The Flip/Flop as a Fixie

This was going to be a new experience. I’ve not ridden a fixed wheel bike since the age of four or five but that had stabilisers so doesn’t count! Task number one was to install the wheel on the bike for the first time, which is when I noticed that the Goldtec hub’s spindle is in fact a fair bit thicker than a normal 10mm rear quick-release-compatible spindle yet it has flats machined into its ends to allow it to be slotted into the frame’s 10mm drop-outs. This has a number of implications: it can be fiddly to engage the hub spindle when it is first offered up to the drop out; it’s not possible to use the DMR-type chain tugs that slot over a standard 10mm spindle and enable the use of quick-release skewers with “track end” style drop-outs; but it does allow the use of meaningfully chunky hex bolts instead. So I had to ditch my DMR chain tugs, and the Deore QR which they allow the use of, in favour of the loathsome On-One tugs that came with the frame and the hex bolts that came with the wheel. It’s no biggie – ready to roll!

The first thing I noticed was that there was nothing to notice, until I absent-mindedly stopped pedalling and my own momentum wrenched my legs unwillingly around a couple of cycles before the brain kicked in. No freewheeling up to kerbs, roots, steps, etc… I’d have to ride right at and over them, and if the pedals hit then tough! That’s not a great feature to have on a MTB, in all honesty. Neither is the need to keep pedalling when leaning into a corner – I broke my leg doing this on a racer in my teens and don’t wish to repeat the experience! Once I was out in open country, with a bit of room to manoeuvre and cruise at a steady pace, it was easy to forget that this was a fixed wheel. Spinning along on the flat or climbing a hill was no different to using a freewheel, but a big difference was to be found when letting the bike go on the downhills. Of course, you can’t stop pedalling and with a single 32/16 ratio it’s not long before things start to get a bit frantic! There are two ways to handle this, assuming that we dismiss spinning your legs so quickly that they unscrew at the hips and you end up a gibbering wreck: grab the brakes, or apply backward pressure on the pedals. I was using soooo much brake that the pads must have been screaming for mercy, so I tried the second approach. It sort of worked, and I dare say that it gets easier and more effective with practice. It’s an odd thing to want to do though. Surely downhills are the payback for having dragged yourself to the top in the first place, so quite why you’d want to expend even more energy by slowing yourself on the way down is lost on me!

I found that the backward pressure technique had but one benefit. The trails are almost universally muddy at the moment and I found that as I instinctively backed off while entering corners the slight braking force that I applied via the pedals was enough to send the rear tyre into a rather exciting controlled slide. Not a full-on skid nor a complete wash-out, but enough to set a bit of adrenaline pumping! That aside though, I found little to recommend a MTB fixie and was glad of the opportunity to flip the wheel over onto its freewheel side. One has to remember that the victimless sins of suspension and gears have already been forgone on this bike, so to do without a freewheel in addition requires much caution heaped upon caution and I found that this limits the fun potential far too much for my liking.

A freewheel is such a cheap, readily available aide that it seems almost daft to wilfully go without one. As I bimbled about the Herts countryside not really making a great deal of effort (see, that’s what singlespeeding does to you) I was trying to think of what might be the advantages of going fixed. There don’t appear to be many!

1) Track stands become very easy;
2) You don’t have to unclip from the pedals at traffic lights and junctions (see 1 above);
3) Fewer moving parts = less to go wrong (but then how many freewheels do you get through!?!);
4) You can apply braking as well as accelerative force to the pedals;
5) You can ride backwards (and, in all probability, fall off trying).

It’s not exactly a fait accompli! One can understand why couriers seem to favour fixies in a city environment, but I don’t know whether track racers do simply because an arcane UCI rule says they must or because there’s some other unseen advantage.
The wheel itself performed faultlessly, however unless I have a “road to Damascus” experience in the meantime it won’t be more than a couple of rides before the track cog is ditched in favour of a second freewheel cog.

The Flip/Flop wheel

This was a great find. The Singletrackworld classified ads forum is a lottery and sometimes you need a bit of luck, such as to log on just a matter of minutes after a juicy “For Sale” ad has been posted. Good deals go fast, it’s strictly first-come-first-served and it was my turn with this one.

