Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Guest Blogger Edition: Frankenwheel

   Our friends over at The Beat Bike Blog have been busy working on creating new bikes out of old ones again. This project caught my eye as being a nice mixture of weird and clever.
 
   This guy got his hands on this vintage Mercier Special Tour de France, which as he points out, has a pretty cool name.

Mighty Mercier

He also had a 3 speed internal shifting 26" cruiser wheel he wanted to use. So, why not put them together? Here's why:

- Smaller back wheel will not allow brakes to reach the rim
- Smaller wheel will lower the BB, and increase the chance of the pedals hitting the ground
- Lower back end means a more slack steering angle, and less nimble handling.

   Not to be deterred, he set up a custom frame spacers. This is similar to the product featured a few weeks ago by RoadToPista.

Adaptor in action


  So the reason he did this was not to allow for a larger wheel, but to raise the bottom bracket and gain pedal clearance, Clarence. I'm not sure why he kept the reverse drop outs and not a track drop.

  At first I thought, "This is stupid." But the more I read the less stupid and more... silly it became. It sure addresses the main issue of  eating it because of clipping a pedal. Good job guys.

No comments: