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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Belt Drive Odyssey Begins Now.....

Yes, "The Belt" is making a limited engagement run here and you know, first impressions are everything. They say that you need to grab their attention with something spectacular and then keep the suspense going until the ultimate climax, hopefully near the end.

So, how is "The Belt" doing so far? Well.......in a word........

Thud!

Yeah, I know. I am a skeptic and all, but this is hard to deny as a real, down to earth, honest to goodness "thud" of an impression. Here's the deal.....

"The Belt" has a zero tolerance policy towards lateral mis-alignment. Chains are definitely waaaay more forgiving in that respect. So, we found out that a minor mis-alignment condition existed with the bicycle we received sporting "The Belt" and that a "quick fix" was made that we should adopt. It was certainly easy to do the "fix", which fixed the out of alignment issue, but caused me to be out of alignment! You see, the fix involved moving the eccentric to the non-drive side as far as possible so that the crank is offset to the non-drive side by a huge margin. My body does not be diggin' it!

So, I am going to have to bust out the tool-age and put the "Fixinator" on this bad boy. Otherwise "The Belt" will be turning into a "The Chain" real fast like.

The Score: "The Belt": 0  "The Chain": 1

Stay tuned for further updates as they become available...........
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6 comments:

  1. mw8:04 AM

    shaft drive next!

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  2. Unknown12:48 PM

    The good news it that it's far less costly to convert FROM a belt that it costs to convert TO a belt!

    How much fun are Raleigh dealers going to have if that bike ships like that?

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  3. Guitar Ted2:02 PM

    @Ben: They are making a running change, or so I hear. I got my issue resolved by swapping the front ring to the inner position and everything came out right then.

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  4. Small Adventures3:20 PM

    Ugh......belts.....at least it ain't serpentine =P

    Steve

    PS: I'll keep my chain,thankyouverymuch! =)

    ReplyDelete
  5. MarvinK11:20 PM

    A friend of mine has a Trek Soho (internal gearing + belt). It didn't have any alignment problems and she was happy with the performance for the 6 months she's had it. She's decided to trade the commuter for a CX bike... so she's selling it... but not because of the belt!

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  6. Guitar Ted6:55 AM

    @Marvin K: That's cool.....and not unexpected when it comes to commuting and belt drive bikes. Even Gates tells me that commuting is far less stressful to The Belt than single speed mountain biking is. makes sense, no?

    And that is where Gates is having issues with The Belt. On mountain bikes, which are almost universally being ridden as single speeds with The Belt. Mountain biking also has much higher peak torque loads at much lower rpms than commuting, which is the main source of their issues at Gates.

    ReplyDelete