The wheel in question consists of a black quick-release or bolt compatible Goldtec Track “flip/flop” hub mated to a black Mavic XM719 rim (the current equivalent of my F519s) with 32 silver DT Champion straight gauge spokes laced three-cross and including two Shimano SF-MX30 freewheel cogs with 16 & 17 teeth respectively. The seller had it built by Condor Cycles, a well known and apparently well regarded bike shop on Grays Inn Road in London, much favoured by the London bicycle courier cognoscenti. We haggled the price down to £55 and I avoided the postage cost by meeting the seller, a nice chap who’d switched to using a fabulously spendy Rohloff Speedhub, to do the deal in person. While the wheel is not exactly how I would have built it (I’d have gone for 36 black DT Competition spokes and tensioned them bit more), it was a fantastic bargain for it is in near-new condition, with hardly any wear to the braking surface of the rim, and hub & freewheel bearings as smooth as new. The hub alone would have cost more new than I paid for the entire wheel!

Since I bought it back in the autumn the flip/flop wheel has sat in my garage doing nothing, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. Back in August I was thinking of using such a wheel to set up the Inbred as a “doublespeed” by carrying two freewheel cogs with different numbers of teeth, which is what the previous owner had used the wheel for. I will copy this at some point, but initially I’ve decided to remove the 17 tooth freewheel and replace it with a 16 tooth fixed cog.

“A fixed wheel? On a mountain bike?” I hear you cry, “What madness is this!”

Well I read recently, on some website or other, a fixie aficionado stating categorically that everyone needs to try a fixed wheel bike at some time or other or they won’t know what they’re missing. It’s got to be worth a go!

There are several reasons why I’ve been slow to do anything with the flip/flop wheel. Firstly, I couldn’t find a cheap source of a compatible, reasonable quality, threaded “track” cog. This was made more difficult because I didn’t really know what to look for, nor where to find it. Fixed wheels, where the sprocket is screwed directly onto the hub body, seem to be the preserve of cycle couriers and track racers (hence the name “track cog”) and not knowing anyone who could be remotely described as either I was searching in the dark. Certainly the niche singlespeed brand Surly, whose excellent stainless steel chain-ring and cassette cog currently adorn my singlespeed, produce equally good track cogs and lock-rings, but at £30+ they represent very poor value when one considers that a 9 speed Shimano XT cassette can be bought new for less! Eventually I took a punt on a really cheap cog on Ebay, and bought a lock-ring from the same seller for £11.90 in all, even though the item description mentioned something about a “left-hand thread”, the purpose of which I didn’t properly understand at the time.

I didn’t really know what would turn up, but there was no need to worry. The track cog is unbranded but made from thick steel, uses a regular right-hand thread and requires a 1/8” chain, which spreads the loads a bit more and suits my SRAM PC1 chain just fine. It’s also black which will allow it to sit unobtrusively to the left when not in use. The lock-ring is aluminium and also black, but unfortunately the 4-point tool required to fit and remove it has smaller pins than the tool required to remove a Shimano freewheel, and I don’t have one. You pays your money… Nevertheless, for now I can tighten it sufficiently using a pin spanner. The interesting thing about this is that it has a left-hand thread: in other words, you tighten it by screwing it the opposite way to the track cog. I had imagined that this would render it useless, but on closer inspection the Goldtec hub has a smaller, opposing thread sitting outboard of the cog threads at the ends of its body. I’d initially thought that these smaller threads were for use with cogs of 15 teeth or less, but the lock-ring screws on to them, butting up against the track cog and thus securing it firmly in place. Simple!

