Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info
sheldonbrown.com
sheldonbrown.com
You could find answers you didn't know to questions you didn't know to ask for hours and hours. And then some tangent about French derailleurs, besides.
I still have tools color-coded Sheldon's way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Brown_(bicycle_mechani...
> Reports of the demise of this Web site are greatly exaggerated! We at sheldonbrown.com thank Harris Cyclery for its support over the years. Harris Cyclery has closed, but we keep going. Keep visiting the site for new and updated articles, and news about possible new affilations.
Also:
I would bet that most active fixed riders have recent practical exposure to SB because of it, I hear him mentioned regularly IRL. I know a 22-year-old with his face tattooed on his calf lol.
> his face tattooed on his calf
Best cycling tattoo I’ve ever heard of
The site has been "maintained" (heavily edited and appended) by a guy named John Allen who I think mostly just knows a bunch of people in the retrogrouch scene (you know the types - $10k steel randonneur bikes), has never worked as a bike mechanic, seems to have little practical hands-on knowledge, and repeatedly pontificates about stuff he doesn't seem to have experience with. A lot of his additions and modifications seem to be his personal opinions.
I don't know if it's since been revised, but the stuff he wrote about belt drive bikes years ago made it clear he was just parroting shit he'd read elsewhere by people who had never ridden one for an extended period of time or owned one. Despite what he claims, they're virtually unbeatable for all-weather transportation bikes.
Considering he's the kind of person that rides around the world, and that the suggestions seem well presented, internal gear hub + belt drive seems like a solid combo for reliability.
It is. But make sure you get a solid internal gear hub because they're not all made the same. Shimano has an indestructible five gear model, the higher the number of gears the less torque the hub can deal with. Rohloff is beautiful but I think it is overpriced for what it offers (that's a personal opinion, others may well disagree). B-brands or anything open or chain based is going to be a lot less reliable.
He actually recommends Shimano Alfine 8, he finds it has a good balance between robustness and the way it handles.
Rohloff hubs are made in Germany by a workforce that enjoys good working conditions, and moreover each hold a stake in the company. That’s something to remember any time you compare the price of a Rohloff hub to an Asian-made component.
I'd say the onus is on the commenter to show that other countries do better than Germany, a world leader in worker rights.
https://www.prioritybicycles.com/pages/about-us
[disclaimer] Neither affiliated nor do i own one :(
I guess biking is still dominated by guys and by racing. If bike commuting picks up, low entry bikes should outnumber sporty bikes 10:1, I hope.
Edit: they only sell in the US, not in Europe :-(
Edit: those are not commuting bikes :-))) Now, THESE are commuting bikes: https://www.batavus.nl/elektrische-fietsen
I didn't mean cheap, but I can see how it can be read that way :-)
For example, looking at medium - large sizes, Trek Marlin 8 Gen 3 [1] has a standover of ~750mm, while Nukeproof Scout [2] has one of just ~710mm.
[1]: https://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/bikes/mountain-bikes/cros...
I get how internal gears are great and reliable and probably a great choice if You need a bike that will carry 30kg of baggage for 20k+ kilometers and won't break. However, I don't plan on doing either of those things.
I'm fairly happy to do my basic yearly maintenance myself (chain / cassette change), if in return I get a system that will cost me way less and has an upgrade tree that's an order of magnitude larger than that of belt drives.
For me, part of the fun in bike building / maintenance is the fact that Your tastes / needs change. And to a good degree, if You stay in the mainstream components, bikes these days are pretty flexible / adaptable to that. In my case, I'd probably struggle with handlebars (I'm a fan of drops, which would probably limit my choice of shifters) and frame geometry (as I age, I'm starting to develop a pretty well honed taste for what size / fit do I want to have in a bike frame).
Hard core no fuss commuters that don't ever want to touch or tinker with bike parts.
The things that make a bike work well for 20k km in harsh conditions in Kazakhstan and India also make a bike work well with a child seat in the city during the summer and winter and out grocery shopping, etc.
I would have loved to build me something around a Rohloff gearbox with a belt compatible frame, but that thing would set me back at least 2k EUR / USD. By comparison, my current commuter setup is a combo of two single speed bikes (one light, one with racks for more cargo / shopping capacity), either of which I got used for 50 and 100Eur respectively. And my current bikepacking bike is a 1200EUR steel Kona with some extra components slapped on top. Basically, I've got 3 bikes for 3 diferent uses for a price of that gearbox one.
