buildup blunders

[Bicycle808]

i once overhauled a cb hub, and put the guts in backwards after the repack; dang near tightened everything down fully before i realized.
Made me feel kinda foolish.

 

[kingfish254]

CHECK THE CHAIN LINE !!!

With the addition of an Anything Goes class to this years build off, I expect to see this be an issue. No matter how cool the frame looks, if the chain hits it, it aint a ridable bike!!

I made sure with multiple mockups on Fugsley that the chain line worked both from the side with frame clearance as well as head on with tire and frame clearance and chainring/wheelcog alignment.

 

[heartlandcruisers]

good point kingfish

the chain line is extremely crucial when dong any kind of modification to the frame or wheels
if it hits or flexes too much this will not only be non ridable but it could cause serious damage
i had a chain get chewed apart by not having the lineup properly
luckily i found someone who needed the links otherwise a perfectly good brand new chain got trashed
this goes for the wheel rebuilding too as both these issues caused the failure
i have a few marks on my leg from the chain getting chewed up as well as playing kiss n tell wit my neighbors car
i have learned the hard way this is crucial
thank for posting
Sean

 

[alistairSH]

heya alistarsh
i didn't know that either that's actually a good piece of info we can all use
i always thought they were all compatible

Nope. As far as I can tell...
Shimano 9-speed groups (road and mountain) - all compatible with each other (assuming derailleur has cage sized for cassette - ie no short cage on a 32t big cog cassette).
Shimano 10-speed groups - NOT compatible. Road and Mountain (DynaShift) use different pull ratios, so shifters/derailleurs must match.
SRAM 9-speed - all compatible with each other
SRAM 10-speed - ???? not sure
Shimano and SRAM front derailleurs/shifters - all compatible

Internally geared hubs are their own systems, usually.

All that's for shifters/derailleurs. For brakes...
Road levers (drop bar, STI, whatever you want to call'em) will only actuate road calipers or cantilevers
Mountain levers (flat bar) come in two pull ratios - for cantilevers/road calipers OR for V-brakes/disc (and most new levers are v-brake/disc unless noted otherwise)
There are a few exceptions - some mountain levers have two settings, and there are a few road brake levers that will pull V-brakes/discs properly (but none of the STI-style levers do this). And SRAM does make a road-use disc brake for use with STI-style levers (used on cyclocross bikes, usually).

I don't know where the vintage drum brakes fit into the brake lever mix. Probably the same pull ratio as cantilevers, but that's a guess.

And, for the rich among us, skip all the cable pull nonsense, and use Shimano Alfine Di2 instead. Internally geared hub with electronic shifting - pretty freakin' awesome, but more expensive than most of the bikes we're talking about.

 

[Bicycle808]

Good info, Allistair. To clear up some of it:
-drum brakes work with short-pull levers, same as cantilevers, road calipers, and BMX u-brakes. Also, they make "road" versions of some mechanical disc brakes, which are compatible with short-pull levers. Also, a few manufacturers are making v-brakes with shorter arms that work with short-pull levers.
-SRAM's stuff seems like it might be cross-compatible in theory, but I've never tried it myself. I do know that they don't make road shifters with a 3ring crank anymore, so there is that.

It's a crying shame, b/c until just these past few years, Shimano indexed systems all used the exact same pull ratio. Meaning, you just had to match the shifter'snumber of gears to the cassette's number of gears. If you had an 8 speed shifter and an 8speed cassette, you could use any indexed shimano rear derailer, from 6speed to 9 speed. Some of the early tenspeed road stuff used the same ratio, as well. Now, they've got all sorts of different systems, directional chains, etc that is all designed to keep home mechanics from doing awesome shade-tree frankendrivetrains. I've been a mostly singlespeed guy for awhile now, but I have some derailer bikes too. Thing is, from this point forward, I'm a friction-only guy. I don't want to support this planned obsolescence stuff anymore.