Every fan and promoter of urban cycling simply needs a copy of Shirley Agudo’s “Bicycle Mania”. You can regard it as a photo book, with probably the best collection of Dutch cycling photos ever assembled. Even as an Amsterdam resident and amateur(ish) photographer I marvel at the shots in these pages. Have a peek at a few examples here at the Eduard Planting gallery.

But “Bicycle Mania” goes much deeper. The photos are accompanied by well-informed and thoughtfully written text covering in sections covering the how and why the Dutch have achieved (and continue to build upon) the world’s best of nearly everything in transportation cycling: broad popularity, amazing infrastructure, safety, fun and pure variety on wheels. The text is in both English and Dutch, handy learning for those anglophiles who want to delve deeper into Dutch cycling culture than English can take you. Numerous authorities are interviewed, hyperbole and abuse of statistics is thankfully avoided and and it’s just a good read. In a nutshell: Recommended.

Read more about it at the Bicycle Mania website.

In related news a bike photo contest is being held in conjunction with the launch of “Bicycle Mania” by The XPat Journal magazine. First prize is (yep, you guessed it)… a custom built WorkCycles Secret Service bike.

Think you can take this one home? Well, you’d better act quickly since the deadline is 20 January. Photos must be emailed as jpeg’s of maximum 3Mb to: editor@xpat.nl. One photo entry per person and include your full name and phone number.

Wanna check out the bike first to see if it’s worth the trouble? It’s at the Eduard Planting Fine Art Photographs gallery where a number of Agudo’s photographs are on display. I also “borrowed” the above image from their site.

I have to admit that I have a lot of bicycles, and I’m referring to bikes that are really just mine and not somehow part of the WorkCycles fleet or inventory. I periodically cull the flock but some have too much sentimental value to sell, even if I almost never ride them. There’s the Daedalus mountain bike from 1990, designed by me and built by Kent Ericksen of Moots in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. There were six made of which I still know the whereabouts of four. I don’t think I could ever see my lovely De Rosa go. I bought it a year or two old from a friend in about 1982 and raced and trained on it for years until breaking one of the silly diamond shaped chainstays. My friend Brian Spitz (who built some of the world’s cleanest race frames for a while) repaired it but then I hung it up and forgot about it for 15 years. A couple years ago I decided I wanted to get back on a racing bike, found it still wrapped in paper and built it up again. Now it gets ridden regularly, much closer to it’s birthplace in Italy. There are many others, in order of how long I’ve owned them:

Those are all complete, rideable bikes. I also have a number of bikes in various states of incompleteness and a rather absurdly large collection of (mostly old enough to have no monetary value) parts. The semi-complete bikes include:

At least all of the old transport and city bikes are destined for the WorkCycles museum and a few are already on display. A few bikes including the city bike, Brompton, papa bike and racing bike are ridden regularly. Some of the others will return to service when the time is right. Amsterdam has, for example, a fantastic indoor velodrome and I’ve been itching to get back on the track, though that might have to wait until Pascal is old enough to ride too.

Anyhow this is a long intro to noting that I got another bike. This one is a transportfiets (Dutch delivery bike) from the firm “Yankee” in Hoogeveen (where Azor is now and Union once was). I’d never heard of Yankee but that doesn’t mean much; until the 1960’s there were hundreds of small firms building bikes in the Netherlands. Lugs, tubing and components were bought in from various suppliers and the bikes were built from scratch. The quality was typically excellent but the designs were very conservative. Only experts can tell many of the bikes apart and little changed from the 1920’s through the 1960’s or even 1970’s in some cases. A few of the manufacturers were known for particularly high quality (Empo, Fongers, Gazelle, Simplex) and/or unique design (Fongers, Locomotief, Maxwell, Simplex). Yankee though has somehow disappeared into the gorges of history.

Despite it’s near anonymity my Yankee is a beautiful bike, even after at least 50 years and perhaps even a decade or two more. I purchased it from a neighbor. When he brought it in it wasn’t pretty but it was clearly solid, complete and quite original. He’d originally bought the bike some 15-20 years ago for his catering business but no longer needed it. Since then we’ve mostly stripped it down, thoroughly cleaned and polished everything, straightened the front carrier and handlebars, replaced the tires (with better old ones) and assorted other improvements. Only the pedals, which weren’t original anyway, are “incorrect”.

You might not be familiar with the old Dutch transportfietsen and aside from the lovely brass head badge this one’s as typical as they get. Here’s a rundown of some of it’s features:

Perhaps the most obvious feature of a classic transportfiets is the front carrier, always fixed to the wide, 1″ diameter handlebar, very heavy fork crown and front axle. Thus this giant carrier swings with the wheel making it a handful to ride when loaded. Typically a huge basket or wooden crate was mounted on the carrier to carry bread, meat, milk or whatever else the tradesman (or his son) delivered. The load capacity was huge, both in volume and weight. This carrier was made by the firm “Roelewiel” who made the carriers for many brands of bikes.

