Hello everyone, glad to be here. Didn't know that I had a ratrod bike until I showed up at a full boogie vintage ride. Nothing personal, it's just that I ride what I like and don't really worry about titles. Anyway, I was welcomed by the restorers but I definately got the looks with my Klunker-esque tribute bike. It is a 40-ish Prewar Schwinn DX with Hawthorn (I think) dual springer fork, 1980 Sturmey three speed and drum brakes front and rear. The hubs are laced up to old school 26in BMX aluminum rims from the 80s. The bike also has vintage BMX cruiser aluminum bars and Race-Face aluminum 3-piece cranks, buckskin Parsons springer seat and repop rear rack to keep the back of my T-shirt clean. I have built several bikes and this by far has been my best rider...it just cruises...anyway, glad to be here and I will post some of my other bikes in the future...later, David http://www.flickr.com/photos/7589739@N05/
40 Schwinn DX Klunker project
- Thread starter 12bcruzin
- Start date
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It is funny, the front hub stops better than the rear...and neither stop all that well. They work well enough together for a cruiser though but I will need to do some work on the rear. And sorry, nothing for sale at this time but I have another wheel set with white painted S-2s, a red band two-speed kick back and another S/A front drum, just haven't thought about selling...yet.
12bcruzin said:
Life in Moab is good. The temperatures are lowering a few degrees and the bike people will be flooding back in soon. The mountain bikers are pretty cool for the most part, but the road bike people are a different breed. We call it Lycra poisoning around here
Dennis
That's funny you should mention the Lycra crowd, we have a problem here also, you get a pack of about 50 wanna be Lance Armstrong yuppies wearing $500 worth of bright gayly colored Lycra that matches their $5000 road bike riding up and down the PCH doing about 8 mph going from coffee shop to coffee shop generally screwing up traffic. No riding etiquette at all.
Rat Rod
Owner & Founder
I think this is a nationwide trend.
How many of us see the ads on the CL like this....
2006 Fancy Smancy Trek Carbon Fiber Bike - $900
I wasn't thinking correctly and I just put $3600 worth of road bike and biking
clothes on my credit card and I found out I don't like road biking. I am selling
the whole lot for $900...my loss is your gain.
Location: Impulseville
:lol: :lol: :lol:
How many of us see the ads on the CL like this....
2006 Fancy Smancy Trek Carbon Fiber Bike - $900
I wasn't thinking correctly and I just put $3600 worth of road bike and biking
clothes on my credit card and I found out I don't like road biking. I am selling
the whole lot for $900...my loss is your gain.
Location: Impulseville
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Same here...funny thing is I love to ride bikes, any bikes, even road bikes but I just don't fit in with the clicked-in lycra crowd and don't like riding in the drops. I feel like I could die head first at any moment. Then I found a group of Critical Mass riders that could care less about fashion, aero or speed. They wear baggy clothes, t-shirts a running shoes. They ride beach cruisers, old road bikes converted to single speeds, high end road bikes and mountain bikes and anything else. And nobody gets left behind. Last night ride we had maybe 15 people and it was a gas. We were a motley bunch, hippie kids, students, urban professionals and one 45-year old retro grouch (me), all brought together to celebrate cycling...
The front should stop better since 70% of your stopping power comes from the front.12bcruzin said:
Momentum, your weight goes forward, so there's more weight in the front, so the front wheel has more stopping power, and the back wheel has less.12bcruzin said:
That 70% claim of the stopping power is true....but I think we need to consider this too.
If the brakes suck (any brakes, not specifically the drums mentioned) then it is really simple math. Anything times zero equals zero. And whats 70% of zero? :mrgreen:
If you want to go fast and be safe, you need good brakes.
And, your brakes are used more often to slow down than to stop.......
If the brakes suck (any brakes, not specifically the drums mentioned) then it is really simple math. Anything times zero equals zero. And whats 70% of zero? :mrgreen:
If you want to go fast and be safe, you need good brakes.
And, your brakes are used more often to slow down than to stop.......
That is funny, you guys are applying motor vehicle dynamics to 30 year old bicycle technology. Based on where my body weight is located (over rear tire and behind crank) and the fact that at 10 miles an hour (beach sidewalk speed), the front springer fork does not collapse when the rear brakes are applied to avoid kid with surfboard, I deduct that there is little or no weight shift to the front of the bike at low speed. And since it looks as though the drum and shoe size is the same front to rear, I believe that the rear brakes on this particular used wheel set were probably used considerably more then the ever treacherous bike front brake and that is why the back brake sucks...
12bcruzin said:
You act like we're pulling this out of our ..... or something.
I don't know the background of your bike, I don't know how fast you were going when you attempted to stop.
Rat Rod
Owner & Founder
I think there is some merit to the idea of the front brake having the majoritiy of the stopping power.
I'm assuming that's why the fixie guys just run a front brake....besides making the bike look streamlined.
Someone on another board once advised me to run the fronts if I was only going to run one set of brakes.
I'm sure the road bike guys here can chime in and explain it better than me.
And besides....if you're riding slow enough, just use the Fred Flinstone technique. :wink:
I'm assuming that's why the fixie guys just run a front brake....besides making the bike look streamlined.
Someone on another board once advised me to run the fronts if I was only going to run one set of brakes.
I'm sure the road bike guys here can chime in and explain it better than me.
And besides....if you're riding slow enough, just use the Fred Flinstone technique. :wink:
