Before we get going with this issue of Back From The Dead, Dieter has been inventing. Maybe you’d like to have a guess at what it is?
Hmm…ponder that and read on!
If you read my second hand bike buyer’s guide a few months ago you may have noticed that I have something of an affinity for bikes of a certain 90’s vintage, steel machines with skinny tubes and wild paint jobs. Bikes that aren’t a million miles away geometry and component wise to what the industry is relentlessly pushing as a totally new innovation and the bike you just can’t do without in 2022: a Gravel Bike!
Well it was until recently – the transformation of gravel bikes from half touring, half cyclocross, half XC bike* into refined, sleek and exciting looking bikes that are great fun to ride and infinitely marketable to all echelons of cycling is nothing short of remarkable.
Latest Singletrack Merch
Buying and wearing our sustainable merch is another great way to support Singletrack
*(I know the maths doesn’t add up but we’re talking about drop bars on mountain bike, oops, sorry, gravel trails here, nothing about it makes sense!)
But we should have faith! If any industry can be relied upon to create a totally new product to sell you that’s kind of the same as the product they already sell you but wrapped up in a slightly different package/head angle it’s the cycling industry…
Back in 2008ish I bought a Marin Toscana. I was sick of commuting on my dirt jump bike and kept seeing this Marin hung up in the shop and the more I looked at it the more it seemed like the perfect commuting machine for me. It was marketed as a cyclocross bike (denoted by the CX next to the Toscana label) but it had a much more upright, comfortable riding position than a true cross bike and it was disc equipped, with mountain bike spaced dropouts so I would have cross compatibility with my boxes and boxes of MTB spares.
As it happens as far as commuting goes I’m a mountain biker through and through, I rode the Toscana for a while but it just wasn’t as much fun not being able to just nip down that stair set or jump that little gap or grass bank, etc, etc..
Plus in those carefree days of no responsibilities, having to go home and swap bikes after work before going to the trails was just an extra layer of complication that I didn’t need. So eventually the Toscana was donated to my dad and now spends its days waiting patiently for its yearly trips up and down the Middlewood Way.
But, and I’ve kind of lost my point again as I’m one to do, but we’ll circle back to it later, that Marin was for all intents and purposes a Gravel Bike. The term didn’t exist yet and maybe Marin missed a trick by not inventing it themselves but it was 100% a proto gravel bike. Fat tyres, discs, rack and mudguard mounts (admittedly without as many zits in every tube as modern gravel bikes and so, aesthetically, miles ahead of modern gravel bikes…) in fact it seems the only thing they missed was they just didn’t stick the marketing landing.
The 2008 Marin Toscana was to bikes what The Velvet Underground was to rock and roll. Exactly what everyone wanted, just ten years too early, before anyone could really comprehend what it was or why it was there…
Anyway I was talking about 90’s bikes somewhere up there and how they sort of looked like some of the more “homebrewed ” gravel bikes. Since moving to West Yorkshire and living within two minutes of work up a big steep hill my singlespeed jump bike just isn’t a suitable commuter anymore unless I want to blow through a freehub body/knee every six months singlespeed sprinting up the hill home, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving my proper mountain bike outside a shop if I need something on my way.
The Toscana would be the ideal solution to this problem. Desirability to thieves is low, after 14 years rattling around in my parents store room it’s far from looking it’s best. There is the small problem that I gave it to my dad. Not the biggest issue in the world though, if he gives me a week’s notice before he needs it for its yearly outing I can have it back to him good as new!
But the third and final issue is one of fun! It’s just no fun! They’ve just put two new speedbumps on my way down the hill in the morning, I need a bike I can get RAD on to show all those cagers queued up and down the road on the school run what they’re missing! And I can’t wheelie a road bike properly and what’s the point of riding up a hill if you’re not practicing wheelies?!
The Toscana can stay with my Dad, I need another solution.
Cue the 1991 Raleigh Peak.
This beast came in as a donation but from the moment I took it for a test ride I knew the only person buying this bike was me! It’s a bit of a barn find in absolutely amazing shape under its coat of dust and I do feel kinda bad for the way I instantly started bastardising it from its factory spec perfection. (Also to the chap that commented on the second hand buyer’s guide about the “titanium” handlebar that came on his Raleigh Peak, I’m very sorry to tell you that unless Raleigh managed to find some kind of magical magnetic titanium, that you in fact had a steel bar with a very nice sticker that says the word titanium on it!).
So after a few days of riding it with minimal spec changes, Xlite bar ends and seatpost and a vintage Flite saddle, and with encouragement from Ed at Earnshaws Cycles in Huddersfield with his balloon tyred Saracen, and the subreddit _xbiking, I decided to go whole hog on making this the ultimate comfortable commuter / my interpretation of what a gravel machine that’s still fun enough to get rowdy on!
