Stiffer up Front

I did mention earlier that I felt that there was a bit of flex in the front of the Tikit. I suspected that it came from the aluminium riser tube that was used. When converting to single speed, I took the opportunity to play with this.



My parts box had a nice long quill stem from an old mountain bike with 1 1/8" steerer. So out goes the aluminium riser and ahead style stem. Slip the quill stem straight in the top of the hinged steerer. Since the steerer is designed with a slot so that it can be clamped tight onto the aluminium riser, you can't use the internal expander bolt, so I discarded that and just used the external clamp to hold the stem firm.

... and yes, it's a lot stiffer.

Depending on your riding style and the length of the hinged steerer, this might not work for you. I'll grab a photo of the whole bike as soon as I can so you can see the sort of handlebar height that I end up with.

One-Way Tikit

I'd specifically had this Tikit built with Rob's adjustable dropouts because I like to tinker. With a Pocket Rocket to ride at other times, I finally decided that the Tikit was going to do pure commuting duty and that single-speed made sense. Sometimes I'm commuting when I'm feeling tired and the option of freewheeling down some of Brisbane's hills led me to go with single speed rather than fixed wheel.

I've continually been disappointed with the durability of nine-speed equipment and shelling out $40+ for a chain and $50+ for a cassette with a life span of about 3000 km is just irksome. And it's worse than that because it starts to get those grungy stretched chain noises well before then. The single speed uses a SRAM PC-1 chain ($15) and a $12 Shimano BMX cog that will last tens of thousands of km.



It's a straightforward conversion: the BMX cog just goes right on the existing freehub. I used a selection of cassette spacers to adjust chainline. A nice quality 48T chainring and quality 1/8" chain finishes it off.

Sure, the wheel would have better bracing if I used a single-speed or track hub, but these 16" wheels are so tough already that I don't think that's an issue. More important is the fact that the cogs for a standard cassette go down to 12T, letting me use a nice compact 48T up front. As far as I know, there's only one brand of screw-on freewheel that goes down to 15T, it's not cheap and I'd still have to use that big 60T ring up front to go with it.