If you’ve been paying attention or at least managing to stay awake, you know I’ve been conducting sort of a half-assed Dated Singlespeed 29er Shootout. (Though as I type that I realize I don’t need to specify “dated” because singlespeed 29ers are inherently dated.) After fitting the cheap bike with a cowhide saddle and bamboo bars, I felt I’d narrowed the gap between them considerably, which I confirmed when I got back on the expensive bike and found I wasn’t blown away by how much better it was:
I mean it was still better, but not by a lot.
But there’s more to a bike than how it rides. If you ride one-speed mountain-style bicycles, you’re familiar with the Singlespeeder’s Conundrum: how do you gear the thing so that it’s fun to ride on the trails but not ponderous to ride to the trails? To be perfectly honest, for many years I was not vexed by the Singlespeeder’s Conundrum, since I lived in the middle of Brooklyn and the nearest place to ride mountain bikes was Cunningham Park, which was like 15 miles away:
Gears or no gears, that’s a sucky ride, unless you like cars and traffic lights, so I always just drove places to go mountain biking instead. So for me there was no conundrum: I just geared the bike for the trails, and that was that.
But now, not only do I live much closer to mountain bike trails, but the ride to them is quite pleasant, and I can even get there most of the way on dirt. In fact, since moving to where I live now I almost never drive to go mountain biking, and I’ve come to find the very idea distasteful–not for smugness reasons, but because if I’ve got time to ride I’d prefer to spend all of it on a bike as opposed to spending some of it in a car. However, this does mean I ride my singlespeed mountain bike less than I once did, since if you’re going to ride to and from trails it’s nice to have gears, and if you’re the busy father of seventeen (17) children who’s got schoolbuses to meet, toilets to clean, etc., spinning your legs off on the flats just to maintain a speed of like 8mph tends to eat up a lot of riding time.
This of course raises the second-most asked question in all-cycling after “What pressure you running?,” that being…
…say it with me now:
WHAT GEAR YOU RUNNING?
Most recently that’s been a 34 up front:
And a 20 in the back:
The trails north of the city are quite hilly, so this gear a bit higher than I’d prefer, but it makes getting there just a little more bearable.
Of course, in the eternal quest to solve the Singlespeeder’s Conundrum, some riders have turned to the so-called “dinglespeed,” that being a singlespeed with two sets of chainrings and two sets of rear cogs, thereby yielding both a transit gear and a trail gear. Now, you may be thinking that the idea of a “dinglespeed” is antithetical to the entire singlespeeding ethos:
You may also be thinking, “‘Singlespeeder’s’ Conundrum?’ Being in the wrong gear 99.9% of the time is what you signed up for. Suck it up, or get a bike with gears.”
Fair enought.
Nevertheless, I’d argue that devising workarounds is what orthodoxy is all about. Just as the observant Jew might employ a “Shabbos goy” to conduct his business on the Sabbath, so does the singlespeeder devise sneaky methods to reap the benefits of multiple gear ratios without resorting to a derailleur. All of this is to say I’d been considering dingling the Engin for awhile now, and today I finally decided to do it. So I fished out a bunch of cogs and chainrings and got to work:
Now, I should clarify that, when done properly, the dinglespeed should not only offer the rider two gear ratios, but it should also allow the rider the ability to make the switch between them without changing the position of the rear wheel. Yes, you’ve got to remove the wheel to get enough chain slack to make the change, but if you use the right combination of chainrings and cogs they should both take up the same amount of chain and not require you to reposition the axle. As such, the rocker dropouts of the Engin make it a particularly good candidate for this, since once you’ve set the chain tension, removing and replacing the rear wheel is a simple matter of opening and closing the skewer:
Meanwhile the cheap singlespeed uses good old-fashioned horizontal dropouts, or I guess technically “track ends,” which are obviously simple and effective, but which also require you to use a wrench, and then move the wheel forward, and then re-tension the chain again once you’ve changed gears, and so forth and so on, none of which is a really big deal, but still, you want the dingle change to be as close as possible to a turnkey operation.
So arguably, by virtue of the sophistication dropouts alone, the Engin is a superior bike…though of course whether or not that sophistication is worth the time and expense of getting a custom bike is a whole other discussion.
