Future Perfect

one of the louder things you can hear in your own home is a bike tire blowout

to learn that the rear wheel in this new old bike I’m fixing up has a “Sturmey-Archer S3C Tricoaster” three-speed coaster hub, which is to say that it actually has a goofy little transmission surrounding the rear axle which is responsible for both shifting and braking. Doing both of these in the same hub is perhaps a little overambitious, which is apparently why it took Sturmey-Archer five tries to make one that could do both without having the brake fail if you shifted bad. But having the shifter and brake in the hub does make it safer to ride in wet and icy conditions, so who’s really to say if 1960s British bicycle engineering was good or bad?

The new old bike—a 197X Rollfast Starlight—managed a fifteen-mile ride with no major¹ problems! It feels very weird to roll around on this sort of low-slung roadster after a few years perched up high on old Schwinn road bikes.

1. By which I mean that the shifting is exactly as finicky as you’d expect and the braking distance is uncomfortably long and the pedals locked a few times but I could still brake so it was fine and the rear wheel doesn’t want to stay in alignment. So, par for the course.

to learn that the rear wheel in this new old bike I’m fixing up has a “Sturmey-Archer S3C Tricoaster” three-speed coaster hub, which is to say that it actually has a goofy little transmission surrounding the rear axle which is responsible for both shifting and braking. Doing both of these in the same hub is perhaps a little overambitious, which is apparently why it took Sturmey-Archer five tries to make one that could do both without having the brake fail if you shifted bad. But having the shifter and brake in the hub does make it safer to ride in wet and icy conditions, so who’s really to say if 1960s British bicycle engineering was good or bad?