A couple of months ago we opened Sundays. We’re now extending our weekday hours and will stay open till 6.30pm.
From 21st November, our new hours will be:
Monday – Friday 8.00am – 6.30pm
Saturday 10am-5pm
Sunday 11am-4pm
When our new café opens mid-December, we’ll extend our weekend hours… stay tuned!

The Long Haul Truckers and Crosschecks offer good platforms for setting up quality touring and commuting bikes.
In this case, a Trucker was chosen as the starting point. The bike will be carrying heavy loads with rear and front panniers plus the bar bag.
The bike will also be used extensively for city riding. By integrating a dynamo lighting system you get light when you need it. The Busch and Müller IQ Fly plus headlight is a headlight we often recommend: ‘plus’ means it means includes standlicht, or standlight, (ie: it stays …

Welcome to our winter update! Read through the latest from the workshop and also some cycling news from around Melbourne.
Bill’s back from 4 weeks cycling in Europe. The first two weeks of this was with a big group checking out the Netherlands (check the Cycling Dutch Style blog). then 2 weeks for a quick trip through Copenhagen, Berlin and Paris. Keep tuned to humanpowered.com.au for a trip report with photos soon.
In this edition:

News from the workshop
End of financial year
Great bikes, bikes for transport
Maintenance Training
Kids on bikes: child seats
Cycling news around Melbourne

NEWS FROM …

The wheel pictured above is the first of three matching builds we’ve just done. Actually, not quite matching: two of them are front electric motor hubs and the third is the same motor in a rear hub. Interestingly, the rear takes a 7 speed screw-on freewheel (indicating heightened limitations on its load capacity). Yep! they’re going to be used on an industrial trike.
This job presented some interesting considerations: very short spokes at a steep angles; finding an extremely strong rim to suit; high loading on all three axles; and drive …

“Nice parts since 1989″. True! Paul Components has manufactured high quality bicycle parts in the USA since 1989. The range includes cranks, chain tensioners, brakes and levers, gear shifters and mounts, a wide range of brackets and mounts for lights and small parts and a stack more. Great! And we’re stocking it!
We’ve now got our most popular Paul gear. This range is growing but currently  includes:

Thumbies in Road and MTB clamp diameters. In singles and pairs. In silver and black
Light mounts including the Gino and Stem Cap
Brake levers including the …

The Sun CR18 rim is a very high quality double wall triple pocket rim with single nickel plated brass eyelets. Sweet!

We’ve purchased a fair quantity of CR18s in 27″ (630mm ISO) for custom wheel builds… great for any restoration or upgrade on older 27″ wheel frames. By bulk purchasing, we’ve managed to bring the unit price down significantly.
When upgrading or refreshing wheels on 27″ wheelsize frame, often 700c wheels are used (ie 622mm rather than bead seat diameter). Retaining original wheel size is important when trying to maintain the original …

Over a few months we build up a huge collection of old tyres. We box them up and when the pile gets completely ridiculous we call in the recycler.
When you purchase new tyres from us, if we fit them we’ll offer to recycle your old rubber. If you take them to fit at home, feel free to bring in the old tyres in for recycling.
If you’ve got a big stack of tyres to recycle at home we can take them too. We charge a small fee in this case to …

Just some fun photos of some of the more unusual things we’ve done or seen in the shop
Two very different load bikes
Joel’s Bigdummy and Lewis’ Brompton can both carry a load
The Racing Dragster
Well not quite, the tri-bars are for a load platform (for very light loads only)

A while back with some spare time, a few of the mechanics took to lacing up custom track wheels. Just for fun.
We’ve still got some of these hand built Velocity wheels available. Time to get them on the road! Only while stocks last….

Velocity Deep V rim
DT stainless Champion spokes
Flip flop 120mm spaced rear hub

And the price? $150 per wheel. Serious!

It all started with a sad Shogun Katana road bike in 1980′s fluro orange. In it’s previous life it had been given granny gears & been ridden hard on many a Great Vic bike ride.

Now it was time for retirement by the sea. The Surly Spew on frame prep lists linseed oil as a rust preventative for frame tubes. As I had this on hand it was syringed into every orifice, taking about a week to dry into a claggy mess anywhere I hadn’t been meticulous to clean up.

Stainless bolts …

We’ve been using a Park Tool TM-1 spoke tension meter for near on 2 years. It’s a nice tool… easy to use, absolutely critical for wheel work, you know, one of those things you take for granted. Then a pesky little spring in it snapped about three weeks ago. Oh oh!!! Quick, “get online and work out the part number”. “Got it, 2173 I think, but it doesn’t look like anyone sells it. Better email Park”. So we did. And they called us the next morning to say they can’t …

Jai had some pretty extreme requirements: “Bill, I’ll be riding through rice paddys for about a year. I need to carry a stack of gear and I like the Big Dummy. I also like the Rohloff and the Son dyno lights.” This is a summary of the requirements but here’s what we produced for Jai:

Surly Big Dummy frame and fork set
Xtracycle long loader kit with bags
Twin bar setup to take accessories and give range of hand positions
Ortlieb Classic bar bag
FSA pig heavy duty headset
Tubus Tara front rack for Ortlieb Front …

So you like riding. A lot. You ride for transport, for fitness, to work, on holiday, around town, in the bush… basically, you ride all the time. And, predictably, your drivetrain wears out. Quite often. Ouch. Quite inconvenient and pricey.

Then along came the Rohloff Speedhub: the 14 speed hub with a super wide gear range. Ok so it’s not entirely maintenance free (an oil change every 5,000 clicks is recommended).
We’ve now got three staff hooked on Rohloffs – Moz with four Rohloffs (!) on his various bikes, Joel with one …

We’re extending our hours for the week before Christmas. You know how it goes…
Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the shop
Lots of bicycles were stirring, not even a mouse;
The helmets were hung by the fixed gear with care,
In hopes that Eddy Merx soon would be there;
The peleton was nestled all snug on their saddles,
While visions of full panniers danced in their heads;
A dutch cyclist in her high vis vest, and I in my cycling cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s ride;
The shop will be open …

Down in the workshop people ask us lots of questions. The latest thing that has come to mind is how to get chain tension on a frame with vertical dropouts. You might want to do this for single, fixed or hub gears. I’ll list them in order of complexity.
Use a chain tensioner, that could be an old rear mech (Dura-Ace or Record if you like) or something made for the purpose by Rohloff or Surly to name but a couple of brands. It almost goes without saying that this is …