The other thing that makes the Engin easily dingle-able is the rear hub:
Yes, it’s a singlespeed hub, but it’s a freehub that takes a splined cog as opposed to a threaded hub that takes a freewheel, and there’s enough room on there for more than one cog:
Yes, you can get a dinglespeed freewheel for your threaded hub, but you’re looking at big money:
[Via White Industries]
That’s not to say the quality of the White Industries isn’t worth it, but if you’re not certain what gearing you want it’s far easier and cheaper to mess around with the spare cogs in your parts bin.
As far as maintaining the position of the rear axle, the simplest solution seemed to be to use the same total number of teeth for each gear combination. Yes, as smarter people than me will point out, it doesn’t work exactly. But I hoped if the cogs and chainrings weren’t too far apart in size it would work well enough.
As I mentioned, I’d been using a 34×20, which was just a bit tall for the hillier trails. So for the inner/trail gear I went for a 32×20, and for the outer/transit gear I went for a 34×18. Here’s what a 34×20 looks like in gear inches:
[Via Sheldon Brown Gear Calculator]
And here’s what my dingle would give me:
Obviously I wouldn’t be using them “crossed over” so only the high and low numbers apply. Anyway, as you can see, it’s a pretty small difference, but hopefully it’d be enough to noticeably improve both the ride and the ride to the ride.
For the cogs themselves, I had some nicer Surly ones as well as some generic ones. The Surly ones are flat on one side and sort of beveled on the other, which means they’re “stackable” and you can use more than one together:
I only had a generic 18-tooth cog, but thanks to the profile of the 20-tooth Surly I could place them both together, and thanks to the flatter profile of the generic one I was still able to get the lockring back on there without fishing around for thinner spacers or anything like that:
All of this took maybe five or 10 minutes, and then it was maybe another 10 minutes to install the front chainrings, most of which was spent fishing the appropriate double-ring bolts out of my parts bin.
(By the way, having the option to use more than one chainring, or to position the chainring on either the outside or the inside to tune your chainline, is a great reason to use a multi-ring crank instead of a fancy dedicated singlespeed one on your singlespeed bike. In fact you could make the same argument for using a regular geared hub on your singlespeed and just using spacers, though at least the singlespeed hub results in a marginally stronger wheel.)
Once I got it all together, I rummaged around in the care package the good people at Dumonde were kind enough to send me awhile back and grabbed some chain lube. As I applied it, I was surprised to find it smelled strongly of mocha, and only after noticing this did I think to look at the label:
I must say I owe a debt of gratitude to Dumonde. While I can’t speak to the coffee stuff yet (besides the smell that is), I’ve been using the other chain lubes they sent and they’re fantastic–they last a really long time, and if you’re the lazy type who doesn’t clean their chain like I am they don’t gunk up the drivetrain the way some others do. I’ve also gotten a lot of good use out of their liquid grease:
I’ve breathed new life into cartridge wheel bearings in seconds by drizzling this stuff on there, and I’ve even used it to free up my sticky car hood latch.
Their freehub oil also recently helped me out of a (literal) jam:
My son has appropriated the Normcore Bike as his commuter, which means it’s gone from being an indoor cat to an outdoor cat and all that entails After the bike spent time locked up in the rain the freehub seized up, and I was all set to start combing eBay for a replacement. But the savvy home mechanic knows you should always try the easiest solution first, and after squirting freehub oil in there as best I could I’m pleased to report it’s been working beautifully every since.
So yeah, the Dumonde bike lubes are great, especially for the lazy bike owner. As a teenager I worked in a hardware store, and when my boss used to make me clean the shelves or the fluorescent light fixtures he used to admonish me to use “more juice and less elbow grease”–in other words we had tons of cleaning products on hand, so it annoyed him to see me waste too much time doing actual scrubbing. With Dumonde, I’m able to apply this “more juice, less elbow grease” to my bicycle maintenance by just drenching stuff back into functionality, and for that I’m thankful.
As for the dinglespeed, it appeared to come together nicely:
You can smell the coffee scent from a mile away, but you have to get in really close to notice the dingle:
It’s subtle enough I daresay a drunken SSWC “official” wouldn’t even notice it:
Chainline seems just fine too…
…though I’ve never been one to do more than eyeball the chainline, and it would have to be pretty far off for me to notice:
If it doesn’t run smoothly I’ll just put more lube on there. Problem solved.