The reason these bikes still exist despite their hard lives is the extraordinarily robust construction. This bike weighs almost 40kg. There’s not a single dent in the fenders or frame tubes and the frame was still perfectly straight. The drive chain, chainring and cog are 1/2″ x 3/16″, like on mopeds and small motorcycles. The crank bearings are larger diameter and wider. The cranks are massive chunks of steel.

Bonus for the hardcore nerds who spotted that the left crank is mounted backwards: Yes, I’m aware of it. It’s that way because the crank was apparently bent in an accident and after straightening it still has a little “S” bend so it now fits better backwards.

Before WWII all Dutch transportfietsen had 28″ wheels, generally 28 x 1.75″ like this bike. For those keeping up with current fads and trends that’s the same size known now as a “29′er”. After WWII they were built with either the 28″ wheels or fatter 26″ wheels (for even heavier duty applications). My Yankee has the classic Vredestein “Transport Extra Zwaar” tires. This translates to “transport extra heavy” and they weren’t kidding; these tires weigh some 1500g each and they’re supported by special steel rims that weigh a couple kilos each.

The early transportfietsen were mostly or all fixed gears, meaning they had no means of freewheeling nor did they have brakes. The rider slowed the bike by means of resisting the rotation of the pedals. This was no mean feat on a heavy and heavier loaded bike with the further momentum of such heavy wheels. Of course these bikes were only ridden by professionals, though even they indulged in competitions. During WWII the occupying Nazis banned fixed gear bicycles (really, I’m not making this up) perhaps for a couple reasons:

The Yankee has a coaster brake hub I’ve never seen though. It’s a Bendix like the American hubs I grew up with, except that this one is different. Inside and out it looks much like the German Torpedo but still different, most notably that it has a helical actuator instead of the roller clutch used in the Torpedo. In any case it’s definitely a special, heavy duty model with a 3/16″ cog threaded in place with a locknut.

Am I going to ride it? Nah, probably not for a while. I’m just going to hang it up in our Lijnbaansgracht shop as one more constant reminder of what “quality” means.

Fresh on the heels of Alexis’ escapades at Buckingham Palace, Sage and Cooper also reached London on their way down from Scotland… but not without a little adventure in Wales en route:

English country living

Here’s Sage’s explanation for the posh, English countryside accommodations:

This odd pic comes with an odd story. Cooper and I found a nice hilltop campsite on what seemed to be unowned or no mans land. We were awakened at 9pm by a man who seemed homeless and crazy. With a beer in his hand he tells us the owner of the property is psychotic and just came out of prison for almost beating someone to death. He warns us that if we stayed there the man will run us over in his jeep while we’re a sleep. He tells us to pack up and meet him down the hill at his place and he’ll give us a spot to camp. To make a long story short he wasn’t homeless, but is crazy and was telling the truth about his neighbor. He offered us to stay for several days at his gypsy like home, but one night was more than enough.

I also enjoy camping “wild” while bicycle or motorcycle touring, especially when I’m trying to cover some distance fairly quickly in a rural area. I just ride until it’s almost dark and find a nice, quiet spot that seems to be either public or wouldn’t be noticed anyway. If stealth seems necessary I skip the tent and hide the bike with whatever is available.

This has also backfired on me too. One late, cold night in the Ardennes in Belgium I tossed my sleeping bag out near a dirt track. I slept fine under the stars for a while until I awoke to the creepy feeling that I wasn’t alone. As I came to my senses I heard groaning, breathing, stomping noises all around me. Peeking my head out of the sleeping bag I was met with the noses of a half dozen cows poking at me. Better cows than psychotic ex-cons.

Sage continues about their experience riding Dutch bikes in foreign territory:

We’ve been unable to have a bike shop look at our bikes due to the shops being closed, refusing to look at bikes they haven’t sold, being too busy to look at our bikes, or wanting 50pounds for each bike check up. So three weeks ago week decided to do it our selves and I think its better that we did.

What’s up with this anyway? Two polite travelers come into your shop and ask you to perform the simplest of all services on their most critical equipment. Performing the one-month check on such simple, tough bikes might take 15 minutes if you’re thorough, and certainly doesn’t require any skill that even the most moderately experienced mechanic doesn’t possess. You refuse or ask an exorbitant sum? I don’t get it but friends and customers often refer to bicycle shops as unfriendly, unhelpful places full of elitist, prima-donna boys. I suppose this is one of the reasons we’ve only found about 20 dealers we’re willing to sign on as WorkCycles dealers.

Anyhow the bikes survived their wrenching (probably just checking that various nuts and bolts are tight, and adjusting the chain tension if they were a bit bold) and Sage and Cooper rode into London.

