Keith's Cycling Page

My Cycling Stuff

My Felt F60

My Masi Speciale Commuter Single Speed

My Dual Gear Single Speed Gary Fisher SuperCaliber

I have owned this bike from new, I bought it while running a bike shop in Jindalee, Queensland, Australia in 1991. I replaced the original SunTour gear with Shimano XT, made up some nice Mavic wheels with wheelsmith spokes and raced it for a few years, the pre-suspension years.
Over the years I swapped in some titanium handle bars, added some Profile bar ends changed the saddle MANY times. The bike followed me to the US while I lived in Santa Clara, California and would get me to work most days and back. It enjoyed quite a few rides accros the Alviso Slough.
These days I mainly ride Road, so the Fisher has been relgated to my "shop" bike, its the bike I tow the trailer which my kids ride in. So it was a candidate for my single speed conversion program.
I bought a Forte Single Speed conversion kit, and stripped off all the geared parts and decided on a nice 36/18 gear, which is high enough for cruising at about 20km/hr and low enough to pull the trailer (good thing I do road miles), but with that gearing its not very flexible, I needed another gear and considered putting all the gears back on.
BUT I had an idea, I had left the small ring, 24 tooth on the inside, and the chain line was sweet, so I decided to put a second cog on the rear, whith a chain line to match the small ring. The Forte rig is adjustable, so in about 30 seconds you can adjust it to whichever rear cog you like. This gives me a dual gear single speed of 34/18 or 24/24.
The chain length for this works for both quite well. A small trick, I run the hyberglide chain with the hyperglide cogs, as the Forte cogs required using a wider chain.
I rode the Fisher to the Gold Coast a few years ago, about 100km it had 21 gears then. I have a plan to ride the Fisher as a single speed to the Gold Coast one day, just to see how hard it would be, the average speed the first time was 20km/hr, I hope it will be about the same the second time.

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