Fixed or free (Fixed Wheel - General Tips & Comments)

Member Name: ahenry

Product:	Fixed Wheel - General Tips & Comments
Date:	19/06/01 (383 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Simplicity, Efficiency

Disadvantages: Hills

If you only had to choose one bike, then you wouldn't go for a fixed gear one. They are fun to ride a lot of the time, but sometimes they just aren't practical. They are bad if you need to ride up or down steep hills when you either have to get off and walk, or brake to save your legs from whizzing around at 200rpm. They are also bad if you have to ride at the same pace as other cyclists, as you tend to ride up hills faster, and down them more slowly than with a bike with gears.

The attraction of them is that they have less to go wrong. If you make a fixed rear wheel, it is likely to be stronger than with wheel with a modern cassette hub as it won't be dished and the spokes on either side of the wheel will be at a similar tension. You can't forget maintenance altogether though. If the chain becomes too loose, there is a risk that it will come off, which is likely to lock up your rear wheel.

I built my fixed wheel bike from an old 10 speed bike. I had bought it new when I was 13 years old, and swapped the frame about 10 years later. Bikes which originally came with freewheel sprockets instead of a cassette (ie from before the late 80s) are good for a fixed gear bike as the rear dropouts let you adjust the fore-aft position of the wheel. Newer bikes tend to have vertical dropouts which mean that its more difficult to adjust the length of the chain. With careful selection of sprocket and chainring sizes, you can adjust the tension of a chain without moving the position of the dropouts. Real track bike frames aren't ideal for road use as they don't have much clearance for fitting a mudguard. Fitting brakes is a fiddle and the handling can be a bit twitchy.

You can also buy add on sprockets that convert a freehub cassette into a fixed gear. These might be worth thinking of if you have an unloved MTB. They will still have a dished rear wheel.

I bought a Sovos hub from http://www.sheldonbrown.com/sovos.html. Th
is lets you fit a fixed sprocket on one side of the hub as well as a single gear freewheel from a BMX bike on the other. This means that if you were out on a long ride and pulled a muscle, you can take the rear wheel out, turn it around and have a single gear bike that lets you freewheel instead. I haven't used this feature much at all, but when I have, it was very worthwhile.

If you want to read more about this, see http://www.sheldonbrown.com/fixed/index.html. Its run by a bloke from a Boston MA bikeshop who has been a longtime poster to the usenet rec.bicycles.* newsgroups. I've always been impressed with his technical knowledge. The bikeshop he works at is also worth visiting if you're nearby.

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