Old 11-17-21, 04:30 PM
  #19  
djb
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Montreal Canada
Posts: 13,191
Mentioned: 33 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 2731 Post(s)
Liked 952 Times in 783 Posts
another "spend the money" on nice rolling tires. I've spent a lot of time on Schwalbe Supremes, so am biased towards them due to my extremely good experience with them. Good flat protection, but also a nice flexible sidewall that gives a really nice feel to your ride, and has a fast rolling main part of tire contact patch. More comfortable and faster than "tougher, stiff sidewall tires" and I personally have gotten hooked on wider tires-for the comfort and absolutely not being slower than some narrower tires.

as someone else also mentioned, check out your hubs, if the cups and cones are in good shape, a regreasing and proper cone adjustment can make them faster.

another big factor for overall daily speed is keeping your load to a lot less "sailboat effect" of panniers sticking out into the wind. Yes, narrow seatpacks, frame bags, or simply small narrower rear panniers, can and will make a real difference to being more efficient if you are riding light and therefore your speeds are higher. Tight jerseys, etc all too help a bit, so simply avoiding giant panniers that act like a sail will really help with average speed. Less weight on bike too.

so really, all this stuff can add up and make your bikes more efficient at 20, 25kph, which is where we most often are riding at on a lighter touring bike.

heck, just better tires and frame bags etc will make a real difference, forget about looking at your hubs (but they still could be made more efficient with some good regreasing and adjusting, often hubs are tight, even new)
also, a tighter cassette can make things more efficient also, by keeping better cadence, providing you still have sufficient low gears for climbing easily for your legs and not lugging down.
djb is offline