Russell has a background in mountain bike racing. He knows how to throw a bike around.

Times have changed and these days he needs a bike for city riding. But something tough. He commutes to Latrobe Uni daily and lives in Brunswick. He shifts fairly heavy loads on the bike and tows trailers. Russell doesn’t own a car and was looking for a bike to be his primary form of transport.

In the past, we’ve serviced Russell’s hybrid Pakpare steel frame bike and recently fitted an 8 speed hub gear to it after repeated external gear system failures. The hub has survived but the rim collapsed surprisingly quickly… something about bunny hopping gutters with a load of neuroscience school books in a milk crate over the back end. (We didn’t ask for details.) Oh, and Russell does stuff like move house by bike. He definitely needed something tough.

Russell liked the look of the Surly Big Dummy and we agreed that it would be a great platform for him. Unfortunately the price was prohibitive. Similarly the Xtracycle Radish and Kona Ute were both a bit too expensive. We spent a few weeks thinking before realising that the Kona World Bike was probably the only sub-$1000 bike we’d be able to find that would hold up to what Russell puts his bikes through.

That photo is the stock World Bike straight from Kona to you. Yo.

This wasn’t right in this case and we had to be careful about how we set Russell’s bike up for two reasons. The first was the demanding usage that we predicted and the second was the bike fit. Russell had recently done a full bike fit ergonomic asssessment and come back with the geometry he needed. For some background on bike fit considerations see this article by Peter White.

Here are some shots of the process to get the bike to suit these two requirements.

The World Bike runs quite wide tyres on 26″wheels. This was good for two reasons: first, 26″ is stronger than 700c and should be suitable for the loaded riding Russell does. Second, the wide tyres will cope better with the random bunny hopping, gutter popping, and pothole encounters that are bound to happen. Even with the 26″ wheel size, the shot above shows Lewis tension checking the wheels. The tension check is to bring the wheels up to the correct tension and to make sure that the tension is even around the wheel.

And the tension checked wheels go back onto the frame.

These photos show Russell’s existing rack being fitted to the bike. It was slightly out of alignment but serviceable and should give decent life as long as it isn’t too seriously abused. Lewis opted to use only harded bolts to fit it, and of course thread lock all the bolts to ensure they don’t come loose. We usually fit stainless fasteners for racks and accessories but we’ve seen enough broken bicycle gear from Russell to be extra careful!

And some shots showing the parts Russell supplied to get the riding position he needs. These include an Ahead riser to get more height, a different length and angle Ahead stem and the swept back “trad” or “m” bars. This meant recabling the gears and brakes. Lewis left the cables slightly long to accomodate any adjustments required. In extreme cases, longer cables can give more friction and slightly less accurate shifting however in this case they should be absolutely fine. Lewis also fitted Russell’s SPD pedals.

And here’s the finished bike!