike budget 20-30 years from now. They’ll be stuck with some weird tech stuff that’ll have room for real world tires but no mounts for fenders.
Last edited by hsuBM; 10-10-20 at 06:37 PM.