Just a few rambling thoughts on an idle Wednesday when I've not got much else to do...
I came back to cycling a couple of years ago, rebuilt my old road bike and built up a new (old) tourer, but I keep thinking on and off about getting a new road bike and pondering what I'd buy.
But I'm an old-fashioned cyclist and I think road bikes (for general pleasure cycling, not competition) peaked with good steel frames - for various reasons, but mainly ride comfort, robustness and ease of maintenance.
I ride with other people a lot, and my bikes are by far the oldest in our group rides, and I keep looking at other people's bikes and being actually quite impressed by modern technology - and wondering would I like a similar bike.
But then, we ride vaguely off road (reasonably surfaced canal towpath, earth-surface converted railway line, etc), and companions on aluminium/carbon road bikes are practically rattling their teeth out while I'm lovely and comfy on my nice old 531 frames.
One cycling friend has a seriously good aluminium CX bike, carefully chosen for his variety of rides, and it's genuinely very nice (and very possibly the kind I'd go for if I were new to bikes). But it seems to me that it fills the exact same slot as a traditional steel tourer - which, depending on tyres, made perfect gravel bikes before gravel had even been invented as a marketing concept. And it cost ten times the price of my home-built steel tourer.
Then there's indexed shifting with potentially dozens of gears, and I can happily acknowledge that I'm impressed by the technology and the convenience. I have a 2nd-hand MTB with indexed shifting, and it is good - when I'm bouncing around lumpy ground or through mudbaths, I don't want to take my hand off the bars.
But for a road bike? I've got 3x6 gearing on my tourer (2x6 on my other road bike), and a typical ride uses maybe four out of the 18 combinations - and downtube friction shifters (especially combined with a SunTour Vx derailleur) are instinctive, quick and smoorth.
And the complexity of those ever-swelling brifter monstrosities? And the price? Traditional brake levers are a perfection in simplicity, and they're cheap and easy to adjust and maintain. Couple them with the adjustable mechanical advantage of cantilever brakes (with wire yokes, not those horrible semi-rigid things), and to me that's a combination that has never been significantly bettered (not when you also consider cost, maintainability, etc).
And so, every few months, I come back to wanting to treat myself to a new road bike (which would be my first actual new one in more than 30 years)... but there are no new road bikes that fit the bill better than my old ones.
(Possibly an exert from my perhaps forthcoming "Pointless ramblings of an old cyclist" memoir
)
I came back to cycling a couple of years ago, rebuilt my old road bike and built up a new (old) tourer, but I keep thinking on and off about getting a new road bike and pondering what I'd buy.
But I'm an old-fashioned cyclist and I think road bikes (for general pleasure cycling, not competition) peaked with good steel frames - for various reasons, but mainly ride comfort, robustness and ease of maintenance.
I ride with other people a lot, and my bikes are by far the oldest in our group rides, and I keep looking at other people's bikes and being actually quite impressed by modern technology - and wondering would I like a similar bike.
But then, we ride vaguely off road (reasonably surfaced canal towpath, earth-surface converted railway line, etc), and companions on aluminium/carbon road bikes are practically rattling their teeth out while I'm lovely and comfy on my nice old 531 frames.
One cycling friend has a seriously good aluminium CX bike, carefully chosen for his variety of rides, and it's genuinely very nice (and very possibly the kind I'd go for if I were new to bikes). But it seems to me that it fills the exact same slot as a traditional steel tourer - which, depending on tyres, made perfect gravel bikes before gravel had even been invented as a marketing concept. And it cost ten times the price of my home-built steel tourer.
Then there's indexed shifting with potentially dozens of gears, and I can happily acknowledge that I'm impressed by the technology and the convenience. I have a 2nd-hand MTB with indexed shifting, and it is good - when I'm bouncing around lumpy ground or through mudbaths, I don't want to take my hand off the bars.
But for a road bike? I've got 3x6 gearing on my tourer (2x6 on my other road bike), and a typical ride uses maybe four out of the 18 combinations - and downtube friction shifters (especially combined with a SunTour Vx derailleur) are instinctive, quick and smoorth.
And the complexity of those ever-swelling brifter monstrosities? And the price? Traditional brake levers are a perfection in simplicity, and they're cheap and easy to adjust and maintain. Couple them with the adjustable mechanical advantage of cantilever brakes (with wire yokes, not those horrible semi-rigid things), and to me that's a combination that has never been significantly bettered (not when you also consider cost, maintainability, etc).
And so, every few months, I come back to wanting to treat myself to a new road bike (which would be my first actual new one in more than 30 years)... but there are no new road bikes that fit the bill better than my old ones.
(Possibly an exert from my perhaps forthcoming "Pointless ramblings of an old cyclist" memoir
)
