mynameuk

i'm still pretty new to commuting and i haven't been through a winter yet (still waiting for autumn to arrive) i always read post about bad weather bikes as people second bikes and was wondering the reasons behind having one. is it more about set up, tyres and so on. or is it about not wanting to get a more expensive bike ruined in the bad weather?

just curious especially as im looking to buy a better bike and am wondering if i should hang on to my current one as a back up/bad weather bike.

LesterOfPuppets

I'd mainly consider how much replacement Cassettes and chains cost. If you get a new bike with fancy $150-300 cassettes and $80 chains then definitely keep the old one around.

If your new one takes $40 cassettes and $15 chains then it's up to you. That's not to expensive to replace.

Of course, extra bikes are always nice.

Sixty Fiver

Our winters rate a dedicated bicycle... my winter bike has an internal gear hub and studded tyres which makes for a reliable low maintainence system and a bicycle that is very stable on the worst of roads.

SlimRider

Hi Mynameuk!

Of course, nobody wants to expose their best bike to the worse weather. That's especially so, if they only have one great bike. However, with two bikes, usually the older bike gets assigned all of the winter duties, while the newer bicycle gets taken out of storage, somewhere around Spring time.

So yes, by all means...Hang on to your older bicycle for all of the less than pleasant environmental challenges, that mother nature has in store for you. Your older bicycle has many more days of service that it can serve you. Just be thankful that you are fortunate enough to have two bicycles, instead of only one.

Happy Trails....

- Slim

Juha

Like 65er, I have a dedicated commuting bike for winter, with studded tyres permanently on. This gives me the possibility to err on the safe side in the morning. If it's been below freezing the night before and I suspect black ice, it's easy to grab the bike with studded tyres. Later in winter, I put the summer tyred bikes in storage and use winter bike exclusively.

MichaelW

If you have storage space, a 2nd bike is useful as a backup when your primary bike is being fixed.
Winter bikes need room for winter tyres and fenders which are suitable for your particular winter.
I have one bike for everyday use, summer or winter but switch to studded tyres during icy weeks.

Seattle Forrest

Here in the Pacific Northwet, it doesn't snow very often where most people live. Instead, we get a rainy season. As Lester pointed out, the slop is pretty hard on drive trains - and also on rims (unless you have disc brakes). You wind up with a lot of sand and grit and all sorts of nastiness in the chain, grinding the cassette down, and when you use the brakes, it eats into the rims. So, a lot of us would rather wear down our old bike than the new, fancy one we (probably) just (or more recently) spent money on.

Plus it gives you an excuse to have a second bike. For a lot of people, it winds up being that your new beauty is your fair weather bike, and your older one gets rain duty.

fietsbob

I'm Right near the coast, this spring I snapped up a Bike friday with disc brakes
and an IG hub, hub dynamo light, I just fitted a wired front, battery rear.

Low mounted the lights, so when it gets Xtra-nasty, i get out the rain cape.
so higher light placement would be under the cape.

still have my older setup an 80s mtb, with studded tires, and drum brakes.
it gets used when the roads ice up.

it does that occasionally, eastern inland air mass pushed out the Columbia valley.

pwdeegan

i'd hold onto the bike for a back-up. weather not withstanding, it's always good in case one bike is down for repairs.

in my own case, i use one bike all year for every weather and ride. it's a joy to ride, and so i do. winter? change tyres to winter tyres if necessary (Nokians, 10 minutes); keep drivetrain clean and lubed; make sure fenders are OK. summer time? sometimes i take the fenders off, put on the sportier 28mm tyres. i could ride one of my back-up bikes, but they're not as fun or dialed-in. better to make my ride as perfect as possible.

when the weather and time finally kill the frame, it'll be time to get a new one (i.e., years from now). i can live with that.

pwdeegan

like it's doing right now! already had light snow fall at 600' this morning in EUG (about 8AM). none of it stuck. forecast this evening is a snow level at 1000'. time to bring your old and steady MTB out!

fietsbob

from china poster Q: does Hong Kong or Hainan ever see snow,
given its tropical latitude?
I realize places like Harbin, are a long ways north. and Do .

Andy_K 

I started commuting on a $300 GT Timberline, and when I bought my Kona Jake the following year I decided to keep the Timberline as my winter bike so I could keep my Jake nice and clean. Then I took up cyclocross racing, wherein after 45 minutes my "nice, shiny, clean bike" ends up looking like this:



(No, that's not a Beef Gravy Brown Cross Check.)

So I kind of lost the "nice bike" excuse. Still, I've found that winter riding does create more frequent times when extensive maintenance is required (overhauling hubs, headset and bottom bracket), and even doing the work myself that often takes the bike out of action for a couple of days. So I still need a second bike.

One thing I've found, however, is that if your "nice" bike is significantly more pleasant to ride than your "winter" bike then you are likely to start hating to ride the winter bike (even if it was fine before) and the "n+1" syndrome becomes acute. My GT Timberline didn't stay long. Ideally, every bike you own needs to be the most fun bike to ride in whatever conditions you use it for. So if you're going to have a winter bike, look for something that's more fun to ride in winter than your fair-weather bike. Alternatively, you can get a nice bike that is fun to ride in all conditions and can handle winter duty and keep a beater for maintenance days. This is yet another reason to buy a cyclocross bike.