I’m not quite sure about the context of the above image so I’ll propose a few possibilities and let you decide which you prefer:

And to prove they actually visited London they sent this picture in front of some very Londoney looking old building across a river.

In the previous installment of the Sage and Cooper adventures I discussed the various Shimano roller brakes and noted the impending arrival of the new IM80 roller brake… the brake that could solve our utility bike braking woes. That brake is now a reality; We saw them at the recent Eurobike expo and now have (apparently pre-production) samples to test.

Firstly here is the Shimano IM80 rollerbrake complete. The fancy cooling fin is cute but more importantly the integrated cable stop means that this brake can be retrofitted on almost any front fork with a drum brake type reaction arm holder. That’s different from the previous top of the line IM70 which requires a fork with a cable stop… or handy souls like WorkCycles mechanics who weld cable stop tabs onto the brakes themselves.

Here’s the real “meat” of the story though; the braking surface is V shaped like the IM70 but bigger, and the roller actuation system absolutely dwarfs that of all previous model roller brakes. The IM70 actuation rollers are shown at right. We’ll now install our samples on a (heavily loaded) bike and commence testing!

I wrote in an earlier post about the two ex-Marines riding WorkCycles Secret Service bikes around the world. They previously sent a photo anonymously from their Blackberry (that much I could read in the email) of one of them somewhere in the UK. Well now they’re apparently somewhere else, judging from the different, hilly scenery in this photo. And they’ve traded camera duty thus we see our other protagonist in this story… though I honestly can’t remember which one of the two is Sage. I think it’s the guy in this picture. Detailed descriptions are clearly not their forte.

[UPDATE: In this photo we see Cooper while in the previous photo it's Sage. Glad that's cleared up.]

Speaking of riding the Secret Service in terrain hillier than pannekoeken flat Holland and also of non-detailed descriptions, we were tinkering with Shimano roller brakes today. Shimano makes several versions of their nearly maintenance-free roller brake but their literature and website offer almost no information about the differences between them. Countless conversations with the Shimano tech support guys were fruitless. There are three basic versions of roller brakes commonly found on quality bikes:

For about a year or so we’ve been fitting the IM70 to all Bakfiets Cargobikes and the Secret Service, partially because they look cool but mostly because it clearly has a more consistent, snappy feel and is more powerful. This baffled us since the braking unit in the center of each rollerbrake seemed to be exactly the same unit. In theory then there shouldn’t be much difference.

But today our chief mechanic Eric showed me something new: They’d opened up one of each type of rollerbrake to check out the guts and it turns out that the IM70 is actually special. While the IM40 and IM50 share the same flat braking surface (like a drum brake except in steel), the IM70 has a “V” shaped, or rather double conical braking surface. This gives it more braking surface area and probably makes it self-adjusting as well.

The problem though is that the front IM70 doesn’t have it’s own cable stop, thus meaning that it only fits on front forks equipped with a little cable stop tab. Many bikes don’t have these.

Enter the Shimano IM80 roller brake due for introduction shortly. Again the Shimano literature is just worthless marketing garble but at least it’s visible from the photos that the cable stop is built into this one. Let’s just hope that they’re using the better V-shaped brake surface.

Oh, just to back up a little here… “What’s a roller brake” you might ask, or perhaps a little more advanced question: “how is a roller brake different from a drum brake or a disk brake?” I’ll try to explain briefly, without photos. If that doesn’t work I’ll try again later WITH photos.

Drum brake: Two semi-cylindrical “shoes” get pressed against the inside of a cylindrical drum. The drum rotates with the wheel while the shoes are stationary in the frame or fork. The shoes are pressed outward at one end by means of a cam. More sophisticated drum brakes have been fitted to motorcycles and cars but, to my knowledge, never to bicycles.

Disk brake: A disk rotates with the wheel and the sides of the disk get squeezed by flat pads. The pads can be either cable actuated through a helix or hydraulically actuated.

Roller brake: The IM40 and IM50 are basically just drum brakes with a six lobed actuation cam that presses the shoes outward radially over their whole length instead of just at one point. The roller brake shoes are also steel, running in a bath of special graphite grease. Does your rollerbrake make noise? Squirt fresh grease in.

The IM70 roller brake has the same actuation as the IM40 and IM50 but uses a special type of drum described above.

I’m sure that’s all just totally clear for you know.

A couple weeks ago two young, fit looking, American guys visited WorkCycles Veemarkt shop to look at bikes. Their wishes were clear: the bikes must be simple, very durable and able to carry a decent load. That pretty much describes most of our bikes so the conversation continued and they test rode a number of bikes. After a while it became apparent that these two bikes were not just going to be ridden around the city. No, they’ll be ridden around the world, in no particular hurry, and they don’t seem especially concerned about the challenges that await them. A tough city bike does actually makes a good touring bike and we do periodically sell bikes to be toured on. There have even been some good stories such as the couple who rode a classic Dutch trike (bakfiets) all the way back to Copenhagen, but riding WorkCycles bikes around the world is a first as far as we know.

