Hi!
I've posted this in "technical" before realising that there was SS/Fixie forum. I've got an old Raleigh Boulder (don't laugh) MTB lying about. The gears are knackerd, but it was always a decent enough bike. I'm only going to use it on the flat(ish) going to the local shops and I thought that I might do away with the gears.
Being impecunious at the moment I thought about just leaving the chain on the middle chainring and using a kit to convert the rear hub to a single speed. The bike has horizontal drops, so I was wondering if I could just shorten the chain and adjust the rear wheel placement to fine tune the tension on the chain, thus dispensing with a jockey wheel (?) tensioner. I'm sure I'm being naive here, but most of the bikes I rode as a kid had no gears and no tensioner, do you actually need one with horizontal drops?
PS, Apologies to anyone who read this thinking that I'd found a cheap way to convert a multi-speed.
I've posted this in "technical" before realising that there was SS/Fixie forum. I've got an old Raleigh Boulder (don't laugh) MTB lying about. The gears are knackerd, but it was always a decent enough bike. I'm only going to use it on the flat(ish) going to the local shops and I thought that I might do away with the gears.
Being impecunious at the moment I thought about just leaving the chain on the middle chainring and using a kit to convert the rear hub to a single speed. The bike has horizontal drops, so I was wondering if I could just shorten the chain and adjust the rear wheel placement to fine tune the tension on the chain, thus dispensing with a jockey wheel (?) tensioner. I'm sure I'm being naive here, but most of the bikes I rode as a kid had no gears and no tensioner, do you actually need one with horizontal drops?
PS, Apologies to anyone who read this thinking that I'd found a cheap way to convert a multi-speed.