Steely Dan

for year round bike commuting in a city like chicago, two bikes are better than one. sure, i could have a single jack-of-all-trades, do-everything bike, but no one bike excells at everything. lightweight fast bikes often make reliability/suitability compromises when everything is optimized for speed, and super-reliable/can-handle-all-conditions bikes often make speed compromises when everything is optimized for reliability/foul-weather suitability. therefor, i have a nice lightweight and super-fast skinny-tire road bike that is an absolute joy to ride when the weather cooperates, and then i have a IGH/disc-brake hybrid decked out with full fenders and wider tires/studded tires (depending on season) that can get me to work and back safely and reliably when the weather doesn't cooperate.

sure, the foul weather bike is a bit slower than my road bike, but when it's rainy/icy/snowy/etc. safety becomes a bigger concern for me than flat out speed.

neil

I have two bikes, one for summer, one for winter. They're both decently mid-range bikes, but one is a newer road touring bike and the other is an older, rigid, mountain bike.

Both are up to inclement weather, outfitted with fenders, and I don't worry about riding in rain on the newer bike. But the snow is another matter. Winter roads are a lot more like biking offroad, so the MTB seems appropriate. Having two bikes also means that I can keep the studded tire on the MTB, and not worry about changing every season. The sand and salt also age the bike faster, and I'd rather keep riding an old bike until the wheels come off than have to replace a single ride more often.

Some people also prefer a single speed or IGH for winter because of easier maintenance, while a derailleur bike offers more possible ratios for any given price point. Because I didn't purpose-buy a winter bike, I have derailleurs on both and haven't had any difficulty with it.

mynameuk

hi, i live in the south very close to hong kong. winter temp is about 10 to 12 degrees celcius on average. last year it got down to 5 i receall so no snow, its not really that cold but because it is usually so hot you convince yourself that its cold

our bad weather is tropical rain and typhoons so i need a bike set up for really heavy rain. right now i have fenders that keep me clean enough to be respectable at work but my v brakes are not great. i can wear through the pad quite significantly in a single ride so i think disk brakes are the way to go for me.

tsl

Speak for yourself, sir. Unless of course you think I'm a "nobody".

My best bike is my commuter. It has to be since I'm car-free. It needs to be 100% dependable and reliable in all conditions and all four seasons. It's the bike that gets ridden most often, for the most hours, and for the most miles of all my bikes. My commuter is the only bike I own that I bought new, and I bought it specifically with the intent to use it for its designed purpose--all conditions commuting. My other bikes are playthings. And I bought them all second-hand.

It had only around 1,000 miles on it when the studs first went on and we went to work in the slush. Thirteen-thousand miles later, we're entering our fifth winter. It's still mistaken sometimes for showroom new. Nothing has disintegrated, fallen off, melted, or turned to excrement--all those things some people would have you believe happens when you ride a bike anytime it's not a sunny summer day. I've replaced only normal wear and tear items--cables, brake pads, chains, cassette.

So if you like to ride a decent bike, here's the truth--you don't have to settle for second best in the winter.

No matter what somebody would have you think.

LesterOfPuppets

I hope you're not running Campy SR 11 on it Them cassettes and chains are expensive!

JanMM

Foul weather or not, one must always have a Backup Bike.

Sixty Fiver

tsl and I have a fair bit in common in that we commute / ride daily and don't think that a person has to ride a second rate bike just because the weather and conditions suck... winter is too long here to ride a crappy bike.

This does not mean you have to spend a fortune on any bicycle but if a bike is going to be subjected to harsher conditions it may very well need to be the nicer bicycle.

My new winter bike is not really new as I used an NOS frame and the wheelset from my old winter bike which was retired from winter duty to serve me as a commuter / trekking / utility bike through the 6 nicer months of the year.

I use two bikes in the winter... both are mid range Norco models and the ice / apocalypse bike has an internal gear hub and studded tyres while the extra bike is remarkably stable without studs and is derailleur geared which actually lets this heavier bike roll out a little faster and it is capable of handling things like grocery shopping without needing a trailer.

The extra bike runs slicks in the summer and I also have a studded tyre mounted on it's own wheel that I can swap in and out as I need it.

The benefit of the IGH is that it will run smoothly at temperatures < -40C as it uses synthetic oil as a lubricant and does not lose efficiency.



The derailleur drive on my extrabike has been very reliable in all but the coldest of weather but did get a little skippy when I was riding at -46C...

LesterOfPuppets

I like nice bikes in crap weather too. I ride my Pinarello in the rain all the time! Once in a while even in the snow. Besides the sunny day tubulars, I have relatively cheap wheels (Mavic CXP22 laced to 2300 hubs) on it and run an 8-speed cassette that's shifted with DT friction shifters, so consumables are quite inexpensive.

SlimRider

Well TSL...

I don't mean this to sound too harsh or offensive, but you're different!

You're a minority!

- Slim

PS.

I will reluctantly admit that you TSL, are indeed someone who really counts in my book!

matimeo

+1 cyclocross year round and its all good.

Sixty Fiver

Cyclocross bikes are great all rounders and by location would assume you already run fenders... know a few folks use use CX bikes for winter as they can handle studded tyres which are pretty much essential here.

If I lived in Portland year round I could get by with one bicycle and might just keep a spare front wheel with a studded tyre handy for those rare days the roads get icy.

Andy_K 

The problem with having a cyclocross bike around here is that when the rainy season starts I want to have the fenders off of my CX bike so I can race it. This was the start of a line of reasoning that ended up with three CX bikes in my garage.

Easy Peasy

I use my MTB commuter on bad weather days because I like the stability of its wider slicks on wet roads and times when the MUP is strewn with debris from storms. It also has a more aero position than my hybrid, so I can go faster and keep my head down in a driving storm.