| | Re: Another bike I'm thinking about
Claire Petersky <cpetersky@mousepotato.com> wrote:
>Looking for opinions, as usual:
>
>http://www.ticycles.com/comotion/norwester.htm
>
>The co-pilot looks intriguing!
I have one of these. Caliper brakes, Ultegra drivetrain, vanilla
36 spoke wheels, 28 mm tires, S&S couplers. It's a second bike
for me. I travel with it, and prefer it at home when the weather is
bad enough to require fenders or when I need a rear rack. I've
carried the bike on 8 trips (18 individual airline flights) in
about a year. I rode it on three short credit card tours, two in
China and one in eastern Canada.
Other than the price (which is high, as is typical of small,
one-at-a-time American frame builders) I can unequivocally
recommend this bike. If I could only have one bike it would
be this one. It is an extremely good looking bike if your taste
runs to conventional bicycle frames. The welds are works of art.
While the chainstays are a bit too short to carry large-size
panniers (the Americano fixes this) it is a strong, comfortable
bicycle with a full set of braze-ons. It has clearance for wider
tires than I use, though since 35 mm SKS fenders are the largest
that will fit well under the caliper brakes I'd get cantilever
brakes instead for tires larger than 28c. The bike's weight
surprised me a bit; even with the S&S couplers, the big steel fork
and the slightly larger tires it was only about 3.5 pounds heavier
than my Calfee (though I admit that the latter's components weren't
chosen for light weight). I like riding the bike a lot. The
only complaints I can think of are that it came with Deda handle
bars whose shape I dislike, and that they used (apparently) plated
socket cap screws in the water bottle mounts and other braze-on
fittings, several of which began to corrode after a few months.
Once the bar tape got a bit ratty from travel I replaced the bars,
and I replaced all the cap screws with stainless steel from the
hardware store, so now I have nothing to complain about.
I have a story about my perception of the bicycle's handling,
or "feel" in the Bicycling magazine sense. My last several bikes
have had racing geometry frames, and I'm truly fond of my Calfee,
which "feels" light, stiff, fast and responsive (or twitchy?), just
like everyone says about carbon fiber racing bikes. Or something
like that. When I ride the bike it "feels" like I'm zipping along
on the flats, that the bike is light as a feather when climbing and
that I'm pushing aggressively around the corners on descents, all of
this, of course, in the context of my rather mediocre skills and fitness,
but still, the bike is a lot of fun to ride. In contrast, if you'd
asked me about the Norwester a month or so after I bought it I would have
told you that it "feels" like a Mack truck, big, heavy, wants to go
straight down the road, comfortable but slow and stately. Despite the
fact that the scale told me it didn't weigh a whole lot more than
the Calfee the Norwester "felt" like a big, heavy utility bike.
Last spring (inspired in part by a conversation I read here about
the handling and performance of touring bikes, actually) I decided
I should try to quantify the difference between my racing bike and
my light touring bike. At the time I had started riding the same
43 mile, 3000-feet-of-climbing, circuit almost every weekday, so I
decided to alternate between the bikes and time six road segments that
I could usually ride non-stop. I kept this up for a month and a half to get
enough measurements that the good days and the bad days would average out.
The results were not what I originally might have expected. The
average times on flat and uphill segments were very close despite the
fact they varied a lot from ride to ride, not to mention with improvement
of the motor. On uphills the Co-motion was a bit over 2% slower than
the Calfee (about right for a 3.5 pound weight penalty!), and not
quite 2% slower on the flat bits (because the Co-motion's handlebars
are an inch higher?). On the one mountainside descent I was doing,
however, the Co-motion was about 12% faster. Once I noticed this I
began to peek at the speedometer occasionally on the way down, and
discovered that the Co-motion was, without any conscious effort on my
part, coming out of the corners at a couple of miles per hour faster
than the racing bike. I'm a cautious descender and don't push myself
beyond what feels comfortable, so what feels comfortable to me on
the Co-motion is apparently 12% faster than on my racing bike. What
felt slow to me may actually be better handling. And while I'm still
very fond of riding my racing bike I no longer fool myself by thinking
that what I'm "feeling" has much of anything to do with what the bike
is doing.
In any case, if you feel like spending that much money for a frame
I think the Nor'wester is a pretty good way to spend the money. And,
though I fit a standard size frame well, Co-motion will do a custom
geometry if you need it for fit and, by reputation, are good at it,
so if you want this you might get your money's worth that way.
Dennis Ferguson
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