Where is this a thing? I’m fairly familiar with retro-grouch bike brands, and their products cost less than half of that. Today when carbon frames, Rohloff hubs, or Pinion gearboxes are all the rage, and those are very expensive parts that push up the cost of a bike by thousands, retro-grouch steel bikes often seem cheap in comparison. One exception is when the frame is custom-made in a Western country instead of outsourced to Taiwan like most brands, but that still shouldn’t reach $10K.
Especially not worth it now that midrange bikes come with disc brakes and 1x10 or 1x12 derailleur drivetrains (no front derailleur) that are reliable, efficient, light and inexpensive. Without a front derailleur adjustment is a cinch and any difficulty or mental load for a casual rider to change gears goes away. Things going slightly out of adjustment and then over time some gear combinations causing your chain to skip or fall off is almost a thing of the past.
And only the drivetrain is lower maintenance. Brakes are the same (unless you also decide you don’t really need effective brakes and go with roller/drum brakes over disc brakes). Maintenance of tires/punctures is much more time consuming.
You don't need super duper brakes for casual riding, hydraulic disk brakes are good enough without much maintenance, maybe just once per year.
Unless the tires are skinny, they shouldn't puncture very often and replacing them isn't that hard or expensive.
You won't break any speed records with a belt and an internal gearhub, but they aren't that inefficient especially when you don't waste time or money cleaning the traditional drivetrain.
But overall I think the benefits are not worth the extra cost/lack of choice in models, and other demerits.
It was a reference for older topics, such as recently when I needed to understand the internal workings of a Sturmey Archer hub to fix one.
However, it hasn't been of much help for the new developments from the past 15 years since his passing.
While less organized and sometimes messy, YouTube and many other sites can answer any bike mechanic question. Even ChatGPT generally provides good answers
- Gorilla Tape for tubeless. Reality is that it's porous and absorbent and the adhesive is hard to remove, and can pull the cosmetic layer off carbon rims. It works, but with all sorts of bad side effects. Standard tubeless (polypropylene strapping) tape applied properly rim wall to rim wall works far better.
- A screwdriver is just fine for removing a crown race from a fork. (This almost always mars the fork, and while on a cartridge bearing fork this is mostly cosmetic, it can do damage and is bad looking. Shows lack of attention to detail.)
- Contaminated disc brake pads can be cleaned to like-new by applying heat. I've never once seen nor heard of this actually working long-term. It's always a "well, it might work" that turns up negative. And the outgassing of burning off break fluid isn't good to be around.
Then the litany of "how's this dent in my frame?" with the inevitable and loud "it's metal it can dent and be fine".
That's great idea.
Or just grab the 10mm, it's always 10mm.
[1] https://www.summitpost.org/size-matters-a-gear-comparison/69...
This should be cheap and easy to host behind a CDN like Cloudflare.
Sheldon’s Brown widow I think runs the site now. Prof Fell who taught one of my grad school CS classes.
A banner ad at the top of each page should be more than enough to fund a static site like this (with extra for the authors efforts).
After I dismissed that ad and was actually taken to the link I clicked, the top of the page had a creepy anime dating sim ad that seemed barely SFW.
Another page had four banner ads.
Surely just a small handful of folks donating a few bucks through patreon or whatever, could keep the site ticking over with no ads.
So, total donations were by about 20 people who really funded all of it, the total take for that was distinctly under £1000. At the time that site had between 2 and 4 million views a month. tl;dr few people will consider paying, far fewer will actually pay, even when it benefits them in the long term.
What really upset me about that is if everyone who looked at that charitable request and had simply coughed up £1, and most of them could (sometimes you can't; I've been in that position so I understand) a real difference could have been made.
If a charitable health-based cause pulls in so little cash, even fewer people will donate just to keep a site running.
My website has generated quite a bit of goodwill in my community. It saves people considerable stress.
Donations make up less than a percent of my income. About one in ten or twenty thousand visitors donates. It does not cover my grocery bill. Even readers I personally advise rarely donate.
'The bare minimum hosting cost' is a pretty poor bar for informational content.
I wonder what Sheldon would have wanted. I was always under the impression that he saw it as a community service. Despite working at a bike shop he never seemed to push parts sales in his writings.
I think its entirely possible to recover the costs of a hobby that does public good through donations. Making a reasonable wage (especially by software dev standards) is another matter entirely.
