Originally Posted by Olympianrider

Hello all,

I thought it might be a good idea to post a follow-up to the flurry of messages I exchanged with others on this forum last December. You might say this story has a twist ending.

Last December, I posed a question – does anyone have any opinions about Planet X bikes? But I suppose my question ran a little deeper than that. I was wondering if a thoroughly-modern bike, with all the new technology of the last 30 years, might offer me better performance than I was getting on my vintage steel bike. And maybe the biggest concern was this. During the 2017 STP, the biggest organized ride in this part of the country (the “Seattle-to-Portland”), everyone on those carbon-fiber whatsits seemed to be pedaling just as fast as I was. So how come everybody else seemed to be going just a tad faster? Was it new technology? Carbon fiber? Or was it just me?

Well, I think I have the answer now. Some of you are going to laugh when I reveal the answer below. It really should have been obvious, but nobody guessed it. It wasn’t me, it was the bike all right, and it was something I could fix. I think there might be some value to setting this down, because there must be some dolts like me out there who are as befuddled as I was.

My dream bike. I probably ought to mention this, because my initial object was to find a new bike that might improve my performance. I found the bike. It happened a couple of weeks after all those messages went back and forth. At the time, I was thinking the only way I’d find an all-modern bike with all the features I wanted was to obtain a frame from some manufacturer somewhere in China and build it up from there. I wasn’t looking forward to it, because I’d learned from experience how hard it is to get something like that right. Well, in January, Planet X announced a new model that sounds like it has it all. The Holdsworth Super Professional. Carbon fiber, a frame for fast road rides, a hot-looking paint job, a nice snobby-sounding European name, and most important, the option of selecting Campy parts – something I haven’t seen on anything else in its price range.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I haven’t bought yet. Even though buying a finished bike is cheaper than obtaining the parts and having my local bike shop put it all together, it’s still a big expenditure. And I got the silly idea this year that it might be better to make a down payment on a house. I know, misplaced priorities. Why buy a house when you can have a bicycle instead? I’m still going to buy – eventually. But some of the responses here gave me the idea that it might be possible to tweak my vintage bike and get at least another season out of it.

Fixing my vintage bike. Part of the story is this – I might be riding a rather aggressive schedule, 150 miles a week or more during the good-weather months, but I am a complete Neanderthal when it comes to bike technology. Everything I know about bikes I learned in the ‘70s, from conversations in the schoolyard and half-remembered articles in Boy’s Life. The bikes of the ‘70s are the ones I understand. The guys in the local bike shop kept trying to steer me to modern stuff that bewildered me, with weird shifters that somehow work from the brake handles and teeny-tiny frames more suitable for clowns in a circus – it was as if those guys spoke a different language. So once I started riding heavily, and I decided it was time to move up from my rusty old high-school clunker, I set out to build the best ‘70s bike I could.

I started with an all-531 steel frame, with a nice curving rake to the fork and the right kind of sport-touring geometry for long road rides (it’s an all-chrome 1972 Swiss Cilo). I equipped it with all-Campy vintage parts, because, you know, everybody in the ‘70s knew that was what the serious riders used. Yep, toe straps and all. (Though I did use those cool SunTour bar-end shifters.) It was the lightest, smoothest, most comfortable bike I’d ever owned – just 22 or 23 pounds, I’m guessing. Hey, those guys in those old bike-racing movies were riding bikes just like this one. There shouldn’t have been that much performance difference between a modern bike and an old one. So where did I go wrong?

Some of the answers I got here pointed me in the right direction.

Tire inflation. I’d been inflating my tires to a rock-hard 120 psi, for no better reason than that’s what I had been doing since I was 10 years old and riding a J.C. Penney Sting-Ray knock-off. On advice I got here, I backed off to 100 psi and got a more-comfortable, more-efficient ride with far less vibration. Thanks, guys! I never would have known.

Tires. I ditched the cheap treaded tires I’d been using and got Gatorskins. I moved down from 25mm to 23mm. Rolling resistance went way down, and the ride suddenly had a precision feel I’d been missing.

Rear derailleur. I’d been using a Campy Nuovo Record derailleur, mainly because, well, it was the thing to do in the ‘70s. It was the world standard back then, and it is wonderful on the flats – I love the way it shifts. But the short cage limits you to a rather small low gear. On my bike, the best the local bike shop could get to work was a miserable 25t. With that kind of gearing, every time I came to a steep hill I had to get off and walk. I replaced it with the Campy Rally derailleur (first generation, the revised version) which has a long cage and the ability to use a friendlier low gear.

Freewheel. With a long-cage derailleur, I could consider a different freewheel. Because this is an older frame, it is spaced for the old-style 120mm five-speed freewheels. I didn’t want to alter it to install something wider. Instead, I replaced my old five-speed freewheel with one of those freewheels manufactured in the late seventies and early ‘80s that scrunches six gears into the space of five. This one is a SunTour New Winner freewheel with 32t.

Front crankset. I had been using a Nuovo Record double crankset, 50/42. I replaced that with a triple Nuovo Record crankset, 52/48/36. My thought was that a triple up front might help me get up hills. Certainly it does that. But…

The moment I took it on the road last week I knew the truth. It was the outer chainring. The old one had been too small.

Immediately I could feel the extra power of those two additional teeth. The pedaling was just a little harder, but I was more than ready for it after all the riding I’ve been doing. And the output, using the same cadence, was so much greater. It was as if I’d traded a Chevette for a Corvette.

My guess is that the riders I was comparing myself against were using bigger chainrings like this one, or more likely those modern compact crankset-and-cassette combinations that give greater effective power. I’ve read that the power advantage of 52t versus 50t is about five percent, all things being equal, but honestly it feels greater than that. No longer am I forced to coast when I get going too fast. I’m finding it easy to maintain an 18 mph pace on the flats, with no huffing and puffing and general overexertion.

You know, the clues were all there. Other people were pedaling at the same rate, but they were traveling further with each stroke. Duh. It was the gearing. It had nothing to do with the number of gears or the lack of index shifting or any of those modern conveniences. I just needed a bigger front gear. And I discovered it by accident. I probably would never have figured it out if that triple crankset hadn’t been just a tad bigger.

That first ride, I was thinking holy cow the entire way.

Anyway, I’ve replaced that middle chainring with the 42t gear from my old crankset – a more appropriate middle gear -- and I’m happy as a clam. I rode again in this year’s STP, a couple weekends ago, and once again I’m in the one-day club. I hadn’t figured out the problems with the gearing at that point, and my time on the 200-mile ride was still pretty poor. But at least this year there were a few people who finished behind me.

Good riding, everyone!

Erik Smith

Olympia, WA