New Icy Commute Build

I think we all know the N + 1 formula for how many bikes one needs. In honor of that, I recently built a new "fast" snow bike for icy commuters. This bike replaces one I sold, last Spring, in an effort to thin the herd, a bit.  

That didn't last long!

The bike I sold was a red and black late 80s Specialized RockHopper. (It started out all red, but I had custom rattled-canned it a few years ago.) So, I replaced it with another red circa 1988 RockHopper frame that I have owned for 10 or 12 years. During that time, it has been built as everything from a full-on bagged tourer/commuter to a fixedgear montain bike.

I tried to build the bike with no cash outlay by utilizing parts I had hanging around in my shop building. I ended up buying grips and a set of brake cables and housing, plus some $22.00 platform pedals from eBay. When I was done, it looked like this:

The rear rack is from a Huffy 3-speed. The brakes are generic V-brakes I bought for another project which ended up with different brakes, The crank is a RaceFace from a 10-year old build I did for a friend who ended up trading the bike back for a fixed townie, Wheels are a disc-hubbed Sun Rhino on the back, and a RedLine hub with a Ritchey rim on the front. The cog, on the original build shown here, is a 20-tooth Tomi-Cog which bolts to the disc carrier, with a single 20 tooth cog on the freehub on the other side. Mary Bars and a leather Brooks clone from Asia provide contact points, and old Deore brake levers (early 90s, I think) pull the brake cables.

Tires are cheap Innova studded rubber. The front is half of my first set which I bought back in 2007, when I was doing the every-day bike commute. It is a 2.1" The rear is a 1.9", which replaced one of the original tires after the sidewall blew out. I never liked the smaller tire, but it was all I could find, at the time.

I rode to work on it when we had a little snow, a couple of weeks ago. It was a good shakedown cruise and I found a few things I needed to change. The front fender, which is a rear 29er fender in reality, kept catching my foot. The 34 x 20 gearing was way too low for the conditions, I have the fat-front geared like that so I can push through 8 or 10 inches of snow, but I don't need that capability on this bike. Also, the grips I bought were too small for my hands, so I figured I'd have to buy some Ergons.

Also, I decided to bite the bullet and buy some new studded tires. The small tire on the rear has never suited me, and they are 10 years and 8 years old cheap tires. So, i splurged on some Kenda Klondike 2.2" tires from eBay. One was used, and one was new, but I ended up only spending as much as the new tire lists for, retail. 

While I waited for the tires to arrive, I worked on the other problems. I turned the fron fender around, and put the long portion of the fender in front of the fork. This prevents it from hitting my foot, and also hugs the radius of the tire better.

As i was working, I found an old pair of Ergons I had cut down to use with GripShift. So, I cut some pieces from a round grip to make them full-length, and installed them.

One of my tires arrived, over the weekend, so I put it on the rear rim. While I had the wheel off, I swapped the 20-tooth cog for a 16-tooth version, and removed a link from the chain. The old rack bag I used with my XO-2 is zip-tied to the rack, and I borrowed the frame bag from the Surly.

I might get to use it, this weekend, if the weather-guessers are right!

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