Donations seem to do fine for my local makerspace, and local cycling advocacy group. Maybe this site, which for a lot of people would amount to an online memorial, is somehow different?
The bottom of each page has a "Last updated" timestamp (recent) by Harriet Fell. I think this is she: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell . Perhaps Sheldon's surviving spouse?
Well done on finding Harriet’s own home page. I really like the no-frills, non-fussy presentation style.
Edit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080913084945/http://www.sheldo...
> Learning to build wheels is an important milestone in the education of an apprentice mechanic. A "mechanic" who has not mastered this basic skill cannot be considered to be a fully-qualified professional, and will always feel inferior to those who can list wheelbuilding among their skills.
Not to take anything away from Sheldon Brown. I've spent plenty of time on his site. And of course Brown has a page about Brandt: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/
For a library the money from selling donated books is more valuable than a bunch of (more often than not) filler that'd need to be prepped for loaning (the barcoding, etc) and sorting through to see if they are worth adding to the collection. That money can then be used for books or other library programming.
(Not to mention the awful state some donated books are in... Missing pages, all sorts of things inside of them... Porn stored inside... Wrong covers because of people pulling things... Imagine having to flip through every book to check them out prior to doing all the other prep. It's far simpler to acquire the books from known sources.)
A lot of Brandt's conclusions aren't as relevant in the modern world of carbon fiber rims, which are so stiff that all sorts of interesting things can be done with regards to spoke count.
(For those that aren't aware, carbon rims are so stiff they don't really get trued. They need to be centered so there's no wobble/runout, but tensioning an individual spoke, or even a few near each other, won't create a hop like it does on a flexible metal rim. So building a carbon wheel is more an exercise in evenly bringing up tension while maintaining proper dish and horizontal and lateral centering, but they don't get trued in the traditional sense.)
His wife, Harriet Fell, was one of my Computer Science professors at Northeastern. I really regret that I never took the time to talk to her about Sheldon. It always crossed my mind but never seemed like the right time.
Not many people realize how controversial much of his advice and ideas were when he wrote these. He was such a big influence that his once controversial ideas on things like safe (vehicular) cycling technique, tire tread, fixed gear bikes, cadence, and chain lubrication were one heresy- just suggesting these things to other cyclists could inspire intense rage, but everyone pretty much accepts them now.
I miss that version of the Internet.
I always enjoy the folks in bike shops in the cities I live in. I'm definitely not in their 'scene,' but they're super passionate about bikes and cycling as a primary mode of transportation and really want to get as many people on board as possible. I've heard people accuse them of being elitist or whatever, but even in the most notoriously hipster spots, I've always found them just as happy to fix up some kid's beat up used Walmart Schwinn as they are troubleshooting some alignment problem on someone's custom fixie.
That's feels very different to me than the parts of the more "serious" long-distance/touring/sports cyclist crowd I've been exposed to. The folks I've known in person that don lycra and speed down pretty country roads didn't seem unusual, but in groups, they seem like one of the most gatekeep-y, Mean Girls crowds I've encountered. Better have the 'approved' goals, gear, practices and perspectives if you want to sit with them at lunch. Practical transportation cyclists should keep walking, unless they're doing it in full racing gear with clips, wrap-around shades and a helmet that looks like a heavier duty version of what they wore in tron. If you're not cycling hard enough to need a shower once you get to work, you're not really cycling.
Maybe it's a tiny vocal minority? Maybe they're people that are "online only" enthusiasts trying to be cool? I dunno... but it just seems very punitively conformist.
Anyway, I was also thinking perhaps I could help modernize the website itself in my spare time. If anyone is interested dm me.
I’m more of a runner nowadays, and this site is like Sheldon’s but for runners https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Main_Page
For me, Rockwell is basically an encyclopedia of practical data on lenses (I don't even use him much for camera bodies). Same as Sheldon's site is an encyclopedia of data on bikes. I use them both when I want to figure out how big / heavy / compatible with X something is. Much as I wouldn't bother trying to look up "is X good for me" on Sheldon's site, I wouldn't do so at Rockwell either.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Sheldon%20Brown%27s%20Bicycle%...>
They try to preserve and extend the knowledge there.
Thanks to Sheldon Brown I’ve learned how important it is to place the front derailleur as low and far at front as possible. Reduces or eliminates the need for trimming (Trim-Position) and provides better shifting.