Dave also mentioned that Mark seems to be recovering from his recent surgery and is feeling pretty good now, which is a good excuse for us to get more active about “organizing” rides (if one can apply that term to this group!), just for Mark's therapy of course. Dave will be doing a ride tomorrow from his house to kick things off. (Wait a minute, if the ride was for my therapy, he could have waited till I was back from the "Riviera". – Mark)

John Reese brought in a sample of the latest Three Rivers Park District bike map. They have several cases of these at the Hopkins Depot coffee shop (at Excelsior Blvd and Highway 169, or by bike at the intersection of the St Louis Park, Cedar Lake, and SW LRT trails) that are free for the asking. They are dated 2005 but still are missing several trail links that have been open for some time (such as phase two of the Greenway), so John wasn't dazzled by the bike-awareness of the map designers. Still, they're free and better than nothing.

Joe ?????? showed his Earthcycles Dragonflyer trike at Dave's urging. It was frame number 29, so Dave thinks that would be early in the second of the three production runs of 25 that they ever did (and the third run was never completed before the company folded). It has a long swingarm for Dave's favored “middle” suspension (the trike was copied from one of Dave's and he was consulted heavily during the development of it), plus an intermediate cluster to step up the gearing and also reduce pogoing due to hard pedaling. The suspension has a large elastomer that he has never felt any need to replace or experiment with, though elastomer rods are available by the foot (in various durometer ratings, and with or without a hole down the center) at local companies or over the Web. He uses the early white sidewall Hookworm tires and they show almost no wear yet because he is so scrupulous about keeping his toe-in setting within specs (2 mm works well, and much more than that accelerates tire wear drastically).

(On the 5 speed you have essentially two 3 speed hubs. The left lever determines whether the ultra wide ratio (-33%, 1:1 and +50%) or the medium ratio (-21%, 1:1 and +26%) gearset is in use.  Almost all riding is done in the medium ratio set, and the left lever is only used to make high gear even higher or low gear even lower.  Sounds confusing, but Jane got comfortable with it after one ride. Mark)

Dave rides most of the time using the medium range three speed gearset, leaving the wide range gearset for big hills (up or down). The secondary shifter is operated by an old Huret friction derailleur shifter mounted on the top tube, and Dave says it just has two positions (wide range gears active or not) that are not at all fussy to shift and can be shifted reliably with the non-indexed shift lever. One position has the shifter cable slack, while the other is a medium lever movement away from that (and Mark builds in a spring so it will tolerate a little bit of over-shifting).

He uses 46 and 22 tooth sprockets for a 54 inch middle gear, a setup he uses on all of his hub geared bikes. The 22 tooth sprocket is larger than stock and is the largest readily available Sturmey Archer sprocket. Mark can adapt a freewheel sprocket to go to even more teeth, but Dave doesn't generally need anything with lower gears than his setup.

Dave has alloy rims, though still in the odd English 26” size (ETRTO 590 - A.K.A. 650A - narrower and with a different bead diameter compared to the American 26”/MTB rim), and he says that Freewheel has a surprisingly good selection of tires in that size, including a high pressure (80 psi) Kenda he likes. Dave reminisced briefly about his first bike (that's about 30 bikes ago, folks!) that was a three speed he actually raced after switching to 700c sew-up tires!