Reply To: What to do? Bike ideas.

#346381

Lessons learned from trying to turn an entry level bike into an on-the-cheap legit trail bike.

I had converted to 1x with wide rims and hefty tires with the intention of adding a dropper post, short stem, wide bar and air sprung fork. But I made a mistake – I forgot to put my new chain on and chewed up the brand new wide-ratio cassette. This lead to a lot of trial and error to fix that problem. Then a little stick jumped up and killed my rear wheel and derailleur. Just as soon as that was fixed my free hub imploded. I have fixed everything but it will never be the bike that I want it to be and I will not be putting that new fork and cockpit on.

So what did I learn? Inexpensive is good – cheap is bad. It isn’t just chain retention, a clutch derailleur would avoid the chain such issue that I have. There is such thing as too much tire. That last one is hard to tell when buying tires online. The grip is nice but I am so much slower and it is so tiring.