After some discussion of the bike options they decide to go for almost identical Secret Service NND’s. This is a variant with Shimano’s largest roller brakes front and rear but with a single speed freewheel. I convince them to gear the bikes at least a little on the low side: 38/18 or 19 if I recall correctly. The bikes get our usual frame-mounted front carriers and very heavy duty extended rear carriers. They look suspiciously like modern versions of my old Swiss Condor Military bike.

With the important choices out of the way we get to talking about their plans. I’m curious about how two quite young Americans end up in Amsterdam to buy bikes and can then take several years to ride around the world. At least to my untrained eye these are not rich trust-fund kids. Actually they seem more like military types and that turns out to be the case.

The rough summary is this (please fill me in here so I can correct myself in your next update): These guys are former US Marines. Either one or both performed missions so noxious and dangerous that they’ve been honorably discharged and retired from service. The military apparently doesn’t expect them to live long though they brushed those claims off nonchalantly. Whether it was out of self knowledge, youthful optimism or bravado I’ve no idea.

In the photo above they’ve hit the first hills in England and they intend to remain in the UK for a couple months. I’ll post more updates of their travels as they come in. Of course I’m looking forward to seeing them in exotic locales, such as slogging it across the Urals. I’m also very curious to see how the bikes do and how they get modified along the way; Will the fenders and chain cases get jettisoned? Will the gearing be changed or will they be content to just push the loaded bikes up the mountains? With some luck we’ll see.

Happy travels guys and keep the updates coming!

All WorkCycles bikes are built to order for their new owners, but we generally keep them quite understated. After all they’re workhorses. Sometimes, though, we just enjoy making something more special. This bike was an experiment in combining the beautiful, curved tube Oma frame with the lighter parts of the Secret Service… and perhaps we then got a little overzealous. The result is still an omafiets but definitely not the one your grandmother rode. Nonetheless it remains a tough, utilitarian bike with full LED/dynamo lighting, fenders, front carrier, chaincase etc.

We were a little sad to see her go but she’s clearly going to a good home; a lovely, sporty woman in Amsterdam who rides 1 1/2 hours per day. Her husband also rides one of our bikes.

In case you’re wondering what one of these babies will set you back, it was €1200 as you see it. Really, that’s a bargain for so much hand-made love you can enjoy every day for decades.

Why bother advertising when your customers make sweet videos like this with testimonials about your bikes? Thanks very much Mark and Mark and I wish you many years of pleasure from your new WorkCycles Secret Service!

You might be wondering what this plan is that enabled Mark to buy the bike. In the Netherlands there is a tax law (called “fietsenplan” or “bedrijfsfiets”) to promote cycling. An employee can purchase a bike once every three years with pre-tax salary. You thus save 35-50% on the cost of the bike, depending on your tax bracket. The rule is very straightforward and the only real limitation is that the ruling only applies to the first €750 of bicycle price and €250 of accessories though the tax service (“belastingdienst”) doesn’t seem to care how it gets added up. The bike can cost more but you have to pay out of pocket for the portion over €1000. This law applies to all employed people in the country so, as you can imagine, many of the bikes WorkCycles sells locally are purchased under this ruling.

Nog een bijzondere transportfiets/stadsfiets van de WorkCycles skunkworks. Op basis van de onopvallende WorkCycles Secret Service fiets hebben we deze bijzonder stoere herenfiets met 8 versnellingen gemaakt.

Enkele bijzonderheden:

1. Handgesoldeerd frame met matzwarte poederlak
2. Frame-vaste voordrager
3. Achteruit remgrepen met remkabels verborgen onder kurk stuurlint
4. Shimano Nexus 8 versnellingsnaaf met shifter op stuurpen
5. Shimano Nexave rollerbrakes met verkoelingschijven
6. Naafdynamo, LED achterlicht met standlight en B & M halogeen koplamp
7. Continental Sport Contact banden met een mooie gladde profiel
8. Hebie chain-glider kettingkast

Terwijl deze “veloporteur” vrij normaal eruitziet neemt het eigenlijk veel werk om alles samen te passen. Bijvoorbeeld deze achteruit remgrepen passen niet in een stadsfiets stuurbocht zonder flink vijlen. Daardoor zijn zulke custom fietsen niet goedkoop: Deze kost zijn gelukkige eigenaar ongeveer €1300.

Maar dan is hij toch mooi en fietst heel fijn – verschrikkelijk snel en soepel voor een fiets die 35kg bagage voorop mee kan nemen. Is het dus zoveel geld voor een unieke en tijdloze fiets die je voor de volgende 30 jaar blij en trots gaat maken?