Surly Ogre( Pitch Black) with Rohloff TS OEM2 Disc Brake external gear mech hub

I am glad I got to the point to write about this build. It took me 6 months to get all the parts and it took me so long because of financial reasons. But once you buy the internal gear hub (IGH) Rohloff, the commitment is made and you should keep pushing/buying/building. People with unlimited funding available should disregard this introduction.
First pic: Surly Ogre frame kit (large), or size 20"

Velocity Blunt 35 rear wheel laced with 36 Sapim spokes. In the center is the mighty Rohloff, anodized in black. Power of understatement. Schwalbe  Big Apple tires 29 X 2.35. The Velocity Blunt have  a rim

opening of 35 mm, which will offer the Schwalbe tire a very good, cruiser like setting.
This is a CroMo frame with horizontal dropouts, Rohloff ready.
A few more pics:

This is how the rear end looks like. The IGH will take every available slot/threaded hole/space.

This is the front end of the bike; just regular components, nothing fancy but everything of very good quality. For example, the head set is a Cane Creek series 40. The bottom bracket is a regular Shimano with external bearings.

 I did not have the money to splurge on chris king or paul components. The focus is on the Rohloff. More pics coming;

Everything is coming together. Ratio is 36/16 (crank/rear sprocket) or 2.25 which is bigger than  the 2.1 recommended by Rohloff. I assume everybody reading this is already aware/cognoscente of  the Rohloff instructions.

This is how the bike looks now. Fully functional, Rohloff shifting through  all 14 gears, bike running as smooth as butter/silk/whatever your opinion of flawless would be.

I will be updating the blog with pertinent info about this build. In a way I am glad it is over. In hindsight, it has been a great experience. Not exactly  the "time of my life", but great, challenging, demanding at times. For someone who has never built a bike with an IGH. I think that one should ride a Rohloff to understand it. It is mostly automotive technology creeping into the bicycling industry. A planetary gear box as complex as your automatic transmission.

More pics with the chain line and shifter  cable routing.

The bike weighs a whopping 31.6 lbs (14.33 kg.), by far the heaviest bike in my fleet. Again ,the configuration is: threaded spindle (TS), OEM2, disc brake (DB) and external gear mech.

For the time being, there is a lot of friction in the "system". I have to break it in. So far, I rode less then 50 miles on it. Although very smooth it is hard work for me pushing the pedals on this 2 wheel tractor.

Lately (Jan 2016) I added a Surly tug nut to the rear axle to prevent the rear wheel from moving forward when pedaling hard. This is a weakness of the horizontal dropouts; the rear wheel will tend to move forward in the dropouts, no matter how tight the M10 nuts are tightened on the threaded spindle.

I also replaced the wtb saddle with a Brooks B17 one.

The bike got close to 33 lbs. now

I took a trip to Pelee Island, somewhere in the middle of Lake Erie, in between Leamington, ON. and Sandusky, OH. (4/2016)

 18 nautical miles from Leamington. We did the water front trail, half paved, half gravel. About 20 miles long. The vinery was closed...too early in the season.

I wonder if any Rohloff equipped bike has made it to this location

Detroit Eastern Market 29MAR2015

Today I drove to Cobo Center in Detroit, MI.  (60 miles round trip from where I live) with the purpose of visiting the North American Bike Show.
http://noam.bike/com
By the time I got there the show was already over; they pulled out from the COBO Expo Center the day before.  I was very disappointed but recovered quickly and  took a few pictures from the COBO roof:

And a few more towards the  GM building:

From certain points (of view) the Detroit Skyline/Downtown buildings look very interesting. There is some fine architecture to be seen here.
I decided to go to the Eastern Market (Mack Ave. and I-75) instead to do some shopping.
Having arrived there around 11 am I found out that the market would not open until noon. Another hit (read "miss") for the  day.
Here are some pics from Eastern Market:

They sell meats and cold meats prepared using methods and techniques from Eastern/Central Europe.  The prices are very decent if you buy in large amounts. Also veggies , fish and seeds are of a very good quality, again , if you are willing to buy "large". This is not Costco:it has flair and panache.

The light is very bright and sharp around here ( coordinates:42N83W); one needs welding goggles from March thru October. Or at least, this is how I feel...

Some Slow Roll Bike event was underway; although sunny it was rather cold and windy for this time of the year (30F and 15- 25mph wind)

Some bikes and bikers taking part/enduring the cold. First three pics show cruisers, or a rare breed of bike which one could only see in Detroit and maybe in California

More pcs about this exotic, post-industrial location:

I didn't wait for the market to open and drove back home.

At home there is another piece of gear waiting to be part of a new bike, a disk brake Rohloff internal speed hub (handbuilt in Germany), laced to a Velocity rim 36 spoke.

I would probably have to eat just rice and beans for the rest of the year  so that I could pay off  this stuff. Ein Wunder der Technik.

The next post will deal with building the new Rohloff speed hub based bike.

2014 Kona Rove bike

I once had a road bike, a Cannondale R2000 with an Ultegra drivetrain and Cane Creek wheels.

It was a size 58cm frame and I am 6'3" tall. The bike was very responsive and nimble but riding was harsh and unforgiving. Eventually I sold it. Roads around here are very bad , not really meant for road biking. I decided not to ride aluminium frames again; what's left then? Titanium is too expensive and carbon is not cheap either. Steel.
And here it is, the 2014 Kona Rove (59 cm.):

The propaganda machine advertises this as a "gravel/free range" bike, some sort of a toned down cyclo cross bike which is equally suited for commuting and mellow mountain biking trails.
But , for me, this was the answer to riding the crumbling infrastructure.

What is weird about this frame is the size of the head tube, 7.5" tall, 3" taller then the head tube of a Salsa El  Mar. I installed a Cane Creek (110 series) ZS44, a Deda Elementi handlebar stem and  an FSA handle bar.

This is a work in progress project and I am still waiting for some parts to arrive.
This frame takes 700cc wheels. I got 29" DT Swiss and equipped them with 700x35  Vittoria Randonneur tires and Avid BB7 mechanical disc brakes.

I did some more work on the bike, not a lot of progress but still moving forward. I installed a cyclocross specific crank set (Shimano CX 70 36-46T) which I paired with a road Ultegra 12-25T rear casette.
I do not know if this was  the right choice, I need to see how they work together. I also added Micro Shift 9speed shifters and ran the brake cables.

And this is how the Kona looks today, June 24, 2014 (hot and humid outside)
Work on the bike continued slowly. I added an Shimano XT M-772 rear rerraileur.
I had to mess around with the gears a lot; the new derailleur  is a totally different design, still parallelogram base mechanism but with different control options.

As you can see from this pic, the rear end looks very crowded;in order to remove the rear wheel, the skewer has to be taken out completely and only then could one extract the wheel. I think that the frame was  designed with a road rear derailleur in mind.

 One more pic:

I taped the handlebar with Deda Elementi grey thick tape.

I don't know if I am going to leave it like this; I may change to a darker tape colour later on.

A few more pics taken at Kensington Metropark:

And this concludes the presentation:

The weight is 27.0 lbs. (12.25 kg.)