Of course the first steps in converting any bike that’s older that 10 years into something more acceptable to modern riding standards is to do away with whatever ridiculous appendage is hanging off the front of the steerer tube holding the bars and replace it with the shortest stem/widest bar combination is available to you.
I started off with a 50mm stem and 820mm bars which felt probably even a little more ridiculous than you’re imagining. The outstretched arms from the stupidly wide bars definitely helped make up for what’s lacking in top tube length but the bike was lacking the “pop” I wanted it to have.
The solution presented itself in an old set of 4″ rise Renthal Dirt Jump bars from my trusty 16″ wheel Tiny Bike (TM) (a whole other Back From The Dead in itself). A quick switcheroo and a significant downgrade for my poor Tiny Bike(TM) and the Raleigh was riding high!
The skinny 22.2mm bars offer much more compliance (are visibly much bendier!) than the 31.8 scaffold pole that came off, and transformed the feel of the whole bike.
Further upgrades came in the form of some slick DJ/park tyres in the biggest possible size for that bouncy balloon tyre feel!
Finally the seatpost. With its 27.2mm seat tube the Peak was screaming out for a dropper post. I had an old KS 27.2 dropper with an under seat lever to actuate it, which was ok for a day or so, but under seat levers died out for a very good reason and I was soon itching to remoteify it.
This is a job I’d done before a few times and it’s always worked really well. In the past I’ve always made a dropper remote out of a front rapid-fire shift lever, and the large amount of leverage offered by the shifter coupled with the leverage offered by the long under seat lever means that even with an old grotty cable a remote dropper conversion like this often feels smoother/takes much less effort to actuate than a lot of modern posts. I wanted something different for this bike though, never mind the fact that (for now) the Peak still has a front derailleur and the corresponding shifter. Any dropper lever would have to fit around the decidedly clunky old Shimano LX STI shifter pods.
It was with this thinking that I came up with my first idea for a remote dropper on this bike. Has anyone ever made a dropper that’s activated by a bell?
I had this very fancy looking bell on my workbench, it had a nice powerful spring with a lot of lever throw, all I’d need to do would be to attatch an outer cable stop and drill it to fit a cable end!
With a small amount of drill power a SRAM lever clamp teamed with an inline cable tension adjuster makes a very neat little cable stop for the outer.
An old noodle with a couple of silicone cable protectors and a cable tie makes a secure fitting for the other end of the outer.
Drilling and tapping the dropper lever can be a bit nerve racking but a steady hand and measuring everything twice will help a lot!
To make a long story short though it was all for nothing because as soon as I had it a fitted up ready for its first test the lever bent straight away!
I even tried reinforcing the lever with a piece of steel but to no avail – I was gonna have to keep reaching down to my crotch in traffic for the forseeable!
A few weeks later I was scraping through the bottom of our second hand shifter box at the shop and I found a few broken bits of old thumb shifters that, slotted together in the right order sort of looked like a dropper lever. But not any dropper lever you’ve seen before, it looked like the kind of remote dropper lever that would have come with this bike if droppers had been available when it was new. And yes, before the pedants write in I’m fully aware there was a remote for the Hite Rite but that wasn’t a dropper post as such.
I was going to need some kind of spring to return the lever as the post’s lever didn’t quite have enough snap to deal with the friction created by the cable outer. I pulled a cheap V-brake caliper out of the scrap bin, harvested the springs and got bending!
After a bit of swearing and confusing myself by making springs backwards more times than I’d like to admit I finally had a lever ready to test.
The line that the cable runs from the lever into the cable outer is pretty shambolic but that’s remedied (maybe only temporarily) by a piece of nylon cable sleeve.
Considering it’s made out of scraps from two different shifters, a washer from a rack, one 6mm cable end with the closed end cut off and one V-brake caliper, it works remarkably well!
And just look at it: big, clunky, totally unergonomic! It couldn’t be more 90’s if it tried!
So now as I’m blasting past that unending line of frustrated, stressed out parents on the school run, trapped in their soulless cages, burning away at our earth’s rapidly dwindling resources, it takes me fractionally less effort to drop that seat nice and low to get RAD on the speedbumps!
God, I bet they’re so jealous…
And so back to the beginning, what was Dieter making? Apparently the idea came to him as he was sleeping, or thinking about sleeping.
2
Of course. Just what every bike shop needs. We can only wonder at what sort of cheese consumption results in such sleepy thoughts. The temptation to send Dieter a giant block of stilton and see what happens is strong.
Read more Back From The Dead here.
