(Credit: Shoreline Area News)
Magpie Thrift Store
This summer, we started selling some of our used bikes down the street at the new Magpie Thrift Store location in Shoreline. We are super excited about this partnership! They are a great group and have very similar conservation goals as us. When we reached out to them, they told us they needed bikes for their store, and we are more than happy to oblige! We now have a little corner of the store at Magpie where we sell more of our used bikes. With how crowded things can get in the Shoreline Bike Shack, this is a great way for people to pursue our stock in a less cluttered, chaotic manner. Go check it out!
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Partsbin Drivetrain Review
Ok this next section is going to get in the weeds a bit and wont be exactly “brief” so i put it at the end if that isn't your thing.
I love the Bike Shack for a lot of reasons. It’s great for the environment: bikes are great for the environment on their own, and refurbishing perfectly good older bikes to get used again is *extra* good for the environment. It is a fantastic resource for people trying to learn how to do their own bike maintenance (I learned everything I know from the bike shack and from Park Tool youtube videos!). It is a space to work on your bike with all the tools you need and not have to worry about buying some random bottom bracket tool you only use once a year.
These are great arguments for the Bike Shack, but one I don't often see discussed is how the Bike Shack encourages creativity. Bikes are just complicated enough to be serviceable by non-professionals, and yet highly customizable to all kinds of use cases and tastes. The Bike Shack, and other bike non-profits like it, are great places to find weird parts or test out new ideas without buying a bunch of expensive new bike parts. Wanna try a different style of handlebar? A new crankset? A different seat? You’ll probably find one at your local bike co-op for pennies on the dollar.
And so, to inspire some would-be bike-tinkerers out there, I am going to show you the drivetrain I have cobbled together for my own bike. Like almost everything on my bike (including the frame!), my drivetrain is made from parts I've found around the Seattle area in places like the Bike Shack, Bikeworks, and other used bike repositories.
My idea with this drivetrain was to push the limits of the gear range available on a bike. Like I said, this is gonna get a bit nerdy here, so buckle up for some numbers. A typical drivetrain on a modern gravel bike has about a 400-500% gear range over 24 gears, and costs about $600-$1000. My drivetrain has a 729% gear range over 30 gears, and cost me a grand total of about $90. Quite the difference in performance to price ratio if I do say so myself!
Now this drivetrain is anything but fancy. The rear derailleur is a S-RIDE M410 shifting through a 10 speed Sunrace 11-42 cassette. The front derailleur is an old 90’s Shimano Deore triple shifting through 22-32-42 Shimano crankset meant for a 7 or 8 speed system. I have a SRAM 10 speed chain. And the shifters are friction shifters from Microshift. All of this stuff was found at a steep discount because it was used, and much of it needed some light repairs before it all worked properly (especially the rear derailleur, that I had to fabricate a part for). And, as you might have noticed, aside from having two Shimano components, nothing on this drivetrain is matching. A real frankenstein drivetrain.
And does it work? Yes. Very well, even. After multiple tours and daily commuting on this thing over the last year, I have easily put over 1000 miles on it, and it still shifts just fine. Plus I have low enough gears to go up hills in downtown Seattle without breaking a sweat. Will I ever switch to something else? Definitely! But that is the beauty of thrifting: when you get bored of something, you can send it back into the great cycle of the circular economy, and find something new (to you) without breaking the bank. If you are thinking about doing some mad science on your own bike’s drivetrain, I highly recommend this messing around with this website to learn about gear-ranges and gear-inches: www.gear-calculator.com
Until next time, I hope to see you all out there experimenting with your own bikes and combining parts that were never meant to go together! Ride safe!