Then there were the tyres. Originally my singlespeed had been fitted with 2.4” WTB Mutano Raptors, a very light tyre for their size and with a tread pattern suited to hardpack but little else. Consequently they were very quick (which I liked) but tended to give up all pretence at grip in the wet or when cornering hard (which I didn’t like… repeatedly). At the time I finished building my utility wheels I found some 2.5” Syncros FLT Race tyres reduced from £35 each to just £10 that were apparently too good to resist. My reasoning was that if they did the trick then I’d buy a third tyre to fit to the flip/flop wheel, but unfortunately they proved to be a duff purchase. While being very big and giving extraordinary cornering grip they turned out to have the worst rolling resistance that I’ve ever experienced and were also heavy. So they had to go, and fortunately a foolish Ebay punter paid me more for them covered in mud than I had paid when I bought them new, or indeed more than he could have paid if he’d shopped around! As long as he’s happy, the dopey sap…! I replaced the unloved Syncros tyres by returning from whence I had come, to WTB, but this time I was trying their 2.5” Weirwolf Race. These had got a glowing write-up in Singletrack’s mega tyre test last year and were now on offer for £15 each. They miraculously combine most of the speed of the old Mutano Raptors with most of the grip of the Syncros FLTs thanks to soft compound DNA rubber, all for a reasonable weight: exactly what I was after, so after just a couple of rides on these I bought a third Weirwolf and have just finished building up the flip/flop wheel. Test ride time!

Utility Wheels @ 6 months

It’s been a good six months since I started my wheel building project. The utility wheels, currently installed on my On-One Inbred singlespeed (the cheapie version with track ends, made from “DN6” gas pipe), have given five months of service through an autumn and half a traditional English winter. How are they coping?

Well, this could be a very short post because they have been faultless. In fact so much so that I no longer even think about the fact that I’m riding on my very own hand-built wheels. In spite of the hours of tender loving care that brought them into the world, and the admiring glances that I was forever giving them when new, now I just… I can hardly believe I’m writing this, but… yes, I fear that inadvertently I may have begun taking them for granted!

That’s potentially a good thing – possibly the best thing that could have happened, because it implies that I have total faith in the wheels. But is this misplaced? Such blasé confidence is only justified if you know for a fact that the wheels have been correctly built. Assuming that the wheels are undamaged in any way, you can objectively establish this with three simple checks: the wheel is radially and laterally true; it is centrally dished; the spokes are tight and their tension is even throughout. These three indicators are quickly and easily measured, before, during and after every ride if you wish (I don’t), and if you can give all three the thumbs up then you’re hot to trot!

So, there’s not a great deal else to say about the wheels. The Inbred itself has benefited from Pace RC31 carbon forks up front to replace the hated On-One Superlight steel wrist-breakers that Inbreds come fitted with as standard, and the wheels now sport huge new boots in the shape of WTB’s Weirwolf 2.5”, a great all-rounder.

Coming up…

It’s time to revive the Diary, I think! Six months have passed since my wheel building quest began and since my last post back in August 2006 I’ve been up to a few other things that have kept the wheel building and blogging on hold.

The pair of wheels that I built back in the summer, the all-purpose “utility” set consisting of Mavic F519 rims, Shimano XT disc hubs and DT Competition spokes, is still going strong and I’ll provide a medium term report on them next week.

I’ve not yet got around to building the second set, the “budget” set for Mrs P’s bike consisting of Sun CR18 rims, Shimano XT disc hubs and DT Competition spokes. This is principally because I haven’t been bothered enough but they wouldn’t have been used until this coming spring in any case. Mrs P is not exactly a keen rider and the only time she’d go out on a bike was if it wasn’t muddy or raining and if we could bring the kids along for the ride too! Our youngest won’t be a year old until April, so he’s only been able to ride in a kiddie seat for a couple of months or so. However with spring only another couple of months away and with about £125 worth of wheels to sell when I get the new ones built – that’s £125 to spend on some new project – it’s high time they were assembled! Look out for updates over the next few weeks.

One project that was but the germ of an idea back in August has come to fruition unexpectedly quickly: that being a flip/flop rear wheel for use on the singlespeed. Ideally I would liked to have built it myself, I was fortunate enough to spot such a wheel being sold second hand in the STW classifieds which fitted my own specification almost exactly – a Goldtec flip/flop hub mated to a Mavic XM719 rim with DT Champion spokes and including 16 & 17 tooth freewheels, all for £55. The cost of the individual parts alone is about £140 and the shop that built it would probably have added at least another £20 for putting them all together! I’ve not even test-ridden it yet, and I’ll expand on what I’m going to do with this wheel in a future post.

Also still on my “to do” list is the re-tensioning of my lightweight Hope/XC717 wheels that were so badly built by Chain Reaction, and the dismantling of my very first wheel building attempt, a Hope/X221 mish-mash. My aim is to get all this done before spring is sprung.