Shifting Gears

Last summer, for unhappy reasons, I became the custodian of a bicycle by Richard Sachs, who is (say it with me now) the Karl Farbman of Bicycles:

While over that time I have made some changes to it (seatpost and stem for fit, wheels because of wheel stuff), I’ve refrained from making more substantive alterations–not because I’m trying to maintain it as some kind of memorial, but more because everything has been working really nicely and I’ve been enjoying it very much as is. Also, when you start tinkering there’s always the danger you’ll be tempted to acquire new stuff, and while I’d never completely forswear the acquisition of new bicycles and components, I’ve been doing my best to take on new stuff simply to augment the perfectly good bikes I already have.

However, if you suffer from The Illness, no matter how good the bike you’re riding may be, you can’t hep thinking about ways to make even it better–and in the case of the Farbman, my thoughts have turned repeatedly to that single-ring drivetrain. What I like about it is its simplicity; it works reliably and well, and if I were using this bike to race cyclocross it would be perfect. However, I am not using this bike to race cyclocross, and at this point in my life I can pretty much guarantee I never will again. Instead, I am using the Farbman as what people these days might term an “all-road” or (egads) “gravel” bike, and in that capacity I do miss having more than one chainring, since on the road having to toggle your way though a bunch of gears rather than just make a front shift can feel a little pointless, like taking several baby-sized steps instead of one big grown-up step.

Another issue with the drivetrain has been that the range is a bit narrow for general road riding. It could use a little more on both the high end and the low end, and with a single ring drivetrain like this you can have either/or, but you can’t have both. Thanks to gravity, adding lower gears is more of a priority than adding higher ones, and the derailleur can handle a larger cassette than what’s on there, so a simple solution would be to change the cassette. However, I don’t have such a cassette on hand, I’m trying not to get new stuff, and ultimately a few more teeth aren’t going to make that much of a difference anyway.

Then there’s the SRAM shifter. I certainly don’t hate it, and I do get why some people prefer SRAM over the others. (When SRAM road shifters first came out my friend changed all his bikes to them and never looked back.) However, of the Big Three integrated road bike shifters of this era, mechanically and ergonomically SRAM are my least favorite. (As for Shimano versus Campagnolo, for me it’s too close to call.) The oddest thing to me about SRAM shifters is that, because of the whole “double-tap” thing, if you’re in your lowest gear and you accidentally try to downshift (as you sometimes do when you’re on a very steep climb and you’re under duress), the system will actually upshift instead, which is the last thing you want when you’re on a very steep climb and under duress. My friend was one of those preternaturally smooth riders who rarely made technical mistakes on the bike, so for him it was most likely a total non-issue, and even an ungainly rider such as myself only makes this mistake maybe every 10 rides or something. So while I could certainly keep using the SRAM shifter indefinitely and be perfectly happy, when you’ve got bins full of other types of shifters as I do you can’t help thinking about changing them.

However, until now I have not changed the drivetrain to address any of the above, and that’s for want of one simple part:

See, the Farbman has top tube cable routing, and in order to use your standard issue bottom-pull derailleur you simply bolt one of these things to the seat tube (there’s a mounting point already there for it and everything), loop the cable around it, and that’s it.

But I don’t happen to have the part.

So why not just spend the measly $8.99 for the part and change the drivetrain? Because I have The Illness, and I’ve made a weird commitment not to buy new stuff for my current bikes whenever possible, all so I can pretend I’m not being wasteful and therefore justify the future acquisition of a new bicycle. So without this part, which would be the literal lynchpin for a double- or even triple-ring conversion of the Farbman bike, I have refrained from doing so until now.

Then, this past weekend, I realized that, while I may not have the pulley thingy, I do have a top-pull derailleur. (When I was clearing out my friend’s bike stuff, I sold or donated almost all of it, though I still have a few odds and ends–including, as it turns out, one or two top-pull derailleurs.) So 14 months after becoming the Farbman’s caretaker, I figured I’d finally reconfigure the drivetrain.

With the front shifting issue potentially solved, the problem wasn’t a lack of parts; it was a surfeit of them. I’ve got all sorts of shifters and cranks and derailleurs, so I started pulling stuff out and mixing and matching. How should I approach this logic problem? Did I want friction bar-end shifting? Integrated shifting? Should I just move the Campy drivetrain over wholesale from the Bargain Basement Bike? Since the top-pull derailleur was technically for a mountain bike system it might not work perfectly with an integrated Shimano shifter on a double crank, so either the Campy or at least a front friction shifter seemed like the best option. Maybe I’d even go triple and do a front bar-end and rear STI thing. I even weighed a Dura Ace STI lever and a brake lever/bar end combo to see what the weight difference was–not because it matters, but because I was curious:

Turns out the difference is negligible:

Finally, after considering all the various permutations, I narrowed it down to front and rear bar-end shifters, a Silver3 crank set up as a triple, and two low-normal rear derailleurs (low-normal pairs very well with bar-end shifters):

Ultimately I chose the OM-1, not only because it matched the crank, but also because its chain wrap capacity would be a perfect match with the cassette and crank and even let me keep using the same chain:

I budgeted about two hours to do all this work and it ended up taking at least six, but despite my best efforts to screw up everything went together very smoothly, and I was even able to re-use the bar tape:

That’s a Silver derailleur, and a Silver crank, but as much as I liked the idea of a Farbman with an all-Rivendell drivetrain those are not Silver shifters. Instead I used these:

These are special, because they’re 10-speed Dura-Ace shifters with a friction mode, which few people realize ever existed:

Of course the OM-1 derailleur is meant to be used with friction shifters, so I’m obviously using the Shimano shifters in friction mode, right? Wrong! Rivendell don’t tout this, but unofficially the OM-1 works with indexed shifters too: