It's Winter so the 1952 Raleigh is Resting

It's definitely winter in Northern New Mexico.  There's road salt and cinders on the street, an awful red sludge that seems to be able to work its way into bearings.  For the most part, I'm riding the Happy Little Three Speed Bicycle when I can.
I figure the plastic fenders are much more resilient to road salt than the steel fenders of the Raleigh.  Plus, I can just order new ones.  That's one of the things I really love about the HLTSB.  Ultimately, everything on it is easily replaceable.  It's not a collector's item.  Replacing parts doesn't require going on Ebay and hoping what arrives is what will work.  I replaced the chain last week and found the chainring was surprisingly worn.  I was able to flip it, and I ordered a new one to have on hand in case any of the teeth sheer off.  The Sturmey Archer sprocket seems completely unfazed by the past two years of use.  There's lots of other things about the bike I really love, and maybe someday, when I have more time, I'll catalogue them here.

When the roads are truly icy, and the snow is falling from the sky, my wife and I have been using our Xtracycles equipped with studded snow tires from Schwalbe.  (My Xtracycle is built from a 1984 Trek mountain bike, an 830 I believe.)  Yesterday, it was seven degrees fahrenheit out, and the wind was blowing like crazy, and the roads were slick with ice.  Riding the Xtracycle into the wind, uphill, felt like pedaling a tank.  This morning, it was closer to freezing, and enough ice had melted that I could judiciously pedal over what was left on the HLTSB, cringing a little bit as I climbed the speed humps.  Plus, the wind was not blowing, for which I was eternally grateful.

I'm looking forward to being back on the Raleigh once winter is good and over.

Comments

  1. Good morning! I just happened to stumble across your account courtesy of Shawn's "Society of Three Speeds" story which I follow. Then I spent the last hour reading your entire story... Ha! I usually query Shawn about something I notice on his three speed set-up that I like, so I hope you don't mind if I ask you the same. About your Schwinn. What three speed are you using? I noticed what appeared to be a friction style thumb shifter in your picture, and could not find a picture of the non-drive side, or hub that adequately showed what was being used.
    Thank you for your time, and have a great week!
    Eric

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  2. That's a Sturmey Archer SRF 3-speed hub, and that's the shifter that came with it. It being a three speed, it is an indexed shifter, and so far, the whole set up works pretty well - no laborious research on my part, it's just the three speed wheel I found on Amazon when I decided to convert from a single speed to a triple.

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