Someone called recently asking for suggestions about what to do with the Cyo tailight wiring connectors if you’re not using a tailight. Unlike other dynamo headlights the tailight connectors for the Cyo are not connected to the headlight body, but attached to a few inches of wire. If you’re not using a tailight the stray wires look a little ragged.

One fix is the take a piece of heat shrink tubing and sleeve the connectors with the main headlight wire. Apply a little heat and you’re finished. The wires are tidied up and you can cut the heat shrink off with a razor to connect a tailight in the future.

A couple of announcements about the excellent IQ Cyo lights. After being out of stock of the black Cyo’s for a little while, I now have a small shipment of the R version Cyos, which will be all I have until the end of January/beginning of February (fingers crossed). However Busch and Muller have released a silver Cyo, which I have in both the R and regular version.

The bad news is that the silver Cyo’s are only produced in the senso version of the light. The senso version have a third switch position (on, off, and senso) in which the light shuts itself on or of depending on the light conditions. Personally I find this setting useless and it makes the lights cost an extra $10. However, some people like it, and even more people (myself included) have a weak spot or shiny silver bicycle parts.

I was able to build up one of the new Polyvalent framesets from Velo-Orange over the holiday. I won’t be able to take the bike for a long ride until the weekend (crossing fingers) but I have some observations from the build and short errand-running rides that might be useful for those considering the frameset.

My goal for the build was a spirited porteur–something that felt a lot like a road bike and could carry a large load on the front rack.  Parts selection was widely guided by what I had sitting in bins in the shop. The build went smoothly and I didn’t encounter any frame quirks. The welds are very nice and the flat black black frame color grew on me.

As luck would have it, a day after the bicycle was completed I received a call from my wife telling me she was at the post office picking up an unexpectedly large package. So the Polyvalent was able to do a little porteur duty immediately.

While very large, the box above wasn’t extremely heavy, and wind was much more of a concern on the ride home than the weight. When installing the VO porteur rack I made one simple change from the rack installation shown on their blog that improves the rack performance. If you click on the link you’ll see that mounting the porteur rack level on the PV moves the rack away from the headtube, creating a long lever between the rack and the single mounting point at the fork crown. I sacrificed a level rack and mounted the rack as far back as to shorten the rack strut/lever.

I’ve started to use the Polyvalent for sans toddler grocery runs. I usually treat these rides as a form of exercise, ride fairly quickly, and haven’t once felt the bicycle was holding me back at all. Although my schedule rarely allows it, I do like to ride with the local roadie club once in a while. I stick with the 17-18 mph group, and the rides are generally from 30 to 60 miles. I intended these rides to be the Polyvalent’s second use, and my first few miles have done nothing to make me think it won’t serve this purpose well.

The obligatory component list follows. For the interested the bicycle as pictured would cost $2175. This price includes assembly and two wheelbuilds. $2025 unassembled (wheels built, headset and bottom bracket installed). Framesets are $400. Call or e-mail to order.

• Nexus 8spd rear hub
• Alfine trigger shifter (akward and hideous–I spoke with Jtek yesterday and they should have their Alfine/Nexus barend shifters back in production in a month or two)
• Sugino XD700 compact double cranks used with single ring and Sugino chainguard
• VO bottom bracket, headset, seatpost, porteur rack, 650B fenders, and Diagonale rims
• Nitto Technomic Deluxe stem and Promenade bars
• Dia-Compe Giudonnet Levers with Tektro CR720 brakes
• Shimano DH-3N72 dynohub
• Busch & Muller Lumotec IQ Cyo Chrome Senso headlight and Planet Bike Superflash tailight
• Gran Bois Hetre tires
• Brooks B17 Champion Special
• MKS Sylvan Touring pedals
• Sunlite double legged kickstand

Happy New Year to all and best wishes for 2010. I’ve changed the shop walk-in hours which will now start at 1:30 instead of noon on the weekdays and 1pm on Saturday. I’m happy to set an appointment for those who want or need to come to the shop outside of walk-in hours.

The Christmas wheelbuiding special was such a success that I’ve decided to keep it around in a slightly modified form. Wheelbuilds with components purchased from us will be $15 for 2010.

Sometime on Christmas Eve I’ll close early for Christmas and I won’t return until the following Monday.

Locals, please note I will only be open by appointment from Christmas until January 4th. Call the shop or e-mail me if you need to stop by.

Web orders will ship during this time, and for long-distance customers everything will run normally except that I might be a little harder to catch on the phone. I’ll still be shipping orders and building wheels.

After a long period of unavailablity, Bobike Mini child seats are back.  Don’t forget a windscreen, which helps keep your little one a little warmer during cold winter months. Even at a moderate cycling speed of 15mph wind chill can drop the temperature by 8-10 degrees. Unlike you, your child doesn’t have the extra warmth provided by the work of pedaling. Properly bundling up often-less-than-thrilled-to-be-bundled small children can be frustrating, the windscreen makes getting on the bike a little less hassle and a little more comfortable.

We’ll receive our VO Polyvalent Frames on Monday. Until then I’ll have to refer you to the VO website. The dealer frames are shipping with a Gran Cru aluminum threaded headset. Frame, fork and headset will be $425, which saves you $15 on the headset. If you don’t want a headset, that’s fine. $400 for frame and fork alone. If you want a complete bike, I can of course build the framesets up with anything in our webstore, but I’m happy to special order anything we don’t regularly stock for complete bike orders. You’ll likely want to take advantage of the wheelbuilding special mentioned below if you need some 650B wheels to go with your Polyvalent.

Update: Frames are here, but I won’t have time to build a sample bike or add the frames to the webstore this week. If you’d like a frame or a complete bike please call me at the shop. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about sizing and frame features.

Through the end of the Christmas season wheelbuilding labor will be almost free–$5. This means you’ll save $50 on a handbuilt wheelset. The offer extends through the entirety of the Christmas season, so you have to the feast of the Epiphany (January 6) to take advantage.

As usual, if you’d like a wheel built with components you don’t find in our webstore, simply contact me. I’m happy to special order hub or rims that I don’t normally stock to build the wheel you want. The $5 labor offer is only good for wheels when all the wheel components are purchased from us, sorry. If you send me a hub to build up you’ll pay the normal $30 charge. To shop for wheel components start here.

We’ve added two new rims from our webstore, both are high-polished models from Velo-Orange. You can find both here.

The Terry website has posted a podcast interview with Bicycle Quarterly editor Jan Heine concerning tire performance. For years, bike geeks have believed that hard, narrow tires are significantly faster than wider tires or narrow tires used at lower air pressures. This understanding was confirmed by rolling resistance drum tests, which isolate the rolling resistance of tires on a hard, smooth surface. But rolling resistance alone doesn’t explain tire speed. Suspension losses need to be factored in when evaluating tire performance. Even on smooth roads, suspension losses are considerable, and tires (whether narrow or wide) with supple casings perform better than those with stiff casings (whether narrow are wide). Tire construction and proper inflation have much more to do with (actual, not perceived) speed rather than width, and tires that are too narrow (no matter how well constructed) are slower than the same tire in a wider size because of the excessive suspension losses of tires that are too narrow. All this and more in the podcast above, including why hard tires feel fast precisely because they’re inefficient.

Bicycle Quarterly has been experimenting and reporting on tire performance for the last couple of years. The interview will recover some of the finding for subscribers, and provides a concise summary for those who haven’t read the reports on the experiments.

On a related note, those who don’t subscribe to BQ can view Frank Berto’s tire pressure chart, republished in the magazine a couple of years ago. It’s a good resource for the home or shop.

Charlie Cunningham in the Autumn 2009 Bicycle Quarterly on the inclination of component manufacturers to make well engineered parts:

They don’t care any more. Today, what matters is who has the cheapest manufacturing and the best marketing and distribution, it doesn’t have a lot to do with the parts themselves. . . . They have to sell new stuff. How do you do that? You add features and you add materials, and if you can put a story behind it and make people think that it is better. . .  A lot of people buying that stuff don’t think about it much, perhaps they are not technically sophisticated, and they buy [the ad copy] hook, line, and sinker.