Overrated: front derailleurs and how many people need more than 5 gears, anyway?
Underrated: cargo racks. People should have to go out of their way to buy a bike that can’t carry stuff, not the other way around. Imagine having to retrofit all your jackets with pockets.
@schizanon@cycling
Most overrated? Carbon. It’s brittle, has a really unfavorable failure mode, and can’t be recycled at end of life.
Aero-everything. Just like being obsessed with a bike’s weight, aero on the bike is marginal gains for most people, and it has really negative effects on the feel/comfort of those bikes too.
Kind of annoyed with White Industries at the moment. The original press-fit bearings in my Stanyan’s MI5 rear hub needed replacement a long while ago, so I had my local bike shop order them (which took forever to be shipped by Enduro) and swap them out. Unfortunately, the same amount of play persisted after the bearing swap despite said shop following White Industries’s directions to the T multiple times. My shop has called White Industries multiple times only to not be given any recourse.
I’ve been out that Stanyan for several weeks now and I don’t know if I should just get a different hub put in the wheel or something at this point. :blobfoxannoyed:
Also, I just discovered a broken spoken on my other bike's rear wheel that was just handbuilt at the shop a few months back (and also trued after a couple weeks of riding back then to be safe). :blobfoxgooglycry:
“This is no Dutch bike lane with a safe, modern design and well-funded construction. This is an American bike lane—a blood-pumping obstacle course of neglected asphalt and ideas from the 1970s.”