The righteous peeps at Surly sent us an Instigator with a Large Marge rim and a Hookworm 2.5″ tire for the front. They didn’t send a rear because everyone knows that that’s too big of a rim/wheel combo for a FreeRadical. But I got really excited about fatty fore and aft, so I called Dave at Surly and we talked about options. I could crimp the Long Stays a bit to give more tire clearance through the frame; I already knew that from the Rockabilly mod we did. (An interesting side note is that someone in our forums talks about using a 2.5 Hookworm without modification. Makes me wonder if the big rim has an effect on the overall width of the tire???) But the hitch would be tire clearance for the chain.

We could use a longer bottom bracket spindle, but that wouldn’t give us much since it’s so far from the tire, and by the time you move it far enough out the chain will start to hit the French Nut in high gear. Nix. We could set the low limit screw on the rear deraileur so that you couldn’t access the lowest gears, but you kinda need low gears on a utility bike! Nix. Then Dave suggested removing the outer cassette cogs and moving the whole cassette outboard. You’d lose the highest gears but retain the lowest. Sounds good. Evidently, the cheaper 9-speed cassettes from Shimano allow you to remove a couple of higher gears from the cluster. But I never had to find out cuz I had a deluxe SRAM cassette that you can take the 3 smallest rings off of. This I did, and inserted them inboard to act as spacers.

But this caused shifting meltdown because the SRAM X.O derailleur couldn’t be adjusted to the correct imboard limit without affecting the outboard limit, and the derailleur couldn’t really be set back far enough to clear the cogs, clackety, crickety, clankety. But we were at the tradeshow, just a couple of doors down from Shimano. I got a shifter from them and the crack Surly/QBP guys added a derailleur. Bingo.
So what do you get when you do the arithmetic?

Instigator + FreeRadical + Large Marge rims + 2.5 inch tires = most ground crunching stable Longtail of all time!

I rode Eco and Finochio on the back at the same time, no handed. Stable Able!
Eco took it for a spin to the post office with a couple of outbounds. Note the matching bell.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Bicycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.