For people who are serious about bicycling, a rain bike is a luxury item that actually has some tangible benefits. Such a bike is used for rainy days so you can still train but not get your $15,000 unobtanium gold plated carbon fiber kevlar laced super deluxe Schwinn all wet and rusty. I suppose you could just upgrade all the bits that rust to titanium and not worry about it, but I don’t know if you can get titanium bearing races or not.

At any rate, most rain bikes are simply lower end model race bikes so that the expense of replacing rusted out parts is less painful. I wanted to pursue something even more efficient by using a internally geared rear hub and no derailleurs.  This arrangement is very clean (looks like a single speed) and at the same time fairly water proof to the tricky little expensive bits (like integrated shift levers and $300 + a pop). So I was going to build up a bike based on a single speed frame and use a Shimano Nexus rear hub. In the process of doing my research, I found that someone had already built my dream rain bike. The only problem is that they only sell it to walk in customers. Since I live in Okinawa and their shop is in West Newton, Mass., it’s unlikely I’ll get there. Hopefully I can talk them into selling it to me over the Internet.

My dream rain bike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Health and wellness